What Will It Take for U.S. Wind Energy to Take Off?

In the mid-1990s, we had many, many problems with gearboxes in windmills. It's not like a gearbox in a car, either stick shift or an automatic. A gearbox in a wind turbine has a fixed ratio, typically around 1:100, and it changes the low speed of the rotor shaft to the high speed of the generator shaft. It's a complicated piece of equipment. I got pretty frustrated about it back in the late '90s. The radical solution if you have a problem with a component is to just not have that component. The way to do that is to say to the assertion in the engineering process, "You need to do it this way," and in turn you ask, "Why?"

Having asked this question and decided to act, we did it a proper way. We tested equipment, put out prototypes, and so on. All of that led to the development of the direct wind turbine. We have made a quantum leap in terms of simplicity.

Modern wind turbines have rotors that are 100 meters [328 feet] or more in diameter. Our offshore bestseller has a 120-meter [394-foot] rotor. Such a big machine has a gearbox weighing 35 metric tons, containing 13 gear wheels and 22 bearings. The direct-drive machine, which we use for even bigger turbines, has a 154-meter (505-foot) rotor with blades of 250 feet. This gearless turbine has zero gear wheels and one bearing. By this simplification, you get a lot of benefit. You simply reduce the risk of anything going wrong.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/solar-wind/what-will-it-take-for-us-wind-energy-to-take-off-15657606?src=rss

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