Donald Cooksey: NASA Wind Generation Project
(Page 6 of 9)
May/June 1976
By the Mother Earth News staff
COOKSEY: No. Our design calls for automatic switching gear that allows the WTG to synchronize its output with the alternating current already pulsing through the local power grid. The houses in the area will be feeding off that grid all the time. The windplant won't be connected to the system at all, however, when it's not running. It will switch itself into the grid, though, just as soon as the wind begins to blow hard enough to make it produce usable juice. At that time, the plant will synchronize its output with the AC in the local powerlines . . . and begin feeding its current in. In effect, the grid—which is already there and available—becomes the storage battery for the wind-driven generator.
RELATED CONTENT
Rock Port, Mo., took advantage of the power generated from the nearby Loess Hills Wind Farm in a bi...
More than 100 schools in 30 states have installed wind generators, and many more are doing the rese...
This 1975 article on wind generators includes notes on firsthand experiences, thoughts on finding u...
Wind power has enormous potential, is the fastest growing form of electricity and creates no pollut...
PLOWBOY: That sounds good. But, of course, the power companies already do the same thing with new coal-burning generators and with nuclear power plants. Do you really know that your windplants are any better than other producers of electricity? Have you made environmental studies of the impact your turbines might have on a given area?
COOKSEY: Well one of the reasons we're concentrating on 100-kw and bigger units right now is because we think it's better to feed 15 or 30 or 300 homes from a single windplant than it is to try to provide every house in a neighborhood with its own personal wind-driven generator. Can you imagine just how impractical it would be—and how ugly a subdivision would look!—if each and every home had a 50-foot tower topped with a 30-foot wind charger stuck out in the backyard? TV antennas are bad enough! A single big plant—maybe large enough to feed all the dwellings in a mile-square area—might be sorta nice, though. I don't know, but it might be.
That one big plant, on the other hand, might have some drawbacks of its own. What effect, for instance, will it have on wildlife in the area? Will it scare away all the rabbits and deer? Will it prove to be a hazard to migratory birds? The National Science Foundation is working with the Battell Institute down in Columbus, Ohio on these questions right now.
And what about the micro-climate around a very large windplant? Will that rotor stir up the passing air mass enough to' change the frost characteristics of the neighborhood? We don't know. But we aim to find out.
PLOWBOY: Well let's say that you find the answers to these questions . . . and that the answers are good ones. Let's say, in short, that winddriven generators are really great. They produce meaningful quantities of electricity and they don't disturb the environment. We still aren't going to put them everywhere because the wind doesn't blow regularly everywhere. Where will we put the plants?
COOKSEY: Out on the Great Plains, obviously. Along some ridges in the mountains. And on the coasts of—and out on some of the islands in—a great many bodies of water. Islands can be especially good locations for windplants . . . especially if they're low and don't obstruct the wind that comes blowing across all that flat water. The islands in Lake Erie would be good. Or islands in the Caribbean, such as Puerto Rico. The average wind velocity on some of the Caribbean island coasts is something like 35 miles per hour. That's just ideal for this type of generator.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>
