At the American Wind Energy Association's WINDPOWER 2019 Conference, Agile Wind Power (AWP) was honored to submit an e-poster on our efforts to change how wind energy can be used in the utility industry. For those who were unable to attend the conference and view the poster, I wanted to share an overview of the lessons learned that we shared through this poster.

The transformation of the energy industry

The energy industry that has developed over the past century consists of many large, centrally organized power plants connected by a network that transports the electricity generated to its ultimate consumers.

Since the 1990s, the share of renewable energy sources in the industry has been steadily increasing. Seeking to achieve climate goals has significantly reinforced this trend, but an increased share of intermittent renewable energy sources (such as wind and solar) in the existing network structure leads to power fluctuations. Today, these fluctuations are typically compensated for using conventional fossil-fuel generation, such as coal and gas. However, the utility industry is undergoing a complete upheaval towards a greater decentralization of several complementary, renewable energy producers and sources. Energy producers and energy consumers are moving closer together and the services of producers are smaller and distributed in intelligent local networks.

The importance of wind energy and its future challenge

Wind energy is able to economically generate larger quantities of energy in a relatively small area, meaning higher energy density. For this reason, wind energy plays an important role in the development of decentralized energy markets. However, today's medium and large wind turbines are limited in their fit for distributed power production. They require complex logistics, produce perceptible sound, and are often not accepted by the affected population. Small wind turbines, e.g., 'roof-top scale,' cannot make a substantial contribution to the power supply and are accordingly not economically viable.

As a result, the rapidly growing distributed energy market is poorly served by conventional wind power technology due to significant site requirements and restrictions. The industry has an unfulfilled need for economic wind energy that can be used near populated areas. There are several questions to consider when it comes to getting this energy production closer in location to the consumers, though:

How do you achieve public acceptance and low noise emissions?

How can you reduce the visual impact?

How do you reduce the risk to birds and bats?

While horizontal wind turbines dominate the picture of global wind energy, the solution may be thinking differently...

Changes to vertical axis open up new opportunities

For several decades, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) have been researched and developed, as they theoretically offer many advantages. However, the technological possibilities have so far been limited, so that vertical wind energy has not (yet) managed to enter the large-scale systems market today. Thus, the first years of research and empirical trials were often marked as failures and setbacks.

After extensive basic research in cooperation with scientific institutes and intensive development work to cope with various technical and economic challenges, AWP finally achieved the big breakthrough with the development and implementation of a continuous and self-optimizing adjustment of the rotor blades during operation (so-called real-time pitch control). This process keeps the speed of the turbine low, resulting in lower sound levels and physical stresses.

This advantage in combination with simplified logistics concepts for transport, installation, operation and maintenance, as well as other environmental aspects such as better compatibility with birds and bats allows this new wind turbine to be located closer to populated areas. This method allows installations in places that cannot be served by existing wind turbine technology.

Note: Agile Wind Power has started construction on the first IEC certifiable mega-watt class vertical-axis wind turbine on the German wind test field Grevenbroich. Reach out to us if you have inquiries or just to find out more.