Wind Energy News

Engineers have designed and tested a concept for concrete towers to replace the steel towers used for wind turbines. The concrete towers could be a practical way to raise turbine towers from today's 80 meters to the better winds at 100 meters or higher.

A group of scientists aims to store electricity at the bottom of the sea. The energy will be stored with the help of high water pressure.

Researchers have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.

Researchers have produced a prototype of a self-cooling thermoelectric device that achieves “free” cooling of over 30ºC in devices that give off heat. It is a piece of equipment that acts as a traditional cooler but which consumes no electricity because it obtains the energy it needs to function from the very heat that has to be dissipated.

Thrusters powered by ionic wind may be an efficient alternative to conventional atmospheric propulsion technologies. When a current passes between two electrodes -- one thinner than the other -- it creates a wind in the air between. If enough voltage is applied, the resulting wind can produce a thrust without the help of motors or fuel. Researchers have now found that ionic thrusters may be a far more efficient source of propulsion than conventional jet engines.

Researchers have developed a ground-breaking way to make new affordable and efficient catalysts for converting electricity into chemical energy. Their technology opens the door to homeowners and energy companies being able to easily store and reuse solar and wind power. Such energy is clean and renewable, but it's available only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Incorporating wind power into existing power grids is challenging because fluctuating wind speed and direction means turbines generate power inconsistently. Coupled with customers' varying power demand, many wind-farm managers end up wasting power-generation capacity and limiting the service life of turbines through active control -- including fully stopping turbines -- in order to avoid any possible damage to the power grid from spikes in supply. In a new paper, researchers propose a new strategy to optimize power-generation efficiency and so better control wind farms.

More and more electricity is being generated from intermittent sources of power, such as solar and wind energy. Powerful electric energy storage devices are necessary to level out corresponding irregularities in the power supply. Scientists have recently made an important breakthrough with the development of a redox flow battery that reaches stack power up to 25 kW, with a cell size of 0.5 square meters. This is eight times larger than the previous A4-sized systems.

A new study outlines a path to statewide renewable energy conversion, and away from natural gas and imported fuel.

Medium-sized waves can break wind turbines at sea like matches. These waves occur even in small storms, which are quite common in the Norwegian Sea.

“People have often thought there’s no upper bound for wind power—that it’s one of the most scalable power sources,” says an applied physicist. After all, gusts and breezes don’t seem likely to “run out” on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry.

During a chance encounter with what appears to be an unusually strong blast of solar wind at Saturn, NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected particles being accelerated to ultra-high energies. This is similar to the acceleration that takes place around distant supernovas.

Scientists are testing the complex control system of wind turbines under real conditions in the laboratory before they are built into offshore wind energy plants. This way, software and hardware faults can be found and eliminated before the costly installation of the turbine.

A new approach is available for real-time monitoring of the structural health of wind turbine components during exposure to turbulence.