Wind power is the future

IET organized a wonderful visit to the Puttalam wind power plant last Saturday. It was really interesting because of the clean power it produces and the how less it affects the environment. The wind power generating units are made in Spain by a leading company called Gamesa. Due to economies of scale the Sri Lankan investors couldn’t go for plants higher than 60 meters. Therefore they purchased the smallest units produced by Gamesa where each unit generates 800kW. Due to government regulations one private power producer (PPP) can only produce 10 MW. Therefore the same investors formed two companies where each company owned 10MW and the total generation capacity became 20MW.

These units are of the second latest technology. The wind turbine adjusts its pitch and direction for maximum wind thrust. The wind turbine is geared to a synchronous generator. The AC produced is rectified into DC and then inverted to form a clean 50Hz AC power through semiconductor power electronics. The gear system naturally wastes a lot of energy. The latest technology is to have the wind turbine directly coupled to a low speed (higher number of poles) synchronous generator.

The wind turbines only extract 50% of the energy in the wind. Hence the impact to the climate is less than negligible. According to statistics only 1 bird hits a wind turbine each year in the US.

A Canadian consultant whom we met at the site told us that wind power is the future for Sri Lanka. He was very passionate about wind power plants. He also added that there are many sites with a high wind potential in Sri Lanka and investors are willing to go for this technology, but CEB is only allocating 15% of the installed capacity for non conventional plants. That is because of the low reliability of these power plants. US have a 25% wind power installed capacity, but it has spinning reserves in case the wind stops blowing. Sri Lanka doesn’t have that financial strength to entertain spinning reserves. Therefore we burn fuel instead.