By Sanjay Suri
GREVENBROICH, Germany, Jun 3 2004 (IPS)

It was named Windy, and stood taller than it had seemed from a distance. Its three giant blades seemed to be moving only gently, but a gear turned that movement into about a thousand rounds a minute for the generator rotor.

That whirring rotor was generating about 100 kilowatts an hour, a counter at Windy’s base showed, which meant Windy alone could power the village nearby, and it is being tested as if it could.

Windy is nothing like those picture postcard windmills associated with Tulips and the Netherlands. After all, “the Dutch were market leaders in wind technology 150 years ago,” says Robin Borgert from the Grevenbroich wind test farm. Windy is less pretty, but more productive.

Chimneys from the coal-based power plant right behind belched their usual clouds of smoke into the air. “We get on fine with them,” Borgert said. Neither is a threat to the other. More and more, wind energy is learning to work in tandem with conventional producers to feed into the same grid. Because though wind is free, sometimes there is no wind.

The contribution of Windy and its companions is small, but not that small. The 100 kw/h it was producing is within a 600 kw capacity. Output is always a fraction of the rated capacity, and it fluctuates depending on the wind speed above. Further down the test farm stood windmills with a 2.5 MW capacity (a megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts, a kilowatt is 1,000 watts).

Germany has about 15,000 windmills with an output rating of around 14,600 MW/h. Many of these are much smaller than the likes of Windy. Together they generated more than 20 billion kilowatt hours of emission- free power. The new ones are getting bigger and better; Germany is already by far the world’s most productive country in use of wind energy. Other countries with a more than 1,000 MW capacity are the United States, Spain, Denmark and India.

Denmark is meeting about 20 percent of its energy needs from wind already, compared to an average of 2.4 percent in Europe, making it in that sense the world leader in using wind for energy. Following a new energy agreement in March this year, it plans to add a 400 MW offshore and 350 MW on shore capacity to top its present capacity of 3,100 MW.

Danish companies have taken the lead in putting up windmills in the sea where there is more wind and where no one can complain they do not look pretty. By the end of last year windmills situated in seas had a capacity of 530 MW, and of these a 492 MW capacity came from windmills set up by Danish companies.

“The costs are coming down,” Claus Bojle Moller from the Danish Wind Industry Association told IPS. “On a good site they are now comparable to the costs from conventional sources, when you take the benefits into account.” Those benefits mean primarily an emissions-free production.

Costs are lower at installations with steady and good winds, as at sites in India and in the United States. Most costs are concentrated on installation. Once up and running on a good site, a windmill does not need much more to keep going for years.

The world growth rate in wind energy is about 26 percent, says Borgert. Growth is expected to pick up as costs fall. The Grevenbroich site tests efficiency of windmills in relation to costs, among other factors, and sees good news ahead.

The rotor and other components that actually produce electricity in a windmill are conventional components and therefore relatively cheap at present, he says. But more efficient components are being developed specifically for windmills. Installation of these would improve production efficiency significantly, and with large-scale production costs are expected to fall.

New and less complex generators will also need less maintenance. Better links to the grid system from new sites is expected to add efficiency to supply.

Wind cannot be controlled, but wind speeds can already be predicted to 95 percent accuracy. That is being used to direct wind energy generation at present. High generation is fed into the grid, at times of low generation the more conventional sources take over. “Managing this is fairly easy,” says Borgert.

But that still leaves times when the wind could be creating some spare electricity. That is used at present to pump water supply to reservoirs, Borgert says. But new technology is being developed to store electricity in hydrogen fuel cells which can then be used to generate electricity, something in the manner of giant rechargeable batteries.

Those fuel cells can be good for a major grid and for a remote village.

Close to Windy three men had set up a 6kw/h mobile windmill in less than four hours. Enough to meet essential needs of a small village in a developing country. Backed by fuel cells, a windmill that small could change lives in the remotest areas.

The first known use of wind as energy was in the Babylonian civilisation about 3,000 years ago. That is roughly where Iraq is today; the same land could have got revolutionary winds blowing again.

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