Technology is advanced

Andrew Halcrow believes that “Wind turbine technology is still very much in its infancy”. Propellers have been used in aircraft for the best part of a century and in reverse, so to speak, to generate power since the 1950’s (for example http://www.orkneywind.co.uk/costa.html) and probably earlier.

This is not a technology in its infancy. There is a wealth of knowledge that enables turbine blades to be produced that are very close to optimum in terms of performance.

There will not be a thousand percent improvement in performance in the next ten years, a few percent maybe. The amount of available power is determined by the area swept by the turbine blades and speed of the air (actually proportional to the cube of the air speed: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wind-power-d_1214.html) passing across that area and that fact isn’t going to be any different in ten years time.

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Clearly, it is advantageous to locate wind turbines where there is plenty of wind, since for each doubling of wind speed, the available power goes up by eight times.

Now is the time to be building wind turbines while Shetland has the ability to make an investment and will reap the rewards for many years to come.

Tony Erwood
Lunna
Shetland