Wind Power -- a European Success Story

As we saw in the last installment on wind power, wind turbines are neither dangerous for birds, nor is wind power more expensive than the fossil competition. However, there remain two common bones of contention, both of which we can disprove: Wind turbines are said to be loud and ugly.

Ever stood under a modern wind turbine turning full-blast? You may not be able to hear it, if the leaves in nearby trees are rustling. Several advances were made around 1990 to make wind turbines quieter. First, the rotor blades were slowed down, for the tips of the rotor blades are one of the main sources of noise. This did not, however, mean that less power was generated. More power is generally generated at lower speeds when 3 rotor blades rather than only 2 are used, but the major advance came when rotor blades were developed with adjustable pitch. Rotor blades can now be turned into and out of the wind, allowing for more optimal rotor speeds at various wind velocities -- hence greater power gains.

Another major breakthrough came in 1992 from Germany. Enercon developed a gearless wind turbine that was more robust, powerful and quiet than anything before, the E-40. Noise and energy losses from gears were now a thing of the past. And the industry was increasingly centered in Europe.

Today, you can’t hear a modern wind turbine near a street over the noise from the traffic -- and that has been the case for many years, as the web site of the Danish Wind Industry Association explains:

"A survey on research and development priorities of Danish wind turbine manufacturers conducted in 1995, however, showed that no manufacturer considered mechanical noise as a problem any longer, and therefore no further research in the area was considered necessary. The reason was, that within three years noise emissions had dropped to half their previous level due to better engineering practices."

Still, some people claim to be disturbed by an inaudibly deep droning said to emanate from wind turbines. In addition, the flickering shade caused by the rotating blades is another reason why wind turbines should not be erected where they would cast shadows on buildings. But modern wind turbines are so quiet that in densely populated countries like the Netherlands -- where on-shore space for wind turbines is dwindling -- new ways of integrating small wind turbines and architecture are being sought.

This is how researcher Sander Mertens of the Technical University of Delft (NL) envisions a university building with wind turbines on the roof. These vertical-axis "Darrieus" wind turbines turn irrespective of the direction of the wind.

Don’t expect to see any 60 meter tall wind turbines in the grachten of Amsterdam, but don’t be surprised either if you soon see smaller models popping up on the roofs of the town -- and producing more electricity over the year than the residents of the house consume. Indeed, discussions about such building-integrated systems are by no means limited to the Netherlands. Researchers from the University of Stuttgart in Germany and the British Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are designing buildings that concentrate the wind for the turbines. The first experiment models have already been built.

Esthetic and political decisions

The decision about whether wind power will make its way into urban centers will largely depend on how people react to the idea. And as the saying goes, there is no arguing about taste. Having said that, it is not at all clear that very many people find wind turbines unattractive. Quite the contrary, wherever one goes all over the world most people clearly seem to find wind turbines attractive: from Australia, where the turbine on the island of Rottnest could become a tourist attraction, to North America, where a recent study found that wind turbines do not have a negative impact on the value of nearby residential property (unlike high-voltage power pylons), to Europe, where various studies have shown that around 80 percent of those surveyed do not display an NIMBY attitude to planned wind farms, but openly welcome them. Even in the USA, a clear majority want to get their energy from renewable sources, as a survey conducted in February of 2003 in Colorado showed: A full 82 percent named some type of renewable energy first when asked how they wanted to have their power generated, with wind power being the most popular at 37 percent.