Exploring revenue-driven wind turbine design

Traditionally, wind turbine and wind farm designs have been optimized to minimize the cost of energy. Such a design would make sense when bidding in price-based auctions. However, in a future with a high share of renewables and zero subsidies, the wind farm developer could be completely exposed to the volatility of market prices, where the price...

Multidisciplinary design optimization of large wind turbines: Technical, economic, and design challenges

Wind energy has experienced a continuous cost reduction in the last decades. A popular cost reduction technique is to increase the rated power of the wind turbine by making it larger. However, it is not clear whether further upscaling of the existing wind turbines beyond the 5–7MW range is technically feasible and economically attractive. To...

Great expectations for offshore wind turbines: Emulation of wind farm design to anticipate their value for customers

To date, the technical feasibility of making electricity from offshore wind energy has been convincingly proven. However, the current challenge is to reduce the costs of this form of energy. One of the aspects playing a role in cost reduction is the optimisation of the wind turbine. The wind turbine influences the costs of various elements of an...