The industry is taking two parallel pathways towards cost reduction: first, incremental innovation, looking at cost reductions through economies of scale resulting from increased market volumes of mainstream products, with a continuous improvement of manufacturing and installation methods and products; secondly, breakthrough innovation, focused on creating innovative products, including significantly upscaled dedicated offshore turbines, to be considered as new products.
Funded under the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the UpWind project has been exploring both pathways. The UpWind project initiators realised that wind technology disciplines were rather fragmented, in that no integrated verified design methods were available; that essential knowledge was still missing in high priority areas, for example in external loads; that measuring equipment was still not accurate or fast enough; and that external factors were not taken into consideration in minimising cost of energy (grid connection, foundations, wind farm interaction and so on).
Optimum Technology?
Rather than pursue one single ‘optimum’ technology, UpWind explored various high-potential solutions and integrated them with a view to the potential reduction of cost of energy. An optimised wind turbine is the outcome of a complex function combining requirements in terms of efficiency of electricity production, reliability,
Read More from the Article Source: Full Article
