"Massive interest" opening up in business-scale wind turbines
Monday 27 April 2009
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| American wind turbine manufacturers are currently leading the field for 50-100kW wind turbines, such as Entegrity, which offers these 50kW machines |
As wind turbine manufacturers strive to build ever bigger machines for the power generation market, they appear to have left behind a significant demand for smaller turbines for businesses and community use.
While the big players in the turbine market stretch to build machines rated 3MW plus for onshore applications and 5MW to 10MW for offshore use, a conference in Watford heard last week of a "massive interest" now growing for machines in the order of 50kW and the low hundred kilowatts.
In particular, there has been increasing demand in the UK from farmers, who want the benefits of income from renewable energy, but without the impact on the landscape of the large machines, which can be three times as tall at 100 metres or more.
And, businesses seeking to meet their own on-site demand for power are also driving the market, spurred on by the prospect of feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewable energy, which could be offered for projects up to 5MW in size from April 2010.
Yet delegates at the International Small Wind Conference heard that no European manufacturers - let alone British firms - currently offer such turbines any more - meaning they can only be brought in from North America or China.
As a result, import duties and freight costs make the turbines more expensive than they should be for the UK market.
Rod Edwards, technical director at renewable energy developer and installer Perpetual Energy Ltd, said that for smaller businesses and farmers, the relatively low capital costs of the 50kW turbines were proving attractive.
The machines can cost in the region of £150,000 to £250,000 compared to the multi-million pound requirements of large wind farms.
Cheshire-based Perpetual offers turbines including the 50kW EW50 machine from American firm Entegrity, and the NorthWind 100 from another US firm, Northern Power Systems.
"We're seeing increased demand from farmers, seeing this as farm income and to reduce their energy costs," Mr Edwards said. "We're also getting a lot of interest from community projects and groups of farmers who want to put up three or four turbines in adjoining land."
We're seeing increased demand from farmers, seeing this as farm income and to reduce their energy costs.
Alex Murley, small systems manager at the British Wind Energy Association, the trade body that organised last week's conference, agreed there was "massive interest" in this scale of turbine at the moment.
Manufacturers
Potentially, companies that could pursue this community-scale demand could be manufacturers currently making smaller turbines in the region of 6-15kW - or large-scale turbine manufacturers down-scaling their products.
New Energy Focus spoke last week to American manufacturers of 100kW turbines now actively looking to grow a presence in the UK market.
But, delegates at last week's conference did hear the suggestion that European companies like German turbine manufacturing giant Enercon were now in the process of developing products in the region of 33kW to 100kW.
Mr Edwards said the market was not an easy one to get into, since turbines of this scale are seen as being too small for complex engineering, but too large for the simple systems developed for micro-turbines.
"There's more forces acting on a larger tower, but you still have to keep the price down for this market," the Perpetual Energy technical director explained.
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