WhalePower test confirms 20 per cent improvement in annualized energy production
I meant to report this earlier but got sidetracked. Toronto-based WhalePower, maker of the tubercle-lined turbine blades inspired by humpback whale flippers, got the results back from its first independent study in the field. The blade design was tested on a 25-kilowatt Wenvor Technologies turbine at the Wind Energy Institute of Canada. The institude found that annualized energy production from the retrofitted blade increased by an estimated 20 per cent. You can find the data here and analysis here. “Rated power was attained at 12.5 metres per second versus the 15 meters per second previously published performance for the unmodified Wenvor turbine. (Caveat: it’s an estimate because the test of the retrofitted blade followed International Electro-Technical Commission standards, while the benchmark data did not). “An improvement of just 1 or 2 per cent in AEP is significant,” said Stephen Dewar, WhalePower’s director of R&D. “Here we have about 20 per cent with low noise. We’re thrilled by this result.”
The next step, I imagine, is to perform a more comprehensive apples-to-apples test on a larger turbine. Hopefully these results will help the company raise the capital it needs to take its testing to the next level. Perhaps at some point it will begin catching the attention of some of the bigger wind-energy players.
Tags: WeiCan, Whalepower, wind
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and 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.
