ENERGY Ӏ ONSHORE WIND POWER
WINDS HIGH
Wind power already supplies more than seven percent of the world’s electricity and the proportion can only increase. Julian Champkin investigates the challenges and the solutions of constructing wind turbines on land.
Of all the transformative energy sources wind power is the most visible. It is transforming landscapes onshore and at sea. It is successful: last year wind generated 7.8% of the world’s
A Cometto
BladeMax1000 at the Faymonville WindMover event
electricity; for the UK, in October 2023, the figure was 33%. Wind does not carry the waste disposal problem of nuclear, nor its huge decommissioning issues and costs. The long lead-in times that have bedevilled the UK’s Hinckley Point C station are unknown to it. (Construction of Hinckley Point C began in 2017; current estimated costs are over £41 billion; and the project is still not forecast to generate power until 2029.) Wind towers can go up far faster; not exactly overnight but they are built within months or a few years of construction beginning. What is there not to like? But they do have one problem:
height. Hub heights of current onshore wind towers are about 98m metres (2022 figure). Next generation towers of 199 metres have already been announced by Danish wind company Vestas. Offshore towers in their latest iteration are taller: 260m for seabed farms, and still taller for projected floating windfarms. There is a simple, unavoidable
reason for this: efficiency. A large rotor catches more wind; and the higher above the ground you go the harder and more consistent the wind is. The power produced by wind turbines scales with the square of blade length and increases with height.
Faymonville’s WingMax takes XXL blades
18 CRANES TODAY
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