Elektrit saab tasuta

Tapping into clean power from the wind
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By Mícheál Ó Coileáin Kerry County Council Environmental Awareness Officer


Wednesday August 26 2009

DOMESTIC wind turbines have recently been tested in the UK by The Energy Saving Trust, which has conducted the most comprehensive technical monitoring of domestic small-scale wind turbines undertaken to date in the UK. The trial was launched in January 2007 to monitor the in-situ performance of 57 turbines installed at UK homes for a period of at least 12 months.

The findings illustrate that turbine performance is highly dependent on local wind conditions so it is vital to accurately predict the wind speed before installing a domestic small-scale turbine. The report also discusses the technical factors that impact on the performance of domestic smallscale wind turbines, including installation and proper siting.

Some interesting findings of the report include:

Wind turbines do work but only when installed properly in an appropriate location.

There is the potential for delivering nearly 2 million tonnes of CO2 savings from domestic small scale wind turbines in the UK. This is equivalent to the annual emissions of approximately 350,000 homes.

There is a potential to generate up to 3,500GWh electricity per annum from domestic small-scale wind turbines in the UK.

Wind speeds are difficult to predict and highly variable. They recommend that potential customers first utilise the best available wind speed estimation tools and then, where appropriate, install anemometry to determine the wind speed distribution.

The introduction of product and installation standards will require that information from specific products is easily comparable.

Domestic consumers should consider energy produced from smallscale wind as one option from a potential suite of microgeneration technologies.

CLEANING UP IN CHERNOBYL

The government of Belarus and Ireland's Greenfield are teaming up to investigate the possibility of growing bioethanol feedstock on contaminated land near the former nuclear plant at Chernobyl.

State company Beliopharm and Greenfield are planning what they claim could be one of the biggest bioethanol plants in Europe, fed with crops grown on land which is still too contaminated for growing food crops. The plant at Mozyr could have a total capacity of 650 million litres of ethanol a year and may be built in one or two phases depending on economic conditions.

Belarus Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov said, "We consider ethanol to be one of the most promising and sustainable sources of cheap and nature-friendly energy and we have several advantages for its production here.

"Firstly, Belarus' agriculture can easily supply the necessary volume of biomass for ethanol production. Then, Belarus is probably the only country in Europe with vast territories which can be used for biomass production — the lands affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe 21 years ago. We can link the economic rehabilitation of these lands to agricultural production of biomass for the energy sector."

Greenfield Project Management's website says that the plan is to grow crops for biomass to turn into sustainable green energy. This will involve using lands that are not currently or directly used to produce food in order to produce the biomass required for ethanol production. Greenfield chairwoman Ann McClain said: "Greenfield's plan to produce bio-ethanol will use land which has been contaminated by radioactive isotopes to cultivate biomass crops for the ethanol distilleries. At the same time, we believe that growing the biomass crops will work to clean up the affected areas. At a later stage, when we move on to second-generation cellulose ethanol, there will be even greater advantages which will mean faster bio-cleaning of the contaminated zones."

- Mícheál Ó Coileáin Kerry County Council Environmental Awareness Officer