THE FUTURE OF WIND TURBINE TECHNOLOGY FOR ENGINEERS
Wind power is a vitally important component in enabling our planet to create more sustainable sources of power generation. Generally, the renewable energy industry is expanding with many countries setting ambitious targets for growth, such as Scotland who aspires to get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. This surge is creating plenty of renewable energy job opportunities for skilled engineers, whilst simultaneously pushing innovation within wind power technologies so processes can become more efficient and a larger amount of power can be generated from sustainable sources.
But where does this innovation leave the wind industry and the engineers that work within it?
The first wind turbines
Wind turbine technology has been present in human history for centuries, with the earliest known windmills used for grain and water pumps in A.D 500-900.
But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that the first turbines designed specifically to generate renewable energy began to emerge across Scotland, Denmark and the USA. The purpose of these wind turbines was to generate electricity in areas that were hard to reach for regular power systems. These early turbines weren’t much different from what we see now within the wind industry. Simply put, they possessed two or three blades, which had a similar appearance to a propeller on an aero plane, which would generate power when the wind caused the blades to turn around a rotor. This rotor would be connected to a generator that then created electricity.
Things have moved on since then, and in the last 40 years, turbine technology has been harnessed to generate electricity on much larger scales to feed into existing power grids. The world’s first wind farm was constructed in the 1980s in New Hampshire, USA, this consisted of 20 turbines but due to developers overestimating the wind resource available, this wind farm was rendered a failure.
Later wind farms in the 1990s were much more successful in the USA, Denmark and the UK and were able to power a small number of homes, paving the way for the impressive wind farms in use across the renewable energy industry today.
Modern wind turbines
The wind turbines of today are considerably and continually improving from those first trialed in the 80s and 90s. We’re increasingly seeing turbines become more cost-effective, more reliable and capable of much more power production – today’s turbines are considerably larger with a greater power generation capacity of up to 12MW!