D.t.n. Kushnir V.G., k.t.n. Benyukh O.A.
Kostanay state university by A.
Baitursynov, Kazakhstan
The experience of government participation in the development of wind
power in foreign countries
Almost all Kazakhstan's
energy is currently based on coal fuel. This is related to the fact that the
country has significant coal reserves that are enough for another 200-300
years. Thermal power plants are producing around 85 percent of energy in the
country. One kWh produced by the thermal power plant costs around 6-7 tenge
($0.04). [1]
The price is based only
on self-cost of the production process, as all the plants have been built tens
of years ago and do not require the return of investments. However, taking into
account the worn-out state of the thermal power plants and their poor
environmental friendliness, Kazakhstan needs to build more advanced thermal
power plants or switch to renewable energy sources (RES), i.e. wind, hydro and
solar
power stations. In this regard, it is useful to consider
the experience of government participation in the development of wind power in
foreign countries.
In the United States, the federal
government's involvement in wind energy research and development began in
earnest within two years after the so-called "Arab Oil Crisis" of
1973. Despite the speed with which it was initiated and began to show results,
this program ultimately proved to be largely ineffective because of the
interference of political factors and the withdrawal of financial support before
success could be achieved.
Federal research and development
activities resulted in the design, fabrication, and testing of 13 different
small wind turbine designs (ranging from 1kW to 40kW), five large (100kW -
3.2MW) horizontal-axis turbine (HAWT) designs, and several vertical axis (VAWT)
designs ranging from 5 to over 500 kW. The approach of this program borrowed
much from the methods used to develop military aircraft, with first the Energy
Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and then the U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE) selecting subcontractors to build and test machines that would be
commercialized; presumably by the subcontractors.
Most of the funding was devoted to
the development of multimegawatt turbines, in the belief that U.S. utilities
would not consider wind power to be a serious power source unless large,
megawatt-scale "utility-scale" systems were available.
Not-withstanding the unusual case of the California wind farms (see below),
recent events (such as the development of 1+ megawatt giants in Europe) have
shown that this view was fundamentally correct.
In some respects, the development of
vertical axis technology serves to illustrate the difficulties of
government-sponsored development programs most effectively. By the standards
usually used by federal managers to evaluate program achievement, the Darrieus
program was an unqualified success. Development in the U.S. progressed in an
orderly manner from 5, 10, and 17-meter experimental machines to a 17-meter
machine commercialized by FloWind that used much of the Sandia technology. Many
high quality government reports were published.
But
beyond supporting one remnant company from the 1980's wind farm boom a real
market for this technology has never emerged.
The largest U.S. Darrieus machine is
a 34-meter, variable-speed testbed, developed by Sandia Laboratories, and
operated at the USDA Agricultural Resarch Station in Amarillo, Texas to provide
experimental data. In Canada, development reached the multi-megawatt scale,
with the 4-MW Project Eole turbine on Magdalen Island in the St. Lawrence
River.
Recent experimental developments for
Darrieus systems center around the use of pultruded fiberglass rotors because
of the high cost of extruded aluminum. The flexibility of this material has
forced designers away from the "troposkein" shape of the earlier
machines (from the Greek "turning rope") to use an "extended
height-to-diameter" (EHD) shape that limits blade flexure and increases stiffness.
So far, results are mixed. The lopsided pear shape of the Tumac prototype illustrates the structural problems that
have been a problem for fiberglass Darrieus designs. This particular machine
failed to survive the first moderately high winds it faced.
Some straight-bladed vertical axis
turbines of the cycloturbine, giromill, and "H" turbine
configurations were developed in the 1970s in the United States and Great
Britain and into the 1990s in Germany. None of the straight-bladed designs has
proved to be commercially successful because of the problems encountered in
handling cantilevered rotor loads with struts and structural members that cause
large amounts of aerodynamic drag.
Beginning with the 100kW MOD-0
installed at NASA's Plum Brook Ohio facility in 1975, the U.S. program rapidly
moved through several generations, including the MOD-1 and the 100-meter
diameter MOD-2 wind turbines [2].
Unfortunately, the program was
burdened by an early error that took four years to overcome. In 1974, perhaps
expecting to reproduce the success of U.S. rocketry development by copying
advanced German designs, NASA engineers turned to Ulrich Hutter's blueprints
for answers. While borrowing Hutter's two-bladed, downwind rotor configuration
for their early designs, they failed to note the importance of the fact that
Hutter's machines featured teetering hubs now known to be essential for
reducing dynamic loads created by tower shadow in two-bladed machines.
NASA engineers were astounded by the
huge dynamic loads the first (MOD-0) machine developed whenever a blade entered
the "dead" space behind the tower (which was also much beefier and
blocked more wind than Hutter's). And it took several years of engineering
studies, responding to outraged Congressional inquiries (from none other than
Barry Goldwater), and other diversions to figure out what was going on and
switch to an upwind, teetered hub configuration.
The rigid hub NASA turbines (with a
probable useful machine life measured in months) none-the-less served as useful
stand-ins for demonstration projects until "real" machines arrived in
the early 1980's.
The program's biggest early success
was the operation of four MOD-OA 200 kW machines by U.S. utility companies [2].
The moniker "real machine"
did not apply to the MOD-1, the program's first attempt at a megawatt-scale
system. Because it was designed before the problems with the MOD-0 were
understood, the design was a lame duck even before acoustic resonance problems
(themselves aggravated by the lack of a teetering hub) scuttled the first and
only installation at Boone, North Carolina [2].
The first "real"
NASA wind turbine was the 100-meter diameter MOD-2. Three of these machines
operated for several years at a site overlooking the Columbia River in the
1980's, providing valuable engineering data and helping to pinpoint design
weaknesses. [2] Others operated at Solano, California and near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The MOD-2 was an inevitably
flawed experimental machine because of the huge technological leap it
represented from the MOD-1. This provided detractors with an easy target for
criticism.
By 1981, the detractors of the
Federal program had succeeded in getting most of the development activity
scuttled, just when things were poised to get better.
Lessons learned on the MOD-2's were
incorporated in the 3.2-megawatt MOD-5B, a 100+ meter behemoth that was still
operating (not without problems) on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii in 1997 [2].
A small machine development effort was belatedly
started in 1976, when a federal test center established at Rocky Flats,
Colorado found that available machines were neither properly-sized, nor
reliable enough, to do the jobs envisioned by federal application studies.
Within four years, 13 wind turbine designs in five application-based
size-ranges were procured, designed, fabricated, and tested: 1-2 kW High
Reliability; 4kW
Small Residential; 8 & 15 kW Residential and Commercial; 40kW Business and
Agricultural.
Successes of this program included
1-3kW and 6kW small turbines commercialized by Northern Power Systems and still
being sold for remote power uses, and a three-bladed 40-60kW machine installed
by the hundreds in California windfarms by Enertech [2].
But, in 1981, the biggest successes
of the federal program were not measured in hardware, but in the number of
designs shown to be unfeasible and in the amount of expertise developed in both
the federal programs and in their private industry subcontractors. The ground
had been laid for success. But this was not to happen.
Federal development efforts were
prematurely scuttled by the Reagan Administration, when the banking and
investment industry threw its lobbying support behind wind industry efforts to
obtain huge energy tax credits. There was no time for reliable hardware to
evolve from exploratory developments. There was no time for a "simpler is
better" philosophy resulting from the small turbine development program at
Rocky Flats to permeate and rejuvenate the large machine design efforts at
NASA.
While the tax credits seemed to some
to be an evolutionary development, they actually amounted to a complete
redirection of U.S. energies. Planning for this re-direction was left to
administration officials who thought that wind turbines were a mature
technology that needed no further development. And who believed the
over-optimistic claims of investment-hungry wind businesses that cost-effective
and reliable designs were already available.
In the seven years between 1974 and
1981, the U.S. Federal Wind Energy Program was an extraordinarily efficient and
successful government research and development activity. Thirteen small
systems, several vertical axis and innovative systems, and four large wind
turbine designs were developed and tested in that brief period. In addition,
two promising intermediate scale turbines
which could have given the U.S. a huge technological lead were on the drawing board and ready for
development. All of this was lost.
In the subsequent seven years
between 1981 and 1988 despite hundreds
of millions of federal tax credits only
four new wind turbine designs were developed in the U.S. All but one (the
Bergey 10kW, which didn't benefit from the credits [2]) were based on spin-offs
of technology developed by companies supported by the previous federal
development effort. And even the Bergey relied for its flexible blades on a
pultrusion manufacturing technique
developed under government sponsorship.
Finally, in 1989, the federal
program now managed by NREL seized an opportunity provided by the Bush
administration and resumed under-funded value engineering of some of the early
1980's designs.
In Europe, government multi-megawatt
machine development programs took longer to start, but were even less
successful from a commercial standpoint.
By the early 1990's, most of the experimental multimegawatt machines
developed in Germany, Sweden, and other countries were no longer operating and
efforts at the network of European wind energy research laboratories had
shifted to basic and applied research, the development of standards, and
certification testing programs.
The proper role of government in
wind energy research and development is a matter of continuing controversy.
There has been a tendency by some
commentators to lose sight of the fact that no successful wind energy project
in any country has been conducted
without some form of government intervention in the form of financial,
technical, or regulatory support. This is really no different than any other
kind of power production facility.
The myth that somehow the windfarm
development of the 1980's was due primarily to "private enterprise"
has even been expressed by people sitting right in the middle of hundreds of
European-manufactured wind turbines
every one of them supported by U.S. and foreign taxpayers and dependent
upon "sweet-heart" government-enforced power purchase requirements.
So, we can draw the following
conclusions: installation of wind turbines will require significant investment; an investment
component should be laid in the price of electricity; at today's prices
investment will be repaid within 10 years and only after that the electricity
may go down in value; some kind of government regulation is required to put
wind energy into use. This decision should be made in the form of laws and officially adopted goals and
guidelines.
Literature
1.
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