US Offering $45M For Huge Wind Energy Test Bed

coondoggie writes "On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million grant to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. The DOE says such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production. According to the DOE, the average size of wind turbines installed in the United States in 2007 increased to roughly 1.65 MW. Additionally, turbines already developed range in the 2.5 MW to 3.5 MW capacity sizes; with plans being developed for even greater power ratings. The larger wind turbines have outpaced the availability of US-based testing facilities, the DOE stated."

Comments

Re:Go for it.

[j0hnyquest]

"For its part, the DOE has ambitious plans saying it expects wind to provide up to 20% of the nation's total electricity needs by 2030." There is no way that will happen. But this will definitely help with getting rid of those pesky birds and bats.

So if I understand this correctly...

[Romancer]

So if I understand this correctly...

We are looking for an artificial environment to test devices that specifically will be used in the natural unpredictable outdoor environment as their sole purpose?

Why not put them in a large windy area and map out their performance with actual gusty conditions and directional changes like they will be subject to in practice.

You'd get better data by skipping the artificial step.

If you really need the extremes to be on demand for destruction testing then put a big fan in front and a shroud around the device to be stress tested. Ramp it up and see how she performs.
Cost wise you could be selling all the energy that the time tests generate to pay for the spot testing and cleanup of the stress tests that fail.

Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?

Re:So if I understand this correctly...

[girlintraining]

Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?

a) To catch obvious design flaws early,
b) To test the device over the entire range of possible operation,
c) To provide a benchmark that remains static from one test to the next,
d) To control all external variables so as to create a consistent frame of reference,
e) To save a few bucks because it's really f----ing expensive to test every design as a full-scale prototype. ... Or to pull a page from our own industry, what's wrong with the following statement: "It compiles, ship it!"

Re:So if I understand this correctly...

[markk]

How much do you think it will cost to fully instrument an experimental Turbine in the field, then tear it down and build a different one? Now, how much for the equipment to stress the turbine at various loads, to manufacture wind speed conditions that mimic many different places around the country, and different loadings, look at various types of network interconnects... We might as well build a testbed location to do this. It might cost 40 or 50 million even eh?

Re:So if I understand this correctly...

[willy_me]

Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?

A static environment is required to observe the effects of different designs. Tests in a real environment are also important - but they do not negate the need for a static test environment.

Re:So if I understand this correctly...

[tibman]

it WILL be tested in real life.. AFTER it's been tested in a smaller controlled environment. Half-assing stuff is building expensive systems and full-scale deploying them as a test phase. Guess what, if they work but have some problems.. that company won't be addressing those problems because they aren't worth the redeployment costs.

Also, a real-life environment won't go through the full range of capable scenarios during the limited test phase. You need to try out all kinds of odd-ball stuff that happens in real-life but just not very often (ie: hurricane).

Being able to install a prototype drive-train and go through the motions of testing without lengthy installation/setup times is important!

Re:So if I understand this correctly...

[TheRaven64]

There's a great video of a wind turbine exploding which you can probably find if you look. Once it went past a certain speed, the tensile strength of one of the blades was exceeded and it split. The turbine then became unbalanced and quickly pulled itself apart.

This turbine, if I remember correctly, had been in use for two year when it happened. It only broke because the winds were much higher than average for the area. If you're testing in a wind tunnel, you can keep turning up the wind speed until the turbine explodes and get an accurate measure of how much energy it produces at each wind speed and how much it can take so, when you deploy it, you can shut it down when the wind speed approaches the maximum. If you test it in the real world and 'skip the artificial step', you may need to wait several years to get wind speeds that high.

From your post, it seems like you've never designed anything for real-world deployment. You always want to control the test conditions so you can see exactly which variable is causing failures in your prototype.

You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 687 wind turbines in Pickens' garage are laying there doing nothing...

Re:Why?

[TubeSteak]

Maybe they want to test wind turbines to destruction, or model their behaviour in different weather conditions. For example: how does ice deposition on turbine blades affect efficiency? Do this introduce any dangerous operational modes?

A test chamber big enough to do all that sounds like the type of thing the military would be interested in. Why not build it at one of the Army Proving Grounds? The road/rail infrastructure already exists for handling extremely oversized loads and they operate wind tunnels.

And

[Sycraft-fu]

So a gigantic blade doesn't go flying in to someone's house.

When you are talking machines as big and as heavy as this, you want to test outside conditions in a safe environment to make sure it won't fail. You do not want to discover later that oh, maybe it WASN'T as strong as we thought.

Same reason why the bend wings on an airplane. No, they will never face stresses that high in the real world. However, we don't want to just fly it around and say "ok, that's probably good" only to find out later that no, it really isn't. You test an outside case, and you do it somewhere that nobody gets hurt.

Re:Why?

[T Murphy]

Brazil has sugarcane to produce ethanol where it cannot make enough oil. France is small, has little (no?) oil to produce for itself and no economical source for ethanol. The only way this has to do with nuclear is France's lack of plentiful domestic fossil fuel makes nuclear more attractive. While nuclear is generally more expensive (less attractive) than fossil fuel power, oil isn't a direct part of the equation. We (US) would probably have more nuclear plants if it weren't for the plentiful coal- I don't think that picture will change because of any fluctuation in our oil imports.