Tawanai

FFC Energy Limited (FFCEL) has finalised contracts of Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) and Operation and Maintenance (O&M) with Nordex of Germany for development of 50 Megawatt Wind Power Project at Jhimpir, Sindh.

FFCEL is a fully owned subsidiary of Fauji Fertiliser Company Limited (FFC), while Nordex AG is a leading manufacturer of Wind Turbines in the world. Founder and Chief Sales Officer of Nordex Carsten Pedersen and Lieutenant General Malik Arif Hayat (Retd) CE & MD, FFC & FFCEL exchanged the contract documents, a press release issued here said.

Arif Alauddin, CEO Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB) Pakistan was also present at the ceremony. FFCEL shall soon be filing Tariff Petition with NEPRA for the project. The construction of the project, shall begin after Tariff approval from National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) and signing of Energy Purchase Agreement between FFCEL and Central Power Purchase Agency. The project, once operational, shall address electricity shortage in the country and will also help the economy by providing cleaner, sustainable and economical electricity to the nation.

FFC has further planned to develop and establish more renewable energy projects in Pakistan to contribute towards fulfilling Pakistan’s electricity needs through captive renewable resources. To that end, FFC has already obtained Letter of Intent (LOI) of additional 100 MW Wind Power Projects from (AEDB)

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Clean Technology, Energy, Green, Infrastructure, Investment, Pakistan, Renewable Energy, Wind

The conflict between proponents of wind energy and those who oppose it is heating up in Texas. The growth of wind power has attracted powerful critics: the owners of natural-gas power plants.

The gas and wind factions have been clashing over the state’s operating rules for the past several months. The gas people say the playing field is tilted in wind’s favor; wind accuses gas of trying to snuff out the nascent wind energy sector.

The success of wind power in Texas has come at the expense of natural gas. If the wind build-out continues, by 2013 the amount of gas consumed to make electricity could fall by 18.5%, as gas plants sit idle for longer, according to Tudor Pickering & Holt, a Houston-based energy investment bank.

At the heart of the battle is a fight over the vicissitudes of wind itself. The wind industry argues that since it can’t control when the wind blows, it shouldn’t be held to the same rules that require everyone else to make payments when they fail to deliver promised power. The natural-gas generators say everyone should operate under the same rules, and lament that wind’s success is merely coming at the expense of another relatively clean energy source.

Similar fights are shaping up elsewhere. In the Midwest and Wyoming, fossil-fuel companies are questioning whether wind is getting too many advantages from government.

The lure of harnessing the wind has attracted big players. Wind-farm developers include NextEra Resources, a division of FPL Group Inc., the giant Florida-based power company, and E.On AG, the huge German power company. General Electric Co. is a major manufacturer of 400-foot-tall wind turbines and United Technologies Corp. recently entered the field.

Via: WSJ

Clean Technology, Natural Gas, Wind

Windbelt is a small-scale wind power technology that was first announced a few years ago. The Windbelt was devised as a wind power generator to meet the very modest power needs of families in third-world countries. The device is revolutionary for being non-revolving — most wind power is produced by something going around in a circle and turning on an axis to drive a generator. Windbelt, however, uses the oscillation of a thin strip of material held in tension with a spring to vibrate a magnet that generates electrical power.

Source: Inhabitat

Energy, Renewable Energy, Wind

The energy crisis in Pakistan is changing the way telecom industry consumes and manages power. In a welcome move, Universal Service Fund has made it mandatory for the telecom operators in rural areas, where USF is providing subsidy, to power their infrastructure through renewable energy sources. This not only makes sense financially but also from an environmental perspective. Telenor and Warid had already taken some initiatives along these lines. Here’s the statement from USF.

It has been observed that commercial power has not reached most of the areas where USF is running rural telecom projects, which proves to be a barrier to provide smooth uninterrupted telecom service. Even where commercial power infrastructure is available, the availability of power is extremely limited. As a result, the telecom operators have to rely on diesel generators. But not only there is the cost of diesel, the re-fueling at these sites is also a big and expensive hassle. At the same time, there is also a great need for cross-cutting operational expenses for maintenance of remote and hard-to-reach remote sites. Therefore, it was decided in the meeting that operators will bid for all future infrastructure in unserved areas with renewable energy solutions.

This decision will play an important role in reducing the energy costs and is also a small contribution towards dealing with the energy crisis in Pakistan. Moreover, this initiative will also help reduce carbon content in the atmosphere.

Wind, solar and other forms of non-fossil fuel energy, such as hydro and geothermal can contribute in this effort. Thus hundreds of renewable energy solutions will get deployed which will not only reduce Green House Gasses (mainly CO2) emissions in the atmosphere, it will also help bring down prices of solar and wind power solutions in the country.

Clean Technology, Energy, Green, IT, Solar, Wind

Government has finally come out with directives to to the State Engineering Corporation to explore manufacturing of windmills turbines locally. The ministry of industries is currently evaluating international tenders for the installation of wind mills in the coastal areas of Sindh, which have been termed as potential source of wind energy by the donor community.

Federal Minister for Industries and Production Mian Manzur Wattoo asked the chairman of State Engineering to explore the possibility of manufacturing windmill turbines at the Pakistan Machine Tool Factory in Karachi for power generation through windmills.

While the ministry was examining the technical and financial aspects of the windmill projects, Mr Wattoo directed the officials to complete review of the project expeditiously as the government was serious to promote low-cost windmill power generation in the country.

Pakistan has considerable potential of wind energy in the coastal belt of Sindh and Balochistan as well as in the desert areas of Punjab and Sindh. In view of the existing potential and the anticipated future energy needs, the government had set a target of at least five per cent of the total national power generation through renewable energy, especially wind by the year 2030.

The wind data has been collected from Pakistan Metrological Department and analysed by Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB).

The data provides that the coastal belt of Pakistan wind corridor is 60km wide (Gharo-Keti Bandar) and 180km long up to Hyderabad. This corridor has the exploitable potential of 50,000MW of electricity generation through windmills.

According to a report of Asian Development Bank on Energy Security, wind power has been a very successful technology, growing rapidly worldwide. Since 2001, installed capacity has grown by 20 to 30 per cent a year. In 2007 alone, $31 billion worth was added, bringing global capacity to 94 GW.

Today, most of the world’s wind power capacity is land-based. The size of onshore wind turbines has increased steadily over the last 25 years. Large turbines can usually deliver electricity at a lower average cost than smaller ones.

Via Dawn

Clean Technology, Energy, Wind, power

Everybody’s rooting for wind and solar power. How could you not? But wind and solar are use-it-or-lose-it resources. To make any kind of difference, they need better storage.

Source: AEP

Battery packs located close to customers can store electricity from renewable wind or solar sources and supply power when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Energy is collected in the storage units and can be sent as needed directly to homes or businesses or out to the grid.

Scientists are attacking the problem from a host of angles—all of which are still problematic. One, for instance, uses power produced when the wind is blowing to compress air in underground chambers; the air is fed into gas-fired turbines to make them run more efficiently. One of the obstacles: finding big, usable, underground caverns.

Similarly, giant batteries can absorb wind energy for later use, but some existing technologies are expensive, and others aren’t very efficient. While researchers are looking at new materials to improve performance, giant technical leaps aren’t likely.

Lithium-ion technology may hold the greatest promise for grid storage, where it doesn’t have as many limitations as for autos. As performance improves and prices come down, utilities could distribute small, powerful lithium-ion batteries around the edge of the grid, closer to customers. There, they could store excess power from renewables and help smooth small fluctuations in power, making the grid more efficient and reducing the need for backup fossil-fuel plants. And utilities can piggy-back on research efforts for vehicle batteries.

Via WSJ

Electricity, Energy, Solar, Wind battery packs, Lithium ion

Via WSJ article.

Energy from renewable sources come and go at nature’s whim. Wind tends to blow hardest at night — a problem, since people use electricity mostly during the day. Sunshine can lose its intensity in seconds if eclipsed by a cloud — inconvenient for people who like their air conditioners to run steadily on summer days.

Many states and countries are pledging to produce 20% or more of their electricity from renewable sources within about a decade. That will be a major stretch. The recession has severely crimped renewable-energy investment. Proposals to turn over large swaths of desert and coastline to renewable-energy generation are encountering angry opposition. And the drop in fossil-fuel prices has removed much of the public appetite for a big renewable-energy bid. Yet those very pressures are pushing renewable-energy proponents to pursue their goal as efficiently as possible. And so the search for ways to accommodate the vicissitudes of wind and sun continues to shape up as one of today’s great technological quests.

A convenient solution would be to overcome wind and sun’s intermittence by storing the energy and then dispensing it later, on windless or overcast days. But storage technology is still embryonic.

So the power industry is having to change the way it operates. To adapt its fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure to renewable energy’s ebbs and flows, it is trying to forecast them better. Knowing how nature is likely to behave will help the industry better balance different sources of renewable energy, scientists and utility executives say. The goal: maximizing wind, sun and other natural sources when each is at its peak.

Currently, every wind farm and solar installation has to be backed up by a nearly equivalent amount of conventional fuel to keep the power grid running. That raises costs.

“We’re putting renewables into a system that wasn’t designed for renewables,” says Paul Denholm, an analyst for the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo.

Wind power is the fastest-growing renewable source of electricity. Buoyed by government mandates and subsidies, wind farms accounted for more than half of all net electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. in 2008, according to the Department of Energy.

But capacity to produce is not actual production. Largely due to wind’s unpredictability, the thousands of wind turbines installed across the country collectively produced only 1.3% of actual U.S. electricity in 2008, the department’s figures show.

The Bonneville Power Administration, a government-owned utility based in Portland, Ore., taps one of the biggest collections of wind farms in the country. Between January and August, average wind-power production accounted for 12% of average electricity consumption in Bonneville’s service area.

From hour to hour, though, wind power swings wildly depending on how things blow at the Columbia River Gorge, where most of the wind turbines in Bonneville’s service area are located.

This Tuesday was typically erratic. At 1 a.m., wind farms in the Bonneville service area were cranking out about 1,550 megawatts of power. By 7 a.m., that fell to about 800 megawatts, just as people were waking up and turning on their lights and toasters. That night, once most people were asleep, the wind picked up again. By 11:45 p.m., wind power topped 2,000 megawatts.

Most of the electricity in Bonneville’s service area comes from hydroelectric power. To compensate for the volatility of wind, Bonneville tweaks the amount of water it lets through the dams. But that doesn’t work for the most extreme shifts in wind. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing hard, Bonneville releases extra water over the tops of dams without using it to generate electricity. Otherwise, electrical wires might get overloaded. And when the wind is so strong that Bonneville can’t ditch enough water, the utility orders wind turbines shut off.

Read more…

Clean Technology, Energy, Solar, Wind

Clean Technology, Energy, Innovation, Solar, Wind

Siemens has announced the release of a new 3.6-megawatt (MW) wind turbine featuring a 120 meter rotor diameter. The SWT-3.6-120 turbine is based on the proven technology of the SWT-3.6-107 – the world’s most popular offshore wind turbine. The new machine will be equipped with 58.5 meter long rotor blades. The turbine has a swept area of 11,300 square meters, which is equivalent to nearly two football fields.

“We anticipate that our new SWT-3.6-120 wind turbine will generate roughly ten per cent more electricity at a typical offshore site compared to our SWT-3.6-107,” said Andreas Nauen, CEO of the Siemens Wind Power Business Unit. “With this new wind turbine we will continue to maintain our technology leadership in offshore wind power. We have already seen a lot of interest from the market in this new product.” The SWT-3.6-120 extends the performance of the proven Siemens 3.6 MW turbine type, which is already established as the preferred offshore turbine type in the multi-megawatt class. Siemens has installed 100 of its 3.6 MW wind turbines and has another 700 turbines on order.

Earlier this year Dong Energy signed orders for more than 450 SWT-3.6-120 machines. 175 of these new wind turbines will be installed in the first phase of the British London Array project, which will ultimately be the world’s first offshore wind farm on a gigawatt-scale. Furthermore, 51 SWT-3.6-120 wind turbines will be installed at the Walney II Offshore Wind Farm, also in the U.K. These orders from Dong Energy are part of the world’s largest wind power agreement for the supply of up to 500 offshore wind turbines, which was signed earlier this year. The wind turbines to be delivered under the supply agreement will have a total capacity of up to 1,800 megawatts.

The first two prototypes of the SWT 3.6-120 will be used by Dong Energy at Avedøre in Copenhagen, and installed in time for the COP 15 / UN World Climate Summit in Copenhagen. The Hvidovre Vindmøllelaug, a group of local investors, is contributing to this project.
Wind turbines are an important component of the Siemens environmental portfolio, which earned the company revenues of nearly EUR19 billion in fiscal 2008, roughly a quarter of the company’s total revenues. Today, Siemens is the world’s leading supplier of environmentally friendly technology.

The Siemens Energy Sector is the world’s leading supplier of a complete spectrum of products, services and solutions for the generation, transmission and distribution of power and for the extraction, conversion and transport of oil and gas. In fiscal 2008 (ended September 30), the Energy Sector had revenues of approximately EUR22.6 billion and received new orders totaling approximately EUR33.4 billion and posted a profit of EUR1.4 billion. On September 30, 2008, the Energy Sector had a work force of approximately 83,500.

Source: www.powergeneration.siemens.com

Clean Technology, Energy, Renewable Energy, Wind

From Ecoworldly.com

The world’s very first floating fullscale offshore wind turbine has officially been inaugurated in the North Sea off the coast of Norway.

The turbine even has a name: Hywind. It measures 213 feet tall and weighs 5,300 tonnes, and it rests on a floating stand which is filled with water and rocks to provide balast. Three powerful cables anchor the stand to the seafloor.

StatoilHydro, the corporate energy giant which owns Hywind, plans to use it as a test for the next two years before building any more floating wind turbines. But if everything runs smoothly, they hope to set up floating turbines around the world for international partners, locations which are likely to include California, Japan, South Korea and Spain.

The biggest advantage to floating turbines is that they can operate out at sea at depths between 120 and 700 metres, much deeper than conventional offshore turbines. Winds are usually much stronger in deeper seas, meaning the new technology could also generate a lot more power.

And for those people who find wind turbines aesthetically unpleasing, floating turbines put further out to sea also mean they’ll be out of sight.

Currently floating turbines are significantly more expensive to build, but due to their many advantages, StatoilHydro believes that the costs should come down over time. “Our goal is to bring down the price to the level of fixed wind turbines that are currently installed in waters some 60 metres deep,” said Anne Stroemmen Lycke from StatoilHydro.

Hywind should begin fanning over the North Sea and generating electricity within the next couple of weeks.

Energy, Innovation, Wind floating turbine