Improved wind turbines under way
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Wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa, a Spanish company with a manufacturing plant in Ebensburg, Cambria County, is working with the Department of Energy to transform wind power technology, making it cheaper and more reliable.
If the project is successful, it could lead to the next generation of wind turbines, officials said.
Gamesa has sent a turbine to the department's National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, where scientists will load it with sensors to verify how much power is produced at certain windspeeds and otherwise check the accuracy of computer models used to design the equipment.
With all the instrumentation, one might compare the turbine to a heart patient, except "this is more like an athlete," said Jeroen van Dam, senior engineer at the lab.
By better understanding how the turbine works, engineers can design closer to the limits, he said. They can, for example, get more power with smaller blades.
"The idea is to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy to make these units operate more reliably, more efficiently, and to be competitive with other forms of energy," said David Rosenberg, Gamesa's vice president of communications.
"We're getting there," he added. "We're getting there much more quickly than we thought."
Wind still produces just a fraction of the nation's electricity -- 2.3 percent for 2010, the last year for which complete data are available. That year, with the recession and other factors, installations slowed. Even so, wind power represented 25 percent of all new generation capacity in the U.S. in 2010.
Last year the industry rebounded, installing 30 percent more wind capacity than in 2010.
Aside from conventional hydroelectric dams, wind remains the dominant form of renewable energy, ahead of both solar and geothermal.
Pennsylvania ranks 16th in the nation in the wind capacity installed, according to the American Wind Energy Association, an industry group.
The state's wind farms produce enough electricity to power 180,000 homes. Projects that would add more than four times that amount of power have been proposed, according to AWEA data.
First Published February 6, 2012 12:00 am
