Capital cost of wind development has significantly increased over the past five years, said a panel of independent wind developers. The cost of transporting a large-scale turbine is about 20 percent of the cost of the equipment and land costs, and royalties to land owners are increasing as well, said Jan Paulin, president and chief executive officer of Padoma Wind Power, LLC at the 2007 Wind Power Finance and Investment Summit in San Diego. Land cost has increased about 60 to 70 percent in the last two years. The two major reasons behind the cost increase are fuel costs, especially high petroleum prices, and the perceived supply shortage of turbines also drives cost of the turbine and its transportation up. Another growing capital cost is in risk management because of the lack of strong warrantees. For a $3 million turbine, the average warrantee is for $20,000. Wind per kilowatt hours is cost competitive to fossil fuels, but the high capital cost, along with substandard warranties, make it difficult, for independent developers especially, to fund a project from start to finish. The capital cost has caused many consolidations of smaller developers into larger companies.

It takes energy to maintain energy from small wind farms. That was the conclusion of Idaho Power’s study on the impact of wind power, which was released Wednesday. Among other findings, the Operational Impact report said that small wind farms - those which produce 10 megawatts or fewer - require the assistance of hydroelectric power to compensate for generating fluctuations caused by changes in wind speed. Idaho Power uses its hydroelectric sources to provide additional energy when small wind farms are unable to stay at predetermined power levels. The report estimates that it costs Idaho Power $10.72 per megawatt hour to offset such fluctuations. The utility wants wind farm operators to pay that expense.

A new wind turbine blade design that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories developed in partnership with Knight & Carver (K&C) of San Diego promises to be more efficient than current designs. It should significantly reduce the cost-of-energy (COE) of wind turbines at low-wind-speed sites. Named “STAR” for Sweep Twist Adaptive Rotor, the blade is the first of its kind produced at a utility-grade size. Its most distinctive characteristic is a gently curved tip, termed “sweep,” which unlike the vast majority of blades in current use, is specially designed for low-wind-speed regions like the Midwest. The sites targeted by this effort have annual average wind speeds of 5.8 meters per second, measured at 10-meter height. Such sites are abundant in the U.S. and would increase by 20-fold the available land area that can be economically developed for wind energy.

In an effort to secure a lucrative deal to supply Delmarva Power with electricity, three power companies are calling their rivals’ technology risky and potentially harmful to the environment, according to documents obtained by The News Journal. The conflict highlights two innovative but domestically unproven technologies. NRG Energy wants to add a coal gasification facility, perhaps with new environmental safeguards, to its Indian River plant. Bluewater Wind hopes to put up a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean off the Delaware coast............Bluewater Wind. marked as “confidential” large portions of its filing, including information on electrical capacity. NRG has raised questions about the wind company’s ability to provide electricity during the hottest summer days. But Bluewater Wind removed details about its projected seasonal capacity from its filing.

Several of Britain’s growing fleet of wind farms ground to a halt on Thursday as severe gales battered the country. The storms, which caused transport chaos and left hundreds of thousands without electricity, proved too much for some wind farms. Most turbines, which are intentionally sited in some of the windiest parts of the country, automatically stop spinning for safety reasons when wind speeds exceed 25 meters per second, or about 55 miles per hour.

Iowa’s municipal utilities announced plans Friday to build a $200 million power plant west of Dallas Center that will store wind energy in the ground and use it to generate up to 268 megawatts of electricity. The announcement is a culmination of more than four years of study and research by the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities and others, although operation of the plant is still several years away. Construction would begin in 2009 with completion expected in 2011, said John Bilsten, general manager of Algona Municipal Utilities and vice president of the newly formed Iowa Stored Energy Park Agency. Only two similar wind storage plants are in existence, one in Germany and the other in Alabama. Both are about half the size of the plant planned for Dallas County, Bilsten said.

DeWind Inc., a subsidiary of Irvine, Calif.-based Composite Technology Corp. (CTC), has completed the construction of the 2 MW DeWind D8.2 wind turbine at an offshore testing site in Cuxhaven, Germany.

Wind, almost everybody’s best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications. Engineers have cut the price of electricity derived from wind by about 80 percent in the last 20 years, setting up this renewable technology for a major share of the electricity market. But for all its promise, wind also generates a big problem: because it is unpredictable and often fails to blow when electricity is most needed, wind is not reliable enough to assure supplies for an electric grid that must be prepared to deliver power to everybody who wants it — even when it is in greatest demand........At a recent discussion of clean energy technologies held at General Electric’s research center in Niskayuna, N.Y, Dan W. Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy for conservation and renewable energy, predicted that renewables, led by wind, could reach 20 percent of demand in the next decade or two. President Bush has also said that wind could supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. But Mr. Reicher drew a quick response from James E. Rogers, chief executive of Cinergy, one of the nation’s largest utilities, and chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, the industry’s trade association. “I love his optimism,” Mr. Rogers said. “But unfortunately, I have to deliver electricity every day.”

An Oregon State University engineering professor has helped design a new “micro” wind turbine that can be mounted along the edges of building roofs to generate electricity. The new small-scale turbine design could revolutionize the wind power industry, with rows of small rooftop turbines enabling power generation in urban and suburban settings, instead of only from large, towering, traditional wind farms in rural areas.

An eight-day shutdown of Melancthon 1 wind turbines was undoubtedly costly but is being viewed by industry officials as among statistically and meteorologically predictable occurrences for any wind plant. The turbines were shut down when ice formed on the blades during the ice storm of Friday, Dec. 1, and came back online only after the ice had thawed from the blades at some point late Sunday.

There won’t be a 450-foot-tall windmill spinning over Charlestown after all — but there could be a new 300-foot long, four-story building on a neighborhood wharf for testing wind turbine blades. Based on reports from top state and city officials, the Globe reported yesterday that Governor Mitt Romney’s administration was looking at a Massachusetts Port Authority pier for a potential US Energy Department wind turbine testing facility, including a tower for turbines with blades spinning up to 450 feet above the ground. In fact, the project would only involve a building 300 feet long and 50 feet high where turbine blades up to 230 feet long would be turned on their sides and subjected to engineering and strength tests.

Climatronics Corporation introduces two new sensors for wind turbine control and application; the F460 wind speed sensor and the Sonimometer sonic wind speed sensor.

Campbell Dunford, CEO of REF, said: “This important modelling exercise shows that even with best efforts a large wind carpet in the UK would have a low capacity credit, and be a real handful to manage. This isn’t the best way to encourage China and India to move towards the low-carbon economy. As a matter of urgency, for the planet’s sake, we need to bring forward a much broader range of low carbon generating technologies, including the full sweep of renewables. Wind has a place, but it must not be allowed to squeeze out other technologies that have more to offer.”

The claimed benefits of wind energy are called into question today by a study that finds few wind farms in England and Wales produce as much electricity as the Government has forecast. The first independent study to rate farms according to how much electricity they produce shows that wind farms south of the Scottish border are not generating as much as the Government assumed when it set the target of producing a tenth of Britain’s energy from renewables by 2010 and 15 per cent by 2015. Despite millions being spent on wind turbines, the study by the Renewable Energy Foundation shows that England and Wales are not windy enough to allow large turbines to work at the rates claimed for them. The foundation, a charity that aims to evaluate wind and other forms of renewable energy on an equal basis, based its study of more than 500 turbines now in operation on data supplied by companies to Ofgem, the energy regulator.

Some onshore windfarms are falling woefully short of their electricity generating targets, throwing into doubt Government targets of having about 15% of the nation’s energy coming from wind by 2020. Research by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) found onshore windfarms in remote locations only are generating above expectation - typically in the north of Scotland where the cost of linking to the National Grid is far greater.

(Pavilion, NY, December 4, 2006) - - Recent gusts were powerful enough to break off the blades of a wind turbine in Genesee County. News 4's Al Vaughters reports the property owner is still picking up the pieces in Pavilion. Steve Rigoni said, "Well, the blade has got to come from Minnesota, so it'll be four or five days before they get here." This is all that's left of Steve Rigoni's wind turbine: three busted-up fiberglass blades and a 140-foot tower. The turbine has been blowing away Steve's electric bills, but Friday's wind storm was just too much.

On Aug. 21, when afternoon temperatures in Washington state soared, Avista Corp.’s (AVA) utility division asked customers to cut their electricity use while it scoured the region for power supplies. Utility operators were frustrated, in part, because the company’s supply of wind power was producing nothing, thanks to a lack of wind. Avista wasn’t alone. Throughout the West during that August heat wave, a growing fleet of windmills met triple-digit temperatures with impotence. California’s grid operator was serving up a record amount of power that afternoon, too, while its 2,850 MW of wind turbines were churning out just 112 MW.......What can all these windmills do to help prevent a blackout in a heat wave? Utilities’ estimates of that range widely. When figuring out how to keep the lights on during the coming summer’s hottest day, PJM pencils in 20% of wind capacity for serving peak load. The California Independent System Operator figures 5% will be there. For Texas, which has more windmills than any other state, Ercot counts on just 2.6% of capacity. Avista, like many utilities operating their own grid, doesn’t count on any wind power during the summer peak. As more windmills come on line, overestimating could mean a blackout, while underestimating could mean paying a lot of money for unneeded standby generators.

Some people say these wind turbines look like corkscrews or a piece of Twizzlers candy. And these uniquely designed wind machines cost about a third the price of conventional wind turbines, according to the Canadian startup company that is building and marketing them. Windaus Energy of Brantford, Ontario, says its wind turbines can be easily scaled for use in residential backyards or large commercial wind farms. In addition to their lower cost, they appear to address some, but not all, of the issues that have riled opponents of wind power. "We have interest from all over the world," said Maurice Deschamps, a former crane operator who is president of Windaus Energy -- pronounced win-DAY-us. "I get it from Argentina, China, India, all over." His wind turbines have no "swoosh" noise and do not kill birds or bats, two problems that have made existing wind-turbine designs controversial, he said. The bird-friendly claim has not been independently verified, and some people are skeptical. Nevertheless, the Windaus turbine doesn't have the typical propeller blades used on conventional wind turbines, such as the ones along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Somerset County. These blades range in length from about 100 to 300 feet. Instead, Windaus employs a vertical column with three twisting wings made of a light but strong composite material. The wings catch the wind from any direction and operate at lower wind speeds.

Government, companies once abandoned idea but now see geothermal power as part of energy equation

Dr Tim Finnigan at the University of Sydney has formed a company, BioPower Systems, to commercialise the technologies. The wave energy system is called “bioWave” and has long, vertical blades that sway back and forth. Dr Finnigan says that it, “Is the only wave energy system that captures a wide swath of incident wave energy without using a large rigid structure. It is also the only such device that absorbs energy over the full water depth and continually self-orients with the wave direction”.