Author: Francesco Miceli
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Type of towers – stiff, soft or soft soft?
In the last month I spent a lot of time discussing about “soft soft” towers. But what does it exactly means? Steel tower for wind turbine are classified as stiff, soft, or soft soft based on the relative natural frequencies of tower, rotor and blades. You obviously want to avoid that your tower is excited…
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Sell a service, not a product: the Indian way to wind energy
India is becoming a very big market for wind energy. After the decline of many European markets (Spain in primis) India is now fighting with Germany to be the third bigger nation in terms of yearly installed megawatts (somewhere around 3600 MW). You can see the other in the graphic above, that I’ve stolen from…
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Top 5 owners of wind turbines
Ever asked yourself who is buying wind turbines? There are quite a lot of customers profiles – from tiny companies (or even a couple of farmers joining their strengths and lands in a renewable energy project) to professional developers, factories interested in using the energy produced all the way up in the ladder to the…
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Most beautiful wind farm picture in 2017
The picture above is the winning entry for the Global Wind Day photo contest. It’s a wind farm in Greece (Agios Georgios, 73 MW: 9x V90-3.0 MW and 14x V112-3). Even if it’s not an EPC I had the pleasure of having a look at the project several years ago and yes, the topography was…
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Wind turbine towers – the bigger the better
It looks like the trend in the business is to go as high as possible. The places with the best wind conditions have been already used in the first 20 something years of the wind industry. Now it’s time to work with low wind sites – and probably, repower the older wind farms. I consider…
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Acronyms in wind farms construction
I’ve been informed by one of my most affectionate reader that some acronyms that I’m using in the blog are not immediately clear. Therefore I’ve started a first list of the most used ones – special thanks to Janos for helping expanding the list: AEP Annual energy production. BoP Balance of plant. All civil (roads,…
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Chinese wind turbines – are they coming?
Well, apparently the answer to this question is “not yet”. I’ve been through an interesting article from Bloomberg – the images of this post are taken from the same source. As you can see, in addition to a new reshuffle in the top 3 (Vestas up again, together with GE), there is another important piece…
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Wind site assessment
The wind site assessment (or “wind and site” assessment) is one of the most important steps in the development of a wind farm. Basically is a in depth analysis of the site conditions of the area where a wind farm could be built. Purpose of this assessment is calculate energy production and suitability of a…
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Land lease and site access: 5 usual mistakes
You would be surprised to discover the amount of problems that are generated by missing, uncomplete or wrongly defined land lease and site access agreement. Land lease contracts must be negotiated by the project company (that is, the developer of the wind farm) with the landowners. It’s extremely rare to have the whole wind farm…
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Split EPC contracts
As you probably will be aware of if you are reading this blog, an EPC is a typology of contract where a company agree to develop the engineering, procurement and construction of a facility (in this blog, a wind farm) for a fixed, “lump sum” amount. The key advantage of this type of contract is…