Linear Energy is a new company that is developing a novel generator that will help to improve the storage and delivery of energy derived from renewable sources.

 

OSTERILD, Denmark — At the northern end of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula, the wind blows so hard that rows of trees grow in one direction, like gnarled flags.

The relentless weather over this long strip of farmland, bogs and mud flats — and the real-world laboratory it provides — has given the country a leading role in transforming wind power into a viable source of clean energy.

After energy prices spiked during the 1973 oil crisis, entrepreneurs began building small turbines to sell here. “It started out as an interest in providing power for my parents’ farm,” said Henrik Stiesdal, who designed and built early prototypes with a blacksmith partner.

The initial windmills made by small operations had quality problems. Blades — then just 15 feet in length — would break or fall apart.

Now, they are giants, made by global players pulling off enormous feats of engineering.

Technicians reach the roof of these enormous wind turbines either via an internal elevator or, if the turbine is installed offshore, by helicopters that lower them into the fenced-off area.
By Rasmus Degnbol
The biggest turbines in Osterild stretch more than 600 feet high. The largest rotor blades can reach 270 feet in length, comparable to the wingspan of an Airbus A380, the world’s largest commercial plane. The price tag: Up to 10 million euros, or more than $12 million.

The monstrous scale has helped turn wind into a mainstream form of power.

Larger turbines harness more wind, creating more energy. The biggest modern offshore turbines produce nearly 20 times as much power as ones developed three decades ago.

The larger the size, the lower the cost of generating energy. In parts of northern Europe, wind is now a major power source. It accounts for 4 percent of overall global energy supply, according to the International Energy Agency.

Blades for wind turbines lie outside a factory, waiting to be transported to wind farms.
By Rasmus Degnbol
From those early Danish innovators, the industry has grown to be dominated by companies like Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy.

The heart of the Siemens Gamesa business lies in Brande, a small Jutland town. It was there in the early 1980s that an entrepreneur named Peter Sorensen founded a wind business called Bonus with a couple of workers from his father’s irrigation company.

Siemens bought Bonus in 2004, and today, Brande is home to large engineering, training and maintenance hubs.

Staff sitting at consoles there can monitor wind farms around the globe. Often, when a problem shuts a turbine down, they can restart it electronically without needing to send a maintenance team.

Siemens Gamesa staff can check the performance of turbines around the world, and fix problems remotely, often from their desks in Brande. Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What began as the offshoot of an irrigation company in the Danish town of Brande is now a major industrial enterprise. Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
At a cavernous workshop, technicians build custom turbine models and facilities for testing whether components are robust enough to last two decades or more. Inside, the towers are so big that elevators haul engineers up and down. Passengers must wear a climbing harness in case they fail.

At a Siemens Gamesa training center, technicians learning how to lower themselves with ropes and harnesses in case elevators inside the turbines fail. Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
The rotors are connected to the windmill tower by a nacelle — a large enclosure the size of a trailer, with plenty of room inside to walk around.

Large enclosures, or nacelles, connect a wind turbine’s rotors and house its generator and controls. Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
Looming over the top deck outside are the rotors. When they whirl, the whole column sways like a ship at sea.

A technician walks inside a prototype wind turbine in Osterild, Denmark. These test models help turbine makers boost performance. Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
Making these blades is difficult and labor-intensive.

Teams of workers gradually fill a mold with strips of fiberglass interlaced with balsa wood for strength. They then inject resins and other chemicals into the container to form the hardened structure.

The huge size of the blades, and the complexity of the process, mean completely automating it does not make economic sense. Around 1,300 people work in the factory, and making a single blade can take about three days.

It’s a difficult balance for manufacturers to achieve both size and efficiency.

The largest blades already weigh around 30 metric tons, and making them longer adds to their weight, fast. Overweight blades might lead to turbines being worn down faster, and would put enormous stress on other components.

A group of workers prepare a mold for a wind turbine blade. They fill the mold with fiber glass cloth in a process that loosely resembles making a surfboard.
By Rasmus Degnbol
Designers are testing tweaks to the shape and size of a blade, experimenting with the changes in wind tunnels or on computers. They have found that gluing various add-ons to the blades can substantially boost performance.

One fix — a combination of serrated teeth and combs that reduced the sound of the blades — was inspired by the wing feathers of owls.

Many of the big turbines that are designed at the center will eventually make their way to the open water, where there is more space and the wind is more powerful.

Their huge components, difficult to transport on roadways, can be loaded at ports onto special boats, which take them to sprawling wind farms in the sea.

The enclosures which connect the blades to the wind turbine’s tower are readied to be loaded onto ships.
By Rasmus Degnbol
The first offshore wind farm was built using a barge that had a crane mounted on a truck. Companies today have developed specialized vessels to carry these 23 April 2018offshore turbines to their floating platforms.

They must contend with a variety of challenges, including the corrosive impact of saltwater. To service wind farms far from the shore, maintenance crews sometimes live on special ships.

It’s a complicated calculus.

In the early years, building an offshore wind farm was fantastically expensive, and governments offered generous subsidies to help the industry develop. But prices have been falling, and government support has “melted away,” according to Andreas Nauen, the chief executive of Siemens Gamesa’s offshore wind division.

Lower costs, though, have also made wind power more appealing elsewhere. Mr. Nauen is optimistic that new markets for wind power, which was once mostly concentrated in northern Europe, will emerge in Asia and the United States.

“This is real,” he said.

New York Times 23 April 2018

London

GLOBAL wind energy capacity could increase by more than half over the next five years, as costs continue to fall and the market returns to growth at the end of this decade, a report by the Global Wind Energy Council shows.

In its annual report on the status of the global wind industry, the GWEC said cumulative wind energy capacity stood at 539 gigawatts (GW) at the end of last year, 11 per cent higher than the previous year.

That should increase by 56 per cent to 840GW by the end of 2022 as countries develop more renewable energy to meet emissions cut targets and prices continue to fall, the wind industry association said.

Around 52.5GW of new wind power capacity was added worldwide last year, down slightly from 54.6GW in 2016.

SEE ALSO: Going green will starve poor countries of greenbacks

The GWEC expects the market to be flat this year but start growing again from 2019. “The annual market will return to growth in 2019 and 2020, breaching the 60GW barrier once again and continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace, in the beginning of the new decade,” the GWEC said in its report. “We expect to see total cumulative installations reach 840GW by the end of 2022.”

Wind power has become more competitive over the past few years, with a move from government subsidies to auctions which has brought costs down further.

“Overall, offshore prices for projects to be completed in the next five years or so are half of what they were for the last five years and this trend is likely to continue,” the report said.

China continues to be the biggest wind market in the world, adding nearly 19.7GW of new capacity in 2017, though this was 15.9 per cent lower than the previous year.

The pace of China’s wind development is gradually slowing down and growth is expected to be flat to 2020.

India experienced record wind installations last year, adding over 4GW, but GWEC expects this to slow this year due to a transition period between old market incentives and moving towards an auction-based system, the GWEC said.

The European Union also had a record year in 2017 with 15.6GW added. The bloc is expected to install around 76GW of new wind power by the end of 2022, reaching a cumulative total of 254GW. The US added 7GW of new wind capacity last year.

Despite attempts to change the structure of tax credits last year, the provisions remained intact and continue to support the industry. REUTERS

Business Times 26 April 2018

Wind turbines ‘could supply most of UK’s electricity’
Dong Energy chief executive hails ‘inflection point’ as he confirms plan to sell company’s oil and gas division
Dong Energy’s London Array windfarm. It is the UK’s largest windfarm operator.
Tuesday 8 November 2016 15.49 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 9 November 2016 00.41
Wind turbines could soon supply most of the UK’s electricity, the boss of the country’s largest windfarm operator has said, as he confirmed plans to sell its oil and gas division.

Dong Energy said the sale would underpin its plan to become a “global leader in renewables”, 44 years after the company was set up to exploit Denmark’s North Sea oilfields.

The chief executive pointed to the tumbling cost of green energy as evidence that wind and solar could supplant fossil fuels quicker than expected.
Smart energy technology ‘stymied by current policy’

“When you look back in 10 years from now, we’ll see this period around 2016-17 as an inflection point,” Henrik Poulsen said. “The cost of offshore wind, also solar and onshore wind, is coming down at such speed that nobody could have predicted.”

Dong Energy is the UK’s largest windfarm operator with stakes in planned or existing projects able to produce five gigawatts (5GW), more than the planned Hinkley Point C nuclear reactors.

Poulsen said technological advances in the energy industry meant wind power could end up supplying more than half of the UK’s electricity demand.

“When you combine different things, you could see offshore wind’s total of the energy mix going a lot higher,” he said. “You could definitely go above 50%.” He cited the falling cost of wind power, coupled with rapid progress in battery storage technology.

Wind power is often criticised for its intermittency, in that it cannot be relied upon to meet the UK’s energy needs because the wind does not always blow. But improvements in battery storage will mean surplus wind energy can be stored for release on windless days.

“There is plenty of room for additional offshore wind capacity in the UK and we would love to play a role,” said Poulsen.

Dong Energy confirmed it was seeking buyers for its North Sea oil and gas business, and Poulsen said the decision was more than simply financial. “The company has an ambition of leading the energy transformation of leading the transition to renewables,” he said. “That’s been driving us for the past few years and we see this as the natural step to transforming to be fully focused on green energy.”

He said the sale had nothing to do with the fact that oil prices have been stubbornly low for two years. “It’s a matter of vision and strategy and not the oil price,” he said.
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The company is “engaging with potential interested buyers”, said Poulsen, insisting that a glut of oil assets for sale would not hamper the process. He said the division had already sold less profitable, high-cost assets that would have made it less attractive to a buyer.

Poulsen was speaking as Dong Energy released third quarter figures that showed a jump in profit to £400m, compared with just £55m last year. Much of the improvement came from proceeds of the sale of Dong’s gas distribution grid in Denmark.

During the quarter renewables overtook oil and gas as the company’s biggest source of earnings, accounting for 42% of operating profit.

Despite the sale of its oil business, the firm has no plans to change its name, which is short for Dansk Olie og Naturgas (Danish Oil and Natural Gas).

The article shows that there is no one dominant storage technology

 

Energy storage for renewables can be a good investment today, study finds
Systems that bank energy can add value to solar and wind projects.
David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
June 13, 2016
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Utility companies or others planning to install renewable energy systems such as solar and wind farms have to decide whether to include large-scale energy storage systems that can capture power when it’s available and release it on demand. This decision may be critical to the future growth of renewable energy.
The choices can be complicated: Would such a system actually pay for itself through increased revenues? If so, which kind of system makes the most sense, and which features of the system are most important? If not, how much cheaper do storage technologies need to be?
A new study by researchers at MIT shows how to evaluate the technology choices available, including batteries, pumped hydroelectric storage, and compressed air energy storage, and demonstrates that even with today’s prices for these technologies, such storage systems make good economic sense in some locations, but not yet in others. The study, by Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor of Energy Studies at MIT, and graduate students William Braff and Joshua Mueller, was just published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“Researchers and practitioners have struggled to compare the costs of different storage technologies,” Trancik explains, “because of the multiple dimensions of cost and the fact that no technology dominates along all dimensions. Storage technologies can only be compared by looking at the contexts in which they are going to be used.” But the study found that regardless of the particular circumstances at a given location, certain features of how electricity prices fluctuate are common across locations and do favor some specific types of storage solutions over others.
Selling at the peak price
For example, the team found that in Texas today, pumped hydro systems can provide added value today for solar or wind installations. In these systems, excess power is used to pump water uphill to a reservoir for storage, and then the water is released through a turbine to generate power when it is needed. The increased revenue the plant can produce, by waiting to sell the power into the grid until spot-prices for electricity — the constantly-changing market rate that electricity distributors pay to producers — are at their peak, would exceed the costs of the added storage system.
Further, they found that such pumped hydro storage provides more value than a storage system using lead-acid batteries even though its power capacity components would cost several times more. This is because a pumped hydro system has lower energy-capacity costs than lead-acid battery system. (Energy capacity refers to the overall amount of energy that can be stored in the system, and power capacity refers to how much energy can be delivered at a given moment from that system). A compressed air storage system could also add value comparable to that of the pumped hydro system. However, batteries are attractive, the researchers note, because they can be installed essentially anywhere and do not rely on natural features that exist only in some locations.
The researchers point out that much research on storage systems for renewable energy sources has focused on using the systems to smooth out the intermittent outputs to better match fluctuating demand. But in practice, most of these wind or solar farms are feeding into the grid, so what matters to potential investors is the price curve rather than the demand curve.
Surprisingly, it turned out that despite wide regional variations in the average prices and the amount of variability in demand and pricing, “the best storage technology in one location is also the best in the other,” Trancik says. “This is because of the similarity across locations in the distribution of the duration of electricity price spikes. This pattern likely emerges because of constraints imposed by the daily cycle, and similarities in when people go to work and go home, and generally how they spend their time.”
Whether an energy storage system is worth the cost today varies widely by location, because of large variations in the frequency and magnitude of spikes in the price and how the solar and wind resources fluctuate over time, she says. But the cost characteristics of the optimal storage systems are similar in all locations, the researchers found, because of certain common, emergent properties of electricity price fluctuations.
“This means that these results can be used to inform investments in storage technology development by the private sector and government, and can inform engineering efforts in the lab,” Trancik says. “The results would have been less general and less useful to technology development efforts if we’d found that the direction of optimal cost improvement, trading off energy capacity and power capacity costs, was different across locations.”
Costs still need to drop
At this time, the study found, the costs of such systems don’t yet make them profitable enough without policy support to enable the kind of widespread adoption that is needed to make a large dent in global greenhouse gas emissions. But, Trancik says, this study does suggest that market adoption already makes sense in some locations, and could be boosted with modest public policy support, which in turn would stimulate technological improvement in storage to encourage further growth. The study also provides guidance on how much the costs of a given technology need to be brought down in order to enable such deployment, and which aspects of the system need the greatest improvement — and thus, where research needs to be focused. For example it provides cost targets for various flow batteries that are in development.
For this study, the team examined three states: Texas, California, and Massachusetts. They found storage systems make economic sense today in Texas and California but not yet in Massachusetts. They plan to broaden the study to more locations to see if their overall conclusions apply more widely.
In one somewhat counterintuitive finding, they say that as the cost of wind and solar power systems comes down, the cost of storage systems will need to come down as well or they will no longer be profitable. That’s because at some point it would be more profitable to simply add more generating capacity rather than more storage capacity. The researchers note that there is a window of opportunity now for storage to be adopted in the marketplace. But they warn that the incentives will diminish over time if no action is taken now, and if wind and solar costs fall further.
Trancik says this research falls in an area she refers to as “directed innovation,” in which decisions about what areas of research, technology designs, and policies are most needed in order to achieve specific societal goals can be based on clearly quantifiable criteria. “The idea is to use data and models to accelerate energy technology development,” she says.
“Since storage involves both energy and power characteristics, among others, improving these technologies involves targeting multiple criteria. If a utility, researcher, or technology investor were considering which research directions would be most likely to increase the value of storage, this method would be a great place to start,” says Gregory Nemet, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was not involved in this work.
“A strength of the study is the extensive sensitivity analysis. It takes several factors into account and then uses alternative assumptions for each factor to see if that changes the results,” Nemet adds. “It is thus impressive that after doing that, they find that existing storage technologies, such as pumped hydro and compressed air, can already add value to wind and solar. Storage adds value to renewables today, even in very different locations.”
This work was supported by the MIT Portugal Program, Lockheed Martin, and the SUTD-MIT International Design Center.

Linear Energy is a  company that is developing a novel generator that could make significant improvements to the delivery of renewable energy.  The objective of Linear’s generator, called GEMINI, is to eliminate the use of gears in wind turbines and to lower the cost of maintenance. An animation on Linear Energy’s website-www.linear-energy.com- demonstrates how GEMINI works.

The Linear Energy team have an excellent mixture of skills and capabilities. The idea has been developed by Russell Dolman who is practical engineer and entrepreneur having honed his skills with the RAF where accuracy and timeliness are of the essence.  Working with him are Ray Maxwell who is a seasoned investor in technology companies and Dr Chris Beck who has spent many years as a technology consultant for both the private sector and for government.