Vestas
Vestas: Wind Power Grows Up Vestas is the world leader in wind technology and a driving force in the development of the wind power industry. Since 1979, Vestas has installed wind turbines in more than 40 countries all over the world.
What once was just a vision is now fast becoming a reality: Wind farms that can be managed just like any other conventional power plant – with grid stability regardless of how the wind blows. One of the big arguments against wind farms has always been the unreliability of wind energy. In simple terms, people said wind just was not stable enough. And if you cannot store it, who would want their electricity supply to depend on the wind? But new technology is quickly changing our idea of the feasibility and reliability of wind power. Just five short years ago, wind turbines had to be disconnected from the grid as soon as even minor variations in power quality arose. Today, the opposite is true. A modern Vestas wind turbine, for example, is designed to simply ride through a fault situation even if a grid is short-circuited or hit by lightning. In fact, the turbines have become so advanced that not only do they stay connected to the grid during a short grid fault situation, but they can actually help maintain the stability of the power quality of the overall transmission grid, something that was unheard of just a few short years ago.
Horns Rev: A Groundbreaking Offshore Wind Farm The recently completed Horns Rev wind farm off the coast of Denmark is a good example of the major advances that are occurring in wind turbine technology. The 160-megawatt wind farm – with its 80 Vestas V80-2.0megawatt wind turbines – represents a real breakthrough in wind technology and offshore wind energy projects. Not only is it the world’s biggest offshore wind farm to date, but the new online management and monitoring system – the VestasOnline™ SCADA system – makes the wind farm efficient and intelligent enough to be called a genuine power plant.
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According to Elsam, the Danish electricity company that owns and operates the offshore wind farm at Horns Rev, the yearly production of the wind farm is expected to be 600 million kilowatt-hours, or 2 percent of the Danish national electricity consumption. When such high levels of wind power are integrated into the electrical grid, the requirements to a wind farm are that it must be operated and regulated just like any other power plant. Among other things, Elsam requires that the turbines are able to regulate their energy output according to the requirements of the
Vestas engineer and product manager Søren Plagborg explains: “With wind farms of this size – in the multi-megawatt category – it is absolutely necessary to achieve the highest level of integration between the transmission network and the management of the turbines. To achieve this objective, two things are crucial: The turbines must all the time be aware of the power quality of the grid, and the grid operators must, on a real-time basis, be aware of how much production capacity there is available
Turbines have become so advanced that not only do they stay connected to the grid during a short grid fault situation, but they can actually help maintain the stability of the power quality of the overall transmission grid. grid. No longer are turbines shut down if there is a fault in the grid. Instead, the turbines at Horns Rev are so sophisticated that they can regulate their output depending on the actual requirements of the grid – and in fact help the grid get back on its feet once a fault has been cleared. These advances in wind turbine technology will help stabilize the grid in emergencies or in other special situations.
VestasOnline SCADA System for Managing Wind Power Plants To deliver such stable power to the grid, Vestas has invested a great deal of time and resources in recent years developing a new electronic management and monitoring system that makes it possible to integrate wind power into an electrical grid and manage megawatt wind power plants in a typical range of 30 to 300 megawatts. The new advanced remote control system is called VestasOnline™ and was launched with the installation of the 80 Vestas V80-2.0-megawatt turbines at the Horns Rev wind farm at the end of 2002. These turbines are the first in the world to be monitored by such an advanced wind energy management system.
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from the wind farm. With VestasOnline, this information is available, and the necessary high level of integration can be achieved.” In situations where the transmission network’s voltage and frequency limits are being exceeded, the new monitoring system will immediately adjust the wind farm’s MVA (Mega Volt Ampere) output. In this way, the network is optimally used because the energy transmission continues without interruption, and the power on the grid is stabilized. Consequently, the system will enable future wind farms to be managed exactly like any other conventional power block controller – even though the energy source (wind speed) is an uncontrollable and varying unit.
One Integrated System The new monitoring system is also a great advance over previous monitoring and control systems because it gathers all the various monitoring functions of previous systems into one new unified system. VestasOnline processes enormous amounts of data and transforms it into the information that wind farm managers in
modern wind power plants need to ensure that the power output of wind farms can be integrated into a larger electrical network. Plagborg adds: “With management systems like this emerging, I believe we will be seeing multi-wind farm systems in the future with wind farm managers regulating larger areas according to the changing wind conditions in whole regions. With VestasOnline, for example, it is now possible to regulate and manage remote production facilities from a centralized regional or national office.” (Please note that some of the above mentioned features are not currently available in all markets.)
The installation of the wind farm at Horns Rev was a real challenge. Among other things, the extreme height of the waves in the North Sea made the design of the site very difficult, especially when it comes to servicing the turbines once they are installed. Downtime for a two-megawatt wind turbine is very expensive! So service access was a crucial parameter in the design of the wind farm. To meet this challenge, all turbines are equipped with special helipads mounted on top of the turbine nacelles. These platforms make it possible to lower technicians down to the turbines from a helicopter (and hoist them up again) if it is not possible to access a turbine from the water due to high seas.
The Energy of the Future Facts About the Horns Rev Wind Farm The offshore Horns Rev wind farm is located in the Nor th Sea, 14 kilometers off the west coast of Denmark. The wind farm covers an area of 20 square kilometers. The seabed in the area is an average of 6 to 13 meters deep, and the turbines are placed 560 meters from each other to optimize park efficiency. Since the wind farm is 14 kilometers from the coast, it can be seen on clear days, but when the weather is hazy or cloudy, it is almost impossible to see.
Thanks to the great leaps forward in wind technology, wind power is now positioned to be a significant source of energy in the future – for many reasons. First and foremost because the world needs more clean, renewable, and competitive sources of energy. Wind energy is all of this, and the supply is both inexhaustible and free. In addition, wind turbines can be installed quickly and easily wherever they are needed. Finally, the increased efficiency of wind power is making it a viable and cost competitive alternative to fossil fuels. ■
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www.vestas.com
CONTACT INFORMATION Svend Sigaard Chief Executive Officer Jens Anders Jensen Director of Sales and Marketing Mogens Filtenborg Director of Operations Søren Vedel Director of Finance
Vestas Wind Systems A/S Smed Sørensens Vej 5 DK-6950 Ringkøbing Denmark Phone +45.96.75.25.75 Fax +45.97.30.24.36
[email protected] BUSINESS CONTACT
Thorbjørn Rasmussen Group Sales and Marketing Manager
[email protected] Phone +45.97.30.28.30
Figure 1
The Horns Rev wind farm off the west coast of Denmark
Courtesy of Vestas Wind Systems A/S
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