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Summary
My thesis analyses wind energy under different aspects, particularly I focused on
the culture and market of wind energy in France. In order to have a real basis for
analysis, I studied the case of Nordex France S.a.s., a company that produces wind
turbines and installs wind parks. The most inspiring part for me was that it had a
specific office dedicated to communicational and educational matters. This office
has been in effect for more than 3 years, as an organised structure, in which has
policies that focuses on bringing awareness about wind energy. Nordex France
communications concentrates on the following tasks:
1) the inauguration of wind parks;
2) pedagogical visits of parks;
3) fair trade stands;
4) the opening of the site of Nordex France.
After the construction of each park, an inauguration takes place. It is an enormous
event (about six months are necessary to organise each inauguration), with the
purpose of providing accurate information on wind power. The inauguration has a
fundamental importance since in that moment there is the active exchange with
Nordex (through many Nordex s employees) and the community, which ask many
questions about the park, including wind energy, turbine functionality, and
avoided pollution thanks to the use of wind power.
In fact, Nordex strongly believes that the understanding and acceptation of wind
power to the general public is an investment in creating peace between wind
turbines and anti-wind citizens.
The communications office of Nordex France also organises the parks visits for
various audiences: for school pupils, chiefs of companies (that are generally
oriented to invest in wind energy), administration department of the Tower House.
Another peculiarity of this company is Windmoney, a tool for financing the wind
project. Inserting the relevant data in this program, permits it to have a business
plan with various provisional information, which is always requested from the
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invertors, the banks and the other stakeholders that take part in the investment. I
examined Windmoney of France, afterwards, I started with the analysis of
Windmoney for the United States (in fact, Nordex is strongly oriented to operate
in this market). This second analysis took tremendous effort because of the US
market complexity: there are fifty states and as many wind energy laws and
territory incentives, there are double taxation laws (national and federal taxes) and
there are two markets for green certificates (voluntary and compliance markets).
Even though France is not the leading country in the European classification for
wind power installation, it shows continuous growth each year. Moreover, it
provided me a good opportunity to study in depth a corporate case and to
experience a country where wind energy shows favourable consideration.
Writing this thesis was an extraordinary experience for me, since it permitted me
to plug into a new reality where I could use my previous skills while improving
my professional and linguistic knowledge.
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Chapter 1
Wind energy
1.1 What is wind energy
Today the energy sources used to create electricity differ in many ways, including
in their environmental impact. Worldwide, conventional source of energy means
generating electricity by using fossil or nuclear fuels forms of power generation
that impact health and the environment through air emissions and other effects.
Electricity markets are changing, however, offering clean ways of producing
power while giving consumers the possibility of choosing how their power is
generated. One of these choices is power from renewable sources that is marketed
as green power. In fact, this kind of power is not involved into greenhouse
emissions, therefore their impact on the environment is extremely lower than
conventional energy sources.
One of these renewable sources, and the one that will be studied in detail in this
analysis, is the energy of wind, or better the power captured from wind.
Wind power is attractive because it is a widely available and renewable source of
energy that produces neither pollution nor climate-changing greenhouse gases.
Once the turbines have been installed, the only fuel need is wind. And global
wind resources are so vast that they could easily meet the world s current energy
needs, at least in theory. In fact, to combat climate change, the European Union
has set itself the goal of deriving 20% of its energy from renewable sources by
2020, with a large portion coming from wind power. In America, a recent report
by the Department of Energy laid out a plan to reach 20% wind power by 2030.
And these ambitions may be dwarfed by Asia, which seems likely to become the
biggest market for new wind installations within five years.
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Wind is a form of solar energy, in which when sunlight heats the Earth, it also
heats the atmosphere. As hot air rises, cooler, heavier air rushes in to fill its
place thus creating wind. For more than 2000 years people have captured this
energy with windmills and used it to do useful things, such as grind grain or pump
water. By the late 19th century, windmills were also being used to produce
electricity. Compared with traditional windmills, however, modern wind turbines
are far more efficient.
1.2 The progress of wind energy
Modern wind power got started after the first oil crisis in 1973, when countries
began to look for ways to generate energy from sources other than fossil fuels.
Denmark, which was almost entirely dependent on foreign oil for its electricity,
was hit particularly hard. But it had one abundant potential energy resource: wind.
So, in the mid-1970s, the country embarked upon an ambitious research project to
develop the technology.
America also began research on wind turbines. With funding from the government,
large organizations such as Boeing, an aerospace giant, and NASA, America s
space agency, began designing large, multi-megawatt machines. The researches
were and are still focused on large size turbines, since bigger machines with larger
rotors sweep a larger area and they can also collect more energy from the wind.
Entrepreneurs and start-ups also began tinkering with designs that appeared on the
American market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those machines were much
smaller, and there were a wide variety of them, including models with two-bladed
rotors spinning about a horizontal axis, and vertical-axis machines. The Danes
also experimented with different designs, but by the early 1980s a standard
Danish architecture had emerged: the three-bladed, horizontal-axis, upwind
machine.
Two-bladed rotors had some disadvantages. Because they are not as dynamically
balanced as three-bladed rotors, they are harder to design. They also typically spin
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faster to extract a similar amount of energy as three-bladed designs, which makes
them noisier. And people prefer the look of three-bladed rotors.
In the early days, wind turbines operated only at fixed speeds. If the wind became
too strong, a simple mechanism prevented the blades and rotor from turning any
faster. A limitation of this design was that the rotor had to be able to cope with
wind fluctuations without being able to adjust its speed, putting enormous stresses
on the blades and drive train. And to start with, knowledge about the impact of
gusts on turbines were limited. To cope with the uncertainty, Danish engineers
designed turbines conservatively, making them very heavy for their size.
Over the years, however, scientists at Denmark s Risł National Laboratory and
other research institutions conducted tests which helped them develop
mathematical models that could predict how the components would be affected by
stretching, bending and vibration. This enabled engineers to optimize the
machines and reduce their weight. By the late 1980s components started to
become much lighter, allowing companies to scale up their turbines while keeping
weight gain to a minimum.
Around the same time, researchers also started developing ways to manage and
reduce the effect of gusts. Turbines equipped with variable pitch could adjust
the angle of their blades and limit the force with which the wind was able to act
on the rotor and the drive train, reducing wear and tear. This system worked even
better in conjunction with variable-speed turbines, which were developed in the
early 1990s. Such machines operate at high efficiency over a wider range of wind
speeds, converting more of the wind s kinetic energy into electricity and allowing
the rotor to adjust its speed to that of the wind, thus further reducing the impact of
gusts on turbine structures.
All these advances have allowed manufacturers to produce ever-larger machines
and to build turbines with longer blades for a given output rating. This has several
benefits. Since longer blades sweep a larger area and capture more energy from
the wind, the turbine produces its rated amount of power at lower wind speeds,
and will therefore run at its rated power a higher percentage of the time. And
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because the drive train does not have to be scaled up, the turbine generates more
energy for a given cost.
Today s machines extract around 50% of the kinetic energy in the wind close to
the theoretical limit of 59%.
1.3 The functioning of wind turbine
The terms wind energy or wind power describe the process by which the wind is
used to generate mechanical power or electricity. Wind turbines convert a portion
of the wind s kinetic energy into electricity.
Table 1.1 shows the various parts of the turbine, in particular the nacelle, that is
the mechanical heart of wind turbine.
Table 1.1 Inside a wind turbine
Source: www.nordex-online.com
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