Ireland energy authority studies VRB Power system
VRB Power’s sale last month of a flow battery system to Irish wind developer Tapbury Management Ltd. was a major coup for the company. The $6.3 million “Redox” system will provide 12 megawatt-hours of electricity storage for Tapbury’s wind farm, allowing it to “firm up” energy produced from the farm. Now, Tapbury and Sustainable Energy Ireland (a government authority in charge of sustainable energy development in Ireland) are jointly funding a study to “ascertain and quantify the full potential economic benefits of coupling Vanadium Redox Batteries with wind farms in Ireland.”
The study is expected to be completed by end of October, 2006 and will be used to determine the economic potential for battery storage operating in the forthcoming Single Electricity Market in Ireland. With over 3,000MW of wind energy in the application process in Ireland, there are estimates that there could be a need for in excess of 700MW of storage in Ireland to enable the successful roll out of its most abundant natural resource.
Positive results from this study could add further momentum to VRB’s business prospects in Ireland and throughout Europe. I’m surprise there’s not an Irish company called Shamrock Wind Power, given that the clover is green, has three leaves (a turbine has three blades) and it’s a symbol of the Irish. (I’ll be curious to see how long it takes from the time of this posting before someone reserves the Web domain “shamrockwind.com” — which is available, btw).
In other wind news, the International Herald Tribune republished this NYT article about homegrown Indian wind-turbine manufacturer Suzlon Energy, which dominates the wind market in India and is now the fifth-largest producer of wind turbines, recently surpassing Germany’s Siemens. The article does a good job of outlining opportunities in India and China for wind development. Interesting enough, I received several e-mails from investors in India after I wrote up my feature on VRB’s deal with Tapbury. They were all keen to speak with VRB about doing tests in India, so that could represent a huge opportunity for VRB down the line.
Tyler Hamilton is a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
September 30th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
It’s kinda sad that Indal, out in Mississauga, has a huge windmill laying on its side in the factory’s back yard with trees and such growing up between the blades. A relic of when the subsidies were pulled back at the end of the 70′s energy crisis. Indal is big in aluminum, which is what the 200 foot long extrusions that were the blades of this vertical axis wind-behemoth were made from, the metal supplied by Indal’s parent aluminum company in India (“Indal”=India+Aluminum) You can see pictures of one of these Canadian-made machines if you Google Images Cap Chat Windmill, it’s also seen on Paul Gipe’s site gallery. I think the largest was over 300 feet tall. A Canadian export to the world. Now Indal does military contracts, but of the “soft” variety, -not weapons systems. (The military loves aluminum.) I talked to guys there, and they said the engineers relished the project and would stay late to work on it. The day I was there a few years back they also happened to be cleaning out a storage room and throwing out the old trade-show display, so I got a cross section of one of the blades, but I dumbly let the rest of it get tossed. A professor just wrote a technical book (2005) about Vertical Axis machines, and the Indal is featured in that.