Keeping the Electrons Flowing (Wind Turbine Operation & Maintenance)

January 4, 2008

Keeping the Electrons Flowing

Project development usually gets the headlines, but it's O&M that makes wind power a reality.

by John Dunlop, AWEA

One of the most popular sections on AWEA's web site is the projects page, which contains an inventory of wind projects across the nation. It is visited frequently for very good reasons. The tally of new projects is the most tangible indication of the success that decades of legislative, policy and technical-development efforts have had in vaulting the wind industry to the status it holds today.

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But any of us who stop by the local Jiffy-Lube (or get out the mechanic's creeper in the garage) know that responsible maintenance of complex equipment is absolutely necessary to ensure the original investment remains worthwhile. Though new installations are a proxy for gaging industry progress, long-term productivity — and the operation and maintenance (O&M) functions needed to support that productivity — is vital to achieve the objective of producing clean, non-polluting electricity.

High-tech and robust

A wind turbine is arguably orders of magnitude more complex than the family car, given the state-of-the-art technology it uses to convert wind energy into usable electricity. Sophisticated aerodynamic blade designs efficiently convert the kinetic energy in the wind to mechanical energy via a slowly rotating shaft. From there, a complex gearbox increases the "quality" of that rotational energy and imparts it to a high-speed rotating shaft. The mechanical energy is then converted to electrical power through a specially-designed generator and, finally, the power converter "reforms" the electricity from the wind turbine into the high-quality power that is fed into the utility grid to power our homes.

In spite of that complexity, the wind turbine must perform those functions day in and day out. A wind turbine commonly is producing electricity up to 80% or 90% of the time. But what does that really mean? The analogy of a wind turbine being a combine that harvests the wind 80 meters up in the air often is used. That's a good analogy in many respects, except that a conventional combine only harvests crops when they are at the right stage of maturity. The farm crew keeps that combine operating day and night to catch the crop at the peak of perfection, a process that may continue for weeks. Still, in the end, the combine may log only 600 hours of operation per year.

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