The year 2008 was another record year for new installations, capacity surging by 27GW (+28.8%) to reach 121 GW globally and the US passed Germany to become the number one market. The top 10 countries stand for 86%+ of total installed capacity with the USA, Germany and Spain in the lead. The USA, China and India are top in new installation countries in the year 2008 and are expected to stay the main players.
Both China and India have an industrial policy geared to conquering the wind turbine market. China alone has got 48 companies that develop and produce wind turbines.
The UK has finally made up its mind and has started massive investments in off-shore wind turbines, which are seen as the future of the industry.
The global wind turbine industry is a € 20 billion industry with an average annual growth rate of more than 20 percent over the period of 2002 to 2008 and annual growth of 41 percent in 2005 and 32 percent in 2006.
The main advantage of wind power is that it produces renewable electricity with zero pollution. On the other hand, disadvantages include the intermittent production of electricity, the fact that some regions do not have enough wind to make a wind turbine economical and that technology improvements still need to be made to drive costs of wind power even lower to parity with fossil fuels.
The average size of a wind turbine installed increased moderately to 1.8 MW in 2009, the largest turbines commercially available in the market range between 5 and 6 MW capacities.
Wind Power
PCR-Energy Ltd can also help clients design their new wind energy turbines to face the challenges of the industry such as intermittent power.
The availability of electricity depends on wind speed. If speed is too low, then the turbines will not turn.
If the speed is too high it can cause damage to turbines and these will have to be turned off.
Phoenix can help by designing storage systems such as new state–of-the-art batteries or braking systems operating at less than full capacity.
Wind turbines depend on wind speed; therefore they operate 65 to 80 percent of time and operate at full capacity only 10 percent of time.
Phoenix can help by designing optimised operation strategies.