Category: General

  • Acronyms in wind farms construction

    I’ve been informed by one of my most affectionate reader that some acronyms that I’m using in the blog are not immediately clear. Therefore I’ve started a first list of the most used ones – special thanks to Janos for helping expanding the list: AEP Annual energy production. BoP Balance of plant. All civil (roads,…

  • Technical due diligence of a wind farm

    It is a hard task to compress in a blog post the reasons behind the technical due diligence of a wind farm and the several points that must be evaluated. In a nutshell, in the clear majority of the wind farms developments are built using borrowed money. The equity (cash at risk) is put by…

  • EWEA 2016

    Some days ago I’ve had the opportunity to spend an afternoon at the EWEA summit, the European Wind Energy Association main event. It was held in Hamburg, city where I have the pleasure to live since December 2015, and it was simply HUGE. This year, both onshore and offshore were held together, resulting in an…

  • Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) topography

    This is a new technology we are going to use in a wind farm we are going to build in Chile. The area that we need is too small to make LIDAR topography cost effective, but too big to use standard field topography: with this new solution we can have the needed data for a…

  • Wind farms projects using Google Earth topography

    One of the biggest problems in wind farms preliminary projects is the lack of a reliable topography. Due to the tight budgets developers are often working with, it is often impossible to obtain a good topography (like the ones you can get with a LIDAR instrumented flight) or at list a decent one (as the…

  • Wind power plant concepts and performance indicators

    Wind turbines are usually placed in clusters called wind farms, with sizes ranging from a few MW (sometimes even a single wind turbine is sold, for instance to a private investor or to give power to an energy intensive factory like a cement plant) up to several hundred MW. These clusters are connected to the…

  • LEGO and Vestas: The unlikely duo

    As you probably know if you are in the wind sector both LEGO and Vestas are Danish companies, so it is not a big surprise to discover that several wind turbines related products are produced by LEGO. Not only the “standard” LEGO City 7747 Wind Turbine Transporter, but even a personalized, limited edition set (known…

  • What is this BoP?

    BoP is an English acronym that stands for Balance of Plants. In the wind farms sector, it means everything but the wind turbines. Basically there are 3 types of Wind Farm contracts commonly used: Supply only. It include WTGs, SCADA, Installation supervision and Commissioning. Supply and Installation, including all the items in Supply only plus…

  • Industrial Archeology

    These are several pictures that I took in 2010 during a trip to Tarifa, southern Spain. It is one of the best spot for wind surf, kite surf and of course for wind energy production. The WTGs are about 20 years old, but they look like remnants of a faraway past, with their lattice tower…

  • Why this blog

    Hello, My name is Francesco and I am a newbie in the word of blogging. Being an engineer working in a big sector in the wind sector, I decided to start this page to share with colleagues and other whoever may be interested what I learn projecting and building wind farm worldwide. I work in…