Wind Energy

Wind Energy is an intermittent energy source from weather and climate atmospheric variations and varies hourly, daily, and monthly by latitude and geographical location. The graph below shows just one random day at one particular location. Wind intermittency is different from and not necessarily related to Solar PV intermittency.

Some locations like the Western United States, coastal regions of the North Sea, and higher altitudes and latitudes have very high amounts of Wind Energy where Wind Turbines solutions are able to be scaled up significantly to GW size.

Other locations due to weather (e.g., low wind pressure gradients) or geographical variations (e.g., tropical equatorial latitudes with low wind speeds) may not be as suitable. Most locations are somewhere in between these extremes.

Residential and small commercial establishments have successfully used “behind the meter” Wind Turbine installations including small turbines. Industrial and extractive industry sites have used multi-hectare sized Wind farms located adjacent to their facilities.

Many Wind Energy solutions require Energy Storage Systems due to the intermittency of Wind and the daily and seasonal variations.

Cost effective designs require careful evaluation of each potential location’s wind energy characteristics, environmental conditions, load demand profile, and criticality of power supply (e.g., interruptible?) to correctly size the Wind Turbine system including turbines, generators, converters, transformers, controllers, and Energy Storage Systems (e.g., batteries and chargers). We use global standard third party software to simulate, optimise, evaluate sensitivities, and size each Wind Turbine system. Sometimes a hybrid solution with other renewables combined with some backup conventional power generation may be recommended.