One morning a year or so ago we met some friends and took a motorcycle ride up to Sackets Harbor, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the eastern-most and smallest of the Great Lakes. On the ride back we saw huge wind turbines — 195 of them — that produce 2% of New York state’s residential electricity. I had seen the giant turbines before from a distance but a visitor center allowed us to stop for a closer look and hear the whooshing sound of the giant blades. Standing there made me wonder what the real potential of wind energy may be.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation. All areas are not suitable for wind energy development, but if you look at the map developed by the Wind Energy Program working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) you can see that the wind is blowing at 15-20 mph at 150 feet above ground in many parts of the country. From a distance wind energy seems very simple. Instead of using electricity to make wind — like a fan — wind turbine technology uses wind to make electricity. The wind turns the blades, which spin a shaft, which connects to a generator and makes electricity.
GE Energy recently shipped its 10,000th 1.5-megawatt wind turbine and over the past decade the GE machines have been installed in 19 countries and have accumulated more than 130 million operating hours, producing more than 78,000 gigawatt-hours of clean wind-generated electricity. The 10,000th unit was shipped to the Ashtabula Wind Energy Center located in North Dakota. (See full list of wind farms). It is often said that wind energy is a drop in the bucket in terms of total energy needs but that is beginning to change. GE’s "fleet" of 10,000 1.5-megawatt machines can power more than five million homes and produce more than 50 million megawatt-hours annually and there is an added benefit. Compared to “traditional” ways of generating electricity, the wind farms represent a savings of more than 27 million tons of CO2 emissions each year, the equivalent of removing more than five million U.S. cars from the road. Hardly sounds like a drop in the bucket.
The more I learn about wind energy the more exciting it is. You can follow wind energy developments at the Wind Energy Update. As the market grows, the technology will advance. GE has already introduced a 3.6 MW machine specifically designed for high-speed wind sites such as exist offshore — remember the map? The main challenge with wind energy is getting the electricity from where the wind is blowing to the places where the electricity is needed. The wind is howling off the Aleutian Islands but that is a long way from San Francisco.
The engineers at GE are doing incredible work. The technical details behind the design of the behemoth wind machines is staggering. They must also stay on top of wind energy as one niche of the exploding new subject area of sustainable energy. I suspect that the GE engineers are using Knovel as their constant online companion. Knovel Corporation has has recently expanded their already vast online engineering resources to include new books such as the Wind Energy Handbook.
The now Knovelized book covers what engineers are looking for — ranging from practical concerns about component design to the economic importance of sustainable power sources. The online book includes 95 digitized and interactive graphs that will be an indispensable asset to engineers, turbine designers, wind energy consultants and graduate engineering students who are anxious to get out in the market and design the latest and greatest wind turbines.
