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July 6, 2006
China Makes Huge Breakthrough in Wind Power Technology
If this happens to be true, the implications of this technology are staggering. This has been bothering me all night, so if you aren't in a mood for a lecture, you'd better move along.
Where to start? The Chinese researchers have made something called a full-permanent magnetic levitation (Maglev) wind power generator. This is the first time this has been done, so it's a big deal even if you don't know what it means. I haven't seen a diagram of how they've implemented it yet, but I suspect what they are doing is using rare earth permanent magnets to float the friction causing parts of the generator away from each other. There will still be some friction caused by the interaction of magnetic fields, but it would give you the 20% boost in power generation they say they've achieved.
Now I know what you're thinking...20% boost doesn't seem that impressive, but the important part of the advancement is in the fine print. It cuts maintenance costs in half. Let that sink in, because it's really important. After you build a wind turbine all you really have is the maintenance costs to keep it generating you free electricity for the next 10 or 20 years. When you take some friction out of the equation you increase the lifespan of your generator and it requires less attention because you don't have to worry about the friction damage. Most importantly it drops the speed required to start generating electricity via wind power down the 3 m/s. Generally it's always been considered a requirement to have the blades moving at twice that speed to generate a useful current. They say that will add an extra 1000 hours of generating time compared to a normal generator in the field today. Just to give you a grasp of the implications of this kind of change, Dr. Cristina Archer at Stanford did a study of the world using wind station data to draw a map of the best places to place generators.
Level 3 and above represents the old required speeds to generate electricity with wind power. You'll notice that America has a lot of sites that have high wind speeds that we can take advantage of the existing technology. Now look at China.
Very few places that could generate electricity with wind. This becomes significant because now about half or so of the Level 1 sites listed meet the 3 m/s requirement to generate electricity and all the Level 2. Not to mention the fact that by cutting the maintenance costs in half they definitely take a massive leap forward in starting out with cheaper electricity. And in the sites where they have the wind power, they can really take advantage of that.
I asked Dr. Archer if she had consider rerunning the numbers on her study with this new kind of generator. I would love to see what the maps would look like then. But either way the implications are staggering. Of course there is always the worry that someone is trying to run up their stock price by making outlandish announcements. That's the problem when you let corporations do research instead of academics. Corporations have a vested interest in making lots of money and very little interest in the truth or science. So it's on my radar to follow up on, until I find someone credible to back it up.
[ via Treehugger]
Read more over at World Watch, Clean Break, Windtech International, and Stanford University.
Posted by Jamison at July 6, 2006 5:10 AM
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