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Small-scale wind energy (wind turbines <50kW rated capacity) is receiving increasing interest as one of a number of microgeneration technologies with potential to reduce carbon emissions. Recent years have seen new products being made available on the UK market, which a survey by the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) suggests is growing quickly.

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA:  The world's most promising regions for offshore wind power have been revealed in satellite images from NASA.  The northern U.S, Canada, UK, Japan and Eastern Russia have the most potential in the Northern Winter, while southern Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Argentina benefit from the most consistent and powerful winds in the Northern Summer.

REpower Systems AG has successfully installed the first of six wind energy turbines for the Belgian offshore wind farm Thornton Bank. The project, located about 30 kilometers off the coast, is the first Belgian offshore wind farm. For the first of three construction phases, REpower is providing six 5-megawatt (MW) offshore turbines, adding up to a total capacity of 30 MW.

As you can see, most of the Big Six spend less than a fiver per customer. Of the small independents, Good Energy and Green Energy spent nothing.

PUC Commissioner Paul Hudson boasted that this new initiative would have Texas—already the leader when it comes to most megawatts produced—generating more than the 14 next-highest states combined.

Efforts to harness the energy potential of Earth's ocean winds could soon gain an important new tool, global satellite maps from NASA. Scientists have been creating maps using nearly a decade of data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite that reveal ocean areas where the wind resources exist to produce wind energy.

The federal government is moving forward with a proposed new set of regulations for "alternative energy production activities" on the Outer Continental Shelf, including offshore wind farms and wave energy projects.

A very informative, quick-read guide on small wind systems is just a click away. This small reader is a great source of research if you would like to learn about wind and if it will work for you.

There is, however, a third way. In Denmark and Germany-world leaders in wind energy development-many commercial-scale wind turbines are installed as single units or in small clusters distributed across the countryside, or scattered around and sometimes within urban agglomerations. And many of these turbines are either owned by the farmers on whose land the turbine stands, or by local residents.

StatoilHydro has decided to build the world’s first full scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and test it over a two-year period offshore Karmøy. The The company is investing approximately 400 million NOK. Planned startup is autumn 2009.

The wind is an increasingly significant source of energy with the rising price of non-renewable fuels. The purpose of this project is to determine the specific intensity and frequency of wind speed required to sustain a large-scale wind farm with power output on the order of hundreds of megawatts. To this end, a non-deterministic methodology will be developed to analyze the viability of wind energy systems. A deterministic analysis method considers the majority of design parameters to be known or fixed and may only perform trade studies on a few parameters at a time to optimize performance. In the case of the energy market though, this is not an advantageous strategy since several factors related to economic viability such as energy prices, interest rates, government incentives, acquisition costs and maintenance are highly variable and cannot be assumed to be known. A non-deterministic, statistical approach to wind turbine design has the advantage of predicting with corresponding levels of certainty the power output and economic viability of an energy system. The primary goal of this project is to define the envelope of operating conditions for a large-scale wind project while considering variables of both engineering and economic significance. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables (HOMER) will be incorporated into the previous analysis using YawDyn and PROPID to determine the economic returns on investment in hypothetical financing cases. Cost factors will now be assigned a mean value along with a probability distribution. Monte Carlo simulations will be run for a large number of variations in the assumed economic and engineering variables to develop an accurate estimate of the price per kilowatt-hour of energy produced from the simulated wind project for a variety of site conditions with the goal of finding the most suitable environment for sustainable wind development.

The U.S. can follow Denmark’s lead and get 20% of its electricity from wind by 2030, the Department of Energy said today. The only obstacles, according to the DOE report, are building the wind turbines, improving them, getting them in place, and getting their electricity to where it’s used. Piece of cake.

Cable company Nexans has been awarded a contract by StatoilHydro ASA to supply the submarine cables for the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm project, located around 20 kilometer (km) offshore from Sheringham, on England's north Norfolk coast. The contract scope includes engineering, procurement and construction of two 22km, 145 kilovolt (kV) XLPE submarine export cables, and a spare cable with associated equipment. An optical fiber cable will also be included.

My question is about the grid and wind power. If we were to add wind power into the generation mix, would the grid still be as reliable as it is today?

The capacity factor of a power plant is the ratio of the electrical energy produced in a given period of time to the electrical energy that could have been produced at continuous maximum power operation during the same period. For a conventional fossil-fuel power station, the capacity factor is determined by planned maintenance downtime, unplanned equipment failure, and by shutdowns when the station’s electricity is not needed. For wind and solar energy, power output is also determined by the availability of wind and sunlight. The maximum power output, or ‘installed capacity’, is a rather theoretical value that is rarely reached. It would be clearer to quote the mean power for solar and wind energy, but because peak power is more commonly quoted, it’s important to know the capacity factor as well, to make sense of the peak numbers.

An argument often heard against wind is that it costs a lot in public subsidies for a solution that will always have a limited

impact (because it still produces only a small fraction of overall needs, and because of its unreliability linked to its

intermitten nature). This is an argument worth addressing in detail, especially when it is pointed out, as the graph shows, that

wind is already almost competitive with the other main sources of electricity, which suggests that it might not even need

the subsidies then (and the increase in commodity prices since that graph was prepared using 2004 data, only reinforces that

argument).

Xcel Energy, (NYSE: XEL)in partnership with the University of Minnesota, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Great Plains Institute, will soon begin testing a one-megawatt sodium-sulfur battery storage system to demonstrate its ability to store wind energy and dispatch it to the electricity grid when needed.

In 2007, domestic products accounted for 56% of the annual market, compared to 41% in 2006,” said Li Junfeng, Secretary General of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association.