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.”







