Project produces budget vertical windmill design

An Empire Magnetics product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 15, 2002

Empire Magnetics is working on a project to design and manufacture low-maintenance wind power systems.

Empire Magnetics has partnered with the State Rocket Centre, Makeyev Design Bureau in Miass, Russia, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, to design and manufacture low-maintenance wind power systems.

These small (3-70kW) wind power systems use a novel vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) design.

VAWT offers a number of advantages over conventional horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), such as lower maintenance costs and increased durability and reliability.

VAWT systems are also more economically viable in remote locations than 100kW+ HAWT systems.

Empire Magnetics will be engineering the alternators for these windmills.

This Windmill programme recently received formal approval from the US Department of Energy, and is currently in the early stages of development.

Rich McClellan, PhD, CEO of Wind-Sail, is taking the lead in developing this business.

"New market opportunities are emerging around the world for inexpensive, small-scale power stations.

In many locations a modern wind farm or single HAWT capable of generating hundreds of kilowatts is no more appropriate than would be a coal or natural gas-fired power plant.

In Russia, India, China and numerous remote locations in the developed and developing world, the expense of fossil fuel based power makes renewable energy sources and, specifically, wind power an extremely attractive alternative", says Dr McClellan.

The multi-billion-dollar wind power industry is the world's fastest growing energy source and is growing in popularity in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and to generate cost-effective electricity in remote locations.

According to the European and American Wind Energy Associations', wind power has grown at an average of 30% over each of the past five years, with a total of 6500MW added to the grid worldwide in 2001 alone.

These windmills are being proposed as power sources in the effort to help rebuild Afghanistan.

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