Endurance Wind Power Blog

Endurance Wind Turbine Design Capitalizes on Low and High Winds

Thursday, December 6, 2007

At the Endurance Test Facility in Spanish Fork, the Endurance S-250 set new records for power production over the last 24 hours. The two Endurance S-250 wind turbines produced nearly 200kWh of electricity. The previous record was set by one of our customers in Iowa, Jeff Matt, who had a record production of 89kWh in a single 24-hour period for a single turbine.

The Endurance design makes this tremendous power production possible for the following reasons:

1. Because our power curve comes up and flattens out (stall control) at the higher wind speeds, we continue to generate near rated power even during very windy periods. All other small wind turbines are furling turbines and will have a power curve that drops drastically at the higher wind speeds (you will see this when you look at power curves that are published), making these other small wind turbines unable to capitalize on really windy periods. They also tend to get pushed to fully furled in a gust but then will stay fully furled even as the wind drops.

2. Often, rated power (for other small wind turbines) represents some type of peak or instantaneous value, and it will never equate out to energy. If you use our rated power range of 4.5-5kW and multiply by 24 hours you can see that theoretically we could do 108 kWh/day. The fact that we did 100 kWh/day represents that the 4.5-5kW rating is real.

3. The Endurance wind turbine produces grid compatible energy right at the turbine and we are not converting DC generated energy to AC. Therefore, when we note 100 kWh, this is recorded for actual numbers back-fed onto the utility meter not off the turbine. Other small wind turbines produce DC energy and have a permanent magnet generator that needs an inverter to convert the DC energy to AC for the grid. This conversion process will reduce actual grid compatible energy anywhere from 15-25%.

4. As rare as it might be in our Spanish Fork test site location for the wind to persist all day, for our customers in the Midwestern states that have continuous winds all day, especially during storm seasons, these customers should expect to see big production days like this.

So how windy was it? The average wind speed was 14.6m/s (33 mph) with a peak wind speed of 24m/s (54 mph).

© 2008, Endurance Windpower.
www.endurancewindpowerinc.com

Endurance Wind Turbine Design Capitalizes on Low and High Winds
Posted by Endurance Windpower on Thursday, December 06, 2007

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