Small Wind, Big Potential
As the giants of the wind industry gather for WINDPOWER 2010, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is projecting that this year’s show will...
Enclosures for Wind Energy Engineers
Enclosures form an integral part of a wind energy circuit protection system in which circuit integrity has to be provided. Typically the enclosure is...
An Alternative Design for Speed Increasers
The AWEA WINDPOWER show always provides impressive demonstrations of the latest and greatest achievements in all the areas of science and technology that are...
A Strategic Approach to Successful O&M
It’s a fact of life that all electromechanical components will fail at some point. Having the right strategy in place to manage that failure...
Maximizing Grid-Connect Time
Nearly all utility-scale wind farm management systems have state of the art automatically controlled wind turbines, but at the electric grid intertie the substation...
A New Phase in Turbine Condition Monitoring
Since 2001, M4 Engineering and M4 Wind Services have been offering engineering, manufacturing, monitoring, data analysis, quality control, and maintenance services to the wind...
Optimizing Existing Wind Towers
As the telecommunication industry matures, many existing towers are being structurally optimized to improve their load carrying potential for additional antennas. Public opposition and...
Conquering Turbine Shaft Alignment
The world’s first electric power generating wind turbine was manufactured by Charles Brush in 1888, and it delivered 12 kW of power reliably for...
Wind will make up a significant portion of the clean energy portfolio
With another record year to the industry’s credit, wind energy deployment both worldwide and in the United States continues to show the effectiveness of...
A Direct Drive to Sustainable Wind Energy
Early last year the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) produced one of the most valuable tools for mapping out what are likely to be...
New Systems for Sleeker Turbine Production
Not since the revolution in aerospace manufacturing has the need for lean solutions that combine composite fabrication and large-part machining been so critical to...
Optical Ice Sensors for Wind Turbine Nacelles
Just as airplanes, refrigerators, radio broadcast towers, vehicular overpasses, and bridges are all succeptible to ice formation, so are wind turbines that are sited...
An Automated Approach to Blade Manufacturing
The wind turbine blade manufacturing business has quickly blossomed from a cottage industry of highly skilled craftsman to a worldwide industry competing for market...
Tribological Challenges to the System
The drive for an increase the amount of sustainable energy sources has given rise to increasing interest in the development of wind turbine technology....
Remote Site Construction
Despite the location, Vestas is more than equipped to deal with the various challenges associated with remote sites for wind farms, as the following...
Solving the Transmission Dilemma
According to the Department of Energy (DOE), one of the primary challenges to getting more wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects developed is...
Gathering Blade Span Data
I’m not a boundary layer meteorologist, nor do I have a degree in engineering, but I do possess something that makes me unique. I...
A New Direction for Turbine Gearing
Experiencing growth of some 30 percent per year, wind power manufacturing is undergoing an evolution. With several components being machining intensive, many processes are...
Cool System, Hot Results
The United States Department of Energy has outlined a plan that would have wind energy provide 20 percent of the nation’s expected energy requirements...
Free Money for Wind Developers
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or “ARRA,” added two new and significant provisions, enacted as part of an effort to spur...
