By John DeFore

Americans who’ve seen Pedro Almodóvar’s celebrated film Volver may not be surprised to hear that, on some days, Spain gets a third of its energy from wind power: A number of that film’s scenes feature star Penélope Cruz driving through vast fields of white turbines driven by an East wind that plays a crucial part in the story.

Now a researcher at Spain’s Public University of Navarre has patented two new approaches to a problem plaguing wind generators: voltage dips.

As a news release here puts it, the kind of temporary power disruptions that can cause your living room lights to flicker can do a lot more to the mechanisms in a wind turbine. “In fact,” it says, “an interruption of half a second in a productive process can cause the whole process to block and it may have to be reinitiated.” For wind generators, “the electronic part of the unit can burn out or otherwise be destroyed, unless a protection system is installed.”

Existing protection systems, though, can simply cause the machine to stop working instead of being destroyed.

Navarre PhD student Jesús López Taberna has proposed two alternatives, one of which has already been adopted by a manufacturer who is commercializing it.

“The most important thing,” López says, “is that we have achieved solutions that enhance the behaviour of the machine without any need to change anything, except the control. It’s like changing the version of a text treatment programme on the computer, without needing to change the PC.

“There are a number of computers inside a wind energy converter and one of these – that which controls the electrical machinery – is the one the control of which we have proposed to modify in order to enhance the behaviour of the machine.”

This development could have widespread implications, because the voltage dips and how they affect wind turbines have slowed the adoption of wind power in some locales worried both the seamless flow of energy and wind’s ability to connect to the power grid.

In Spain, on some days, fully one-third of the country’s power comes from wind generators, according to the Navarre release.

(Photo of turbines courtesy of Vestas Wind Systems A/S; photo of Taberna courtesy of Public University of Navarre)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media