New editions of IEC 61400-2, RenewableUK, and MCS 006 small wind turbine standards

The IEC 61400-2 edition 3 small wind turbine standard is now available. Right now it is available as a prerelease (FDIS) on the IEC webstore (see here ) . If you purchase and download it they will send you the formal publication in due course, as an IS. This is expected in December 2013 or January 2014. Because it is available for purchase from IEC it can now be used by Certification Bodies. This brings to an end a 5-year effort by the members of the MT2 committee that wrote this 3rd edition - thanks everyone.

Following on from this RenewableUK have issued an update to the RenewableUK small wind turbine standard, dated 1 October 2013. This replaces the older BWEA small wind standard (in the last few years BWEA has done a name change to RUK) and because a lot of the content has been sucked into the IEC standard the RUK one has reduced from 20 pages to 5 pages. See here or here. Thanks to everyone in the RUK smallwind tech cte who worked on this.

Following on from this MCS have issued an update to the MCS 006 small wind turbine product standard, as revision 2.0. See here. Again thanks to everyone in the MCS small wind working group WG3a who worked on this.

The main changes in the IEC standard are:

• the title has been modified to better reflect the scope;
• restructured into part I (design evaluation) and part II (type testing) to harmonise use with IEC 61400-22 conformity testing and certification;
• caution provided regarding the use of simplified equations;
• added annex on other wind conditions;
• added annex on tropical storms;
• added annex on extreme environmental conditions;
• added annex on EMC testing;
• added annex on dynamic behaviour;
• duration testing requirements modified;
• added annex on standardised format consumer label;
• many minor changes and all known errata corrected.

The main changes in the RUK standard are:

• Errata will be fixed in a Jan 2014 release
• Foundation documents
• IEC 61400-2 ed 3
• Compliance with all sections of IEC 61400-2
• Except Section 9 (electrical) not required
• And Annex A (variants) made normative (i.e. mandatory)
• And Annex M (consumer label) made normative (i.e. mandatory)
• Note emphasised by repetition in RUK
• In accordance with Section 1 of IEC 61400-2 ed3, “Any of the requirements of this standard may be altered if it can be suitably demonstrated that the safety of the turbine system is not compromised”.
• Ongoing obligations
• During and after turbine certification the manufacturer is required to notify the accredited certifying body of all significant changes to the product, including hardware and software. The accredited certifying body will determine whether there is a need for retesting and/or additional review.
• This requirement to notify the certifying body is intended to be interpreted broadly and in a co-operative manner by both manufacturer and certification body such that any relevant information regarding the in-service performance of the wind turbine system and any of its variants is analysed and the design, manufacture, installation, operation, or maintenance varied accordingly in accordance with the underlying purpose of this standard. This requirement includes significant incidents or failures of which the manufacturer is aware.
• This requirement is to be fulfilled in a timely manner and to include all credible sources of information. Procedures can be agreed between the certification body and the manufacturer such that information is managed in a proportionate manner.

The main changes in the MCS standard are:

• Errata will be fixed in a Jan 2014 release

• Foundation documents
• IEC 61400-2 ed 3 and RUK 2013
• Sunset & sunrise clause
• Available for use from 1 Oct 2013
• New products must use from 1 October 2016 (sunrise)
• Old products must use from 1 October 2018 (sunset)
• Scope
• This scheme provides ongoing independent, third party assessment and approval of companies who wish to demonstrate that their small wind turbines with rated electrical power outputs up to 50 kW (measured at a wind speed of 11.0 m/s) and:
• with a rotor swept area smaller than or equal to 200m2 meet and continue to meet the requirements of the RenewableUK Small Wind Turbine Standard (01 October 2013); or,
• meet and continue to meet the requirements of the most recent edition of IEC 61400-1 Wind Turbines – Design Requirements and selected requirements of the RenewableUK Small Wind Turbine Standard (01 October 2013).
• Maintenance of certification
• Certificates and listing are maintained and held in force subject to satisfactory completion of the following requirements for maintenance of certification:
• 8.2.4 certification is otherwise maintained as described in section 8 of the RenewableUK Small Wind Turbine Standard (01 October 2013)
• Applicable from 1 January 2014

It is hoped and expected that these will be adopted in whole or part in other areas of the world (e.g. by AWEA for USA, Riso DTU for Denmark, and ClassNK for Japan). 

BWEA / RUK and MCS consultation

Following on from the last post:

Today RenewableUK (formerly BWEA) issued the draft RenewableUK Small Wind Turbine Standard for public consultation. 

Please visit the RUK website to view the draft standard and submit your comments using the form provided: http://www.renewableuk.com/en/renewable-energy/wind-energy/small-and-medium-scale-wind/standards-and-certification.cfm  

Simultaneously, MCS issued the draft new edition of MCS006 for public consultation: http://www.microgenerationcertification.org/mcs-standards/consultations

Comments on both standards should be submitted by 18^th April 2013.

IEC 61400-2 edition 3: small wind turbines (CDV) votes & comments

IEC 61400-2 edition 3 progress:

The vote on the CDV (committee draft for vote) for IEC 61400-2 edition 3 has now been received by the IEC secretariat. Twenty countries voted yes, with one no vote that asked for a few changes. There were about 60 comments and the MT2 international committee will now work through them. The aim is to get the FDIS (final draft) circulated within a couple of months, and then the actual international standard (IS) issued in the Summer of 2013 as edition 3.

RUK smallwind standard, and MCS-006 smallwind standard:

This IEC milestone has led to a series of related updates of the RUK smallwind standard (RenewableUK, previously known as the BWEA, British Wind Energy Association) and the MCS-006 smallwind product standard moving forwards. Drafts of both of these have been circulated to the members of IEC MT2 committee and IEA task 27 working group which includes representatives of the smallwind industry from almost all countries. The next step for both the MCS and RUK drafts is that they will go through a public consultation phase in accordance with both organisations' administrative norms. The aim will be to complete the consultation phase shortly after the FDIS is published, as the release of the FDIS is the first occasion when the IEC commences public sale of a new standard.

http://webstore.iec.ch/Webstore/webstore.nsf/0/A5C565FFDF4A4045C12575570057BDA8?OpenDocument

In the meantime if you wish to read a copy of the CDV please contact your country's smallwind association(s) and/or your country's National Committee that links to the IEC.
 

RUK technical note: guidance regarding inverter changes


The RUK smallwind technical committee has released a second edition of the inverter change guidance note, and it has been recognised by MCS as an informative document. A copy can be found on the RUK website, or more easily on the MCS website:

http://www.microgenerationcertification.org/mcs-standards/product-standards


MCS guidance note: potentially novel wind turbine designs:


The Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) has released a guidance note regarding the pathway to certification of potentially novel wind turbine designs. It can be found on their website,

http://www.microgenerationcertification.org/mcs-standards/product-standards


in it are some very pertinent points that the MCS wind working group (WG3) have written to assist people trying to do something they think is new. I won't repeat the points but I will say that certification and standards decisions are a fundamental part of a designer's early-stage work, and are as important as any other part of the technical work, and that any designer should read these documents before they even start to sketch a design.

IEC 61400-2 edition 3: small wind turbines (CDV) published

The CDV for 61400-2 edition 3 has now been circulated 24 Aug 2012 (in bilingual french & english format) under IEC reference 88/437/CDV with a closing date 25-Jan-2012. It took a little bit longer than expected for the MT2 committee to complete the work of putting it into dual english & french format.


The responses to the comments on the CD that explain how/why decisions were taken in writing the CDV was circulated in a 'CC' document 88/417A/CC circulated 8-Jun-2012.


This pair of documents have both been circulated through two different routes. The IEC have sent them to all countries' national committees, and from the national committees the go to the corresponding small wind technical committees in the countries. Separately the MT2 committee members have all received these two documents directly. That way we can be reasonably sure that they are being widely disseminated.


There is a very important sentence at the beginning of this IEC 61400-2 ed 3 standard, in the Section 1: Scope which says, "Any of the requirements of this standard may be altered if it can be suitably demonstrated that the safety of the turbine system is not compromised." This is important because it shows that the standard should not be thought of as a barrier to innovation.


See also my last post. 


Once again many thanks to all members of and contributors to the IEC 61400-2 committee MT2.

IEC 61400-2 edition 3: small wind turbines (CDV)

One of the reasons I have blogged less over the last few years is that I have been contributing to the drafting of the third edition of the IEC 61400-2 small wind turbine standard, and that has taken up a noticeable amount of my personal discretionary time as well as some of our company time.

I am not alone in this effort and behind the scenes in many countries for the last three or four years many people have been contributing in a committee known as MT2, which is a sub-committee of the main wind turbine standards committee TC88 within the IEC international standards organisation.

There have been contributors from the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Australia, Greece, Italy, France, Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. The committee has worked in liaison with an IEA committee looking at small wind R&D areas (known as R&D task 27), and Ignacio Cruz (of CIEMAT, in Spain) and Trudy Forsyth (until recently at NREL, in USA) were the co-convenors and have kept this collective effort moving along smoothly. Many of the prominent people in the industry have given generously of their time to both these committees, and so too have many of the companies in the industry. The basic division of responsibility in the wind energy sector is that IEC looks after standardisation, and IEA acts as a vehicle for coordinating international R&D activities.

During the last fortnight the committee draft for vote (CDV) of IEC61400-2 was submitted to IEC and will soon be circulated out to the national committees (NCs) for vote, certainly by August 2012.

This is an important milestone for a document that is important for the small wind turbine industry. The process has been as important as the product, and it is no coincidence that during the last few years a dozen or so wind turbines have completed the certification process for AWEA/SWCC and BWEA/MCS, and nor is it a coincidence that these two certification schemes are essentially interoperable. The IEC 61400-2 ed 3 includes a lot of the experience gained from this over the last few years.

The cover page of a CDV includes the following text, "This document is still under study and subject to change. It should not be used for reference purposes." This means that it might still be tweaked. However if you are working in the small wind industry then it is probably worth contacting your national committee and asking to read a copy of the CDV. The foreword highlights some of the main areas of change and reads as follows:

International Standard IEC 61400-2 has been prepared by maintenance team 2 of IEC technical committee 88: Wind turbines.

This third edition cancels and replaces the second edition published in 2006.

This edition constitutes a technical revision. Numerous substantive changes have been made.
The most significant of these are:

 • the title has been modified to better reflect the scope;
 • restructured into part I (design evaluation) and part II (type testing) to harmonise use with  IEC 61400-22 conformity testing & certification;
 • caution provided regarding the use of simplified equations;
 • added annex on other wind conditions;
 • added annex on tropical storms;
 • added annex on extreme environmental conditions;
 • added annex on EMC testing;
 • added annex on dynamic behaviour;
 • duration testing requirements modified;
 • added annex on standardised format consumer label;
 • many minor changes and all known errata corrected.

As an example the existing BWEA small wind standard is about 20-pages. After reviewing it against the proposed IEC 61400-2 ed 3 (i.e. the CDV) it looks possible to compress the BWEA standard down to about 4 pages, most of which would simply be what I call "topping and tailing", which is an indication of the amount of learning that has been done by MT2.

One area that has definitely been resolved is that the upper size limit for "small wind turbines" has been confirmed as being a swept area of 200m2. During the process of writing the 3rd edition it was discussed that this might be increased and ultimately the decision was made to keep the limit unchanged at 200m2. There was a lot of debate over this, both within MT2 and within TC88, and the final decision was made very clearly by TC88 who are the ultimate arbiter on the subject. This means that "medium wind turbines" must use the IEC 61400-1 large wind turbine standard, and this is just beginning the process of drafting another edition. Within the -1 team many of the medium wind turbine companies are contributing to evolve a suitable outcome for turbines of 200m2 - 1000m2. If you or your business are involved in that size of turbine and wish to contribute you should contact you NC and ask to be placed in touch with the -1 committee. (The NC is ordinarily your country's national standards institute, so for example in the UK it is the British Standards Institute. If you are not sure who your NC are then email the IEC: http://www.iec.ch/ and they can tell you).

So .... maybe I'll get more of my weekends back. That might mean more blogs, who knows. I'm certainly working on trying to increase the amount of insulation in my house, to get my garden under control, and to try and get a bit of sailing and walking in with friends and family.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed in MT2 and task 27.

Delta Zeeland small wind turbine testfield update - March 2011

The latest March 2011 results are in from the Delta Zeeland wind trial:

http://www.zeeland.nl/digitaalarchief/ZEE0801257

These are a bit difficult to find - the easiest way is to go to

http://www.zeeland.nl/zoeken/

and search for the term 'testveld'

The reason I say this is because we are making changes to the Ampair website and I may move my blog to a separate location to make it easier to deal with press releases.

The Black 300 has been put up in place of the AirDolphin. A second anemometer has been put up at 17m, as well as the existing one at 12m. If my Dutch is correct the Turby has not been producing due to faults for a 3-month period but is now back in operation. The Ampair 600 continues to chug away.

Ampair 6000 update (III)

We had a query from bracken50 on the blog entry of 22 March 2010 asking about progress with the Ampair 6000. Firstly we’d rather that people were open about who they are and with luck bracken50 will trouble to tell us.

Anyway, back in March 2010 we had resolved the blade strength issue arising from the production process, and we were simultaneously trying to refit the installed units and move the factory. Ultimately we got through both those exercises and throughout the rest of the year we kept our heads down and slowly nibbled our way at the order backlog. As we did so we uncovered a series of other issues with the Ampair 6000 and progressively resolved them – not always an easy thing to do as some sites exhibited multiple problems simultaneously.

In mid year we had a tower failure and we carried out a very thorough investigation into why this happened. For a while we shut down some, and then all of the Ampair 6000 units as a precaution. Then we released some back into service with particular precautions. It took us several months to work through the failure investigation and we concluded that there was a design issue that needed a substantial change, and near the end of the year we requested all the units be shut down. We can only request as of course units belong to end-users and not to us. At that point there were about a dozen units out there in four countries, all within about 500 miles of our factory.

Since then we have been working through a design review process and conducting tests of various options. That included building some pretty substantial test rigs and complex computer models, all of which were major projects in their own right. Last week we decided which of these options we would go with and now we are working through the next round of detailed design and test prior to releasing units back to the field. Please excuse me if I do not go into technical details about which options we explored and why we took the decisions we did. In due course it will become clear when units go public and I am sure you can appreciate that we do not want to give free training to others.

Similarly please excuse me if I do not go through the commercial aspects of how we have handled the units in the field. We have to recognise that there are a series of distributors, installers, and end users and it is not our business to discuss their business.

Meanwhile we have settled into the new factory (yippee – flat floors, a roof that doesn’t leak, and some heating in the winter, plus enough space to move around and get work done in an efficient manner) and roughly doubled the number of staff. All the senior design engineers are dedicated to the Ampair 6000 project which receives pretty much their undivided attention. The remainder of the team runs the day-to-day operations with the mature product lines and carries out various other projects so as not to distract the senior engineers away from the Ampair 6000. Our sales for 2010 were substantially up on those for 2009 and one of the important things we are delivering to the 6000 team is space within which to work in peace so that they can take the right decisions in a methodical manner. That’s an important advantage of having real and ongoing business rather than just being a single-product company. Ultimately the Ampair 6000, and the wider business, will both end up stronger for the very thorough work that is going on.

I didn’t really want to post about the Ampair 6000 progress until I’d seen the results of some key tests that took place recently, and which were part of us taking the key decisions we took last week. Now I have seen those I feel confident enough to post this update and so bracken50's question is in a sense a welcome jogger as I've always got too much to do in my day. I think that’s enough for now but I’ll try not to leave it so long before I put up the next update. Also I didn't really want to talk about some of the other work we had going on until I was sure where we stood on the Ampair 6000, so maybe I'll say a little more about that in a while.

Before I forget we've just updated the website for the other arm of our business which manufactures and sells single to three phase converters. See www.boost-energy.com and I reckon the team have done a pretty good job.

Rory & Cookies' Jester Challenge

As I am sure anybody who reads this blog realises we have a soft spot for anyone doing anything seriously challenging and risky in a good cause, and because they enjoy that sort of stuff. The latest one to cross our path is Rory McDougall who is sailing a seriously small catamaran called Cookie solo across the Atlantic on the norther route (i.e. into wind !).

They have entered into the Jester Challenge 2010 to sail Cookie 2800 miles singlehanded from Plymouth UK to Newport USA. They take off on 23rd May and hope to take 4-5weeks. For more info on the Challenge go to http://www.jesterinfo.org/thejesterchallenge2010.html

Rory is raising funds for the Sir Francis Chichester Trust which is a very worthy cause. The Trust send disadvantaged youths on outward bound courses to help their self development through adventure.

If you want to help them raise funds for this charity as they sail across the North Atlantic on Cookie and set another benchmark as the smallest catamaran to do so then please follow the link http://www.justgiving.com/RoryandCookiesJesterChallenge for a safe and easy way to donate online.

Please follow the story of the voyage as it unfolds on the blog - http://roryandcookie.blogspot.com/

We've helped them out by loaning them an old Aquair 100 for the trip. In return they've helped us with testing something we're experiementing with.

Ampair announces investment from Sigma

Ampair Energy Limited is pleased to announce that the Sigma Sustainable Energy Fund II has committed £1.5m to Ampair Energy Limited (“Ampair”).

Ampair is a new company based in Dorset, which recently acquired the business and assets of Boost Energy Systems Limited, a company that designs and produces wind turbines, currently ranging from 100W to 6kW. Ampair wind turbines have been manufactured in the UK since 1973 and the latest model, the Ampair 6000, is a 6kW device which has been designed for worldwide use in grid-tied applications, commercial off-grid applications and rural electrification. Customers who have bought Ampair turbines include Shell, Cable and Wireless and Scottish and Southern Energy, who have purchased two of the first batch of Ampair 6000 turbines to be produced.

Sigma Capital Group plc, the managers of Sigma Sustainable Energy Fund II, are a specialist asset management and advisory group focused on venture capital, property and the commercialisation of university IP.

The investment will be used to support further development of the Ampair range and the expansion of the company’s existing commercial activities.

Patrick Graham, a Director on Sigma’s investment team, said, “Having looked at a number of compelling opportunities in the small wind sector we were drawn to Ampair due to the fact that the overall performance of the Ampair 6000 is comparable to that of the top manufacturers in the industry but it comes at a lower price point, and hence a lower cost per kWh, making it potentially the most economic small wind turbine on the market. It was also important to us that the Ampair 6000 has been specifically designed as a platform technology that can be used to produce larger turbines at minimal additional cost, thereby further reducing the cost per kWh.”

David Sharman, CEO of Ampair, said, “We are delighted to have Sigma on board as our lead investor, they are clearly committed to the sector and were very supportive throughout the process. We look forward to working together with Sigma as we build Ampair into the world leader in small wind turbines.”

Ampair 6000 progress update (II)

It has been some time since we updated everybody about our progress with the Ampair 6000, in fact since the 23 October 2009. Because of this I may get some of a rather complicated history out of sequence.

At the time we were waiting to switch on one Scottish site where they had not completed the local wiring; we were having major difficulties with a site in eastern England; and a site further south was nearly ready to commission.

The site further south was in fact in northern France. We switched on there and the inverter would not connect to grid.

We continued to investigate the eastern England site and it turned out that a major underlying issue was the inverter. We found it very difficult to get technical support on the issue we were seeing and we were beginning to wonder if it was not the inverter at all, in fact we believed we were chasing several different issues simultaneously. Eventually after almost two months we were able to find a work-around for the inverter. The people we were buying these from then announced that they had parted company with the manufacturer of the inverters. The manufacturer tells us that the problem we are experiencing is not their fault, we beg to differ and think we know what is their issue, but we have found a work around that is adequate. Unfortunately all the messing around with an uncontrolled turbine at this site has rather messed up other things which we puzzled away at and as we did so we made changes to other production units to test out the various theories.
Once we found the work around for eastern England we commissioned the French site which immediately worked except that it exhibited an odd rattle at some wind speeds. After thinking through the options, and having had further experience in eastern England, we put this down to a loose magnet and pencilled in a turbine head change to investigate. We had seen a loose magnet on one of the turbines and the symptoms were the same.

As an aside all the remote monitoring packages have worked fine at our own two test locations but not at any of the client sites except for briefly at the eastern England site during a period when unfortunately the sensors were inoperative. We continue to chase our tails on this which is a nuisance as we would really appreciate that data, but fortunately it is not something we included in the ‘sales’ package. At the moment it is a ‘freebie’. We continued to puzzle away at the east of England site which seemed to be seeing unique problems and experiencing terrible bad luck with a run of simultaneous faults.

We installed over on the west coast of Ireland which went smoothly except for the remote monitoring package. Apart from some absolutely awful weather that is – I was trying to teach the local installers in horizontal rain with floods lapping towards our feet.

Then we almost simultaneously commissioned the first Scottish site, a second Scottish site, and a second French site. The second French site was in a desperate hurry to have a unit because of some publicity deadlines and delivery problems from other turbine suppliers (there is a rather depressing history in France with small wind turbines over the last few years) so we let them have our own test prototype Ampair 3500 and explained that we would have to return and upgrade them to an Ampair 6000 at a later date. We were told it was working very well immediately after installation – we gave them all the other kit as per the Ampair 6000 to make the eventual change easier but we limited the power curve so as not to burn anything out.

All these were done with hand made circuit boards and if you count you will find that there are about six units in all which cleaned out our stock of hand made circuit boards. During this period we transited from one set of interconnect unit designs to another as a result of learning in the east of England site, so now we have a mixed fleet out there that we need to revisit. We also had cleaned out our first run of mechanical hardware and did not even have a test unit of our own left.

Whilst all this was going on we were bringing about thirty sets of mechanical hardware through our production system. At a certain point we realised that we were almost two months late with the castings. It took a while to get to the bottom of why this was but finally the foundry explained that the batch of castings had failed the hardness test post heat treatment. They had investigated this and traced it to a supply of ingots with a forged certificate of conformity. So they scrapped the batch of castings and started again. They also invested in an analyser for all their raw materials – they are a very quality conscious foundry with some very high profile customers so were rather relieved that it had happened to our product rather than one of their other clients, and don’t want it to happen again. This set us back about two months on the thirty or so mechanicals.

This in turn was causing knock-on problems elsewhere because we have a rather large order backlog, plus we wanted to completely reinstall at the eastern England site where we were rather suspecting the continual abuse (due to our run of bad luck) had caused a magnet to come loose and jam the entire system. This was after we went there one day to tune the system, observed 6kW output, and then it jammed up. Most unfortunate but at least a safe state to be in.

So by the Christmas period the good news was that blade production was just about getting ahead of demand, and the bad news was we were waiting on a batch of production electronics, and a batch of production mechanicals. The electronics kept on going right as the circuit layouts slowed down. We tried to assist a French client by doing a part delivery of some blades and some mechanicals, and to do this we worked through the holidays and postponed a factory move (we are trying to get into larger premises). They would have to wait for us to deliver the electronics and the remainder of the mechanicals at a later date, same as with eastern England.

Driving back from France in the snow on new year’s eve the phone rang to tell me that the Irish client had woken up in the morning to find his turbine had shed its blades. We immediately contacted all of the running turbines to shut them down. During January we analysed the failure which we traced to a change in the details of the manufacturing process that caused a fatigue failure. We decided to not only revert to our initial manufacturing process (remembering that we had been running a turbine for about nine months before the first unit went to a client) but also to massively reinforce the internal structure of the blade. We filed a HSE incident report with the BWEA for their new small wind safety (HSE) database and we briefed our colleagues/competitors about our problems at the BWEA technical committee meeting. There are enough problems in this industry without trying to sweep safety issues under the carpet and we are happy to share learning in this context. Needless to say this was a pretty devastating episode for us as we thought we had just about managed to juggle all the eggs and get through to settled production.

This set us back in two ways. Firstly all the blades in service – and the five sets that were ready to go into service – became instant scrap. Secondly there was an additional process cost and doubling of processing time to make the reinforced blades. So we slowly made more blades (with some learning and some additional scrappage as a result) and issued blades to two sites – three sets out because one set got stranded en route. These were to sites where the electronics are known to be OK. Unfortunately the Irish site must wait until new electronics are ready as the turbine head needs replacing as a precaution.

Right now we are working our way through the new production PCBs. There are four in a set so there are 120 PCBs in all. Eventually we got the PCB drawings finished, and finally sourced the components some of which had gone out of stock in the interim. We have produced one set of four to proof test them before we go into full production and three have tested fine. The fourth is not behaving and we have been through two build cycles trying to debug it. It has improved on each cycle but is still not quite there and later this week we are going to do a comparative analysis of our lab unit with the production unit, using the production contractor’s test equipment. These are fairly large surface mount boards that are manufactured in a clean room environment so one must work slowly, patiently, and carefully during the debug. As you can imagine this is not filling all of our clients with delight and they definitely do not all appreciate the “how long is a piece of string” nature of debugging.

To speed up the blade manufacturing process we also took a decision – once we were happy with the reinforced blade production and performance – that we would commission additional blade moulds. We have enough of these arriving in about a fortnight to treble the production rate versus where we were, or increase it sixfold versus where we are. That will be a relief as we have more catching up to do both with installed units and with the order backlog.

That brings us to the tricky issue of the order backlog. The good news is that we don’t ordinarily accept deposits and prepayments (we have accepted one for special reasons). The bad news is that on each occasion we have accepted an order in good faith then a few days later something else has set us back. Each time it has seemed to us that the responsible thing is to slow down and figure it out, but of course people who have placed orders don’t see it quite the same way. The still want us to keep to the predicted delivery dates we gave them. Actually not all think like that – some are more understanding, and some are less understanding. Some have now got masts installed or delivered or foundations in the ground, and some don’t. We will be able to give you all dates when we have that fourth PCB through its test. Until then it is always a few weeks away because that is how long it takes to test/produce/assemble/deliver and what we don’t know is when the test cycle will be adequately completed.

In the meantime we try to juggle everybody’s needs as much as we can and we are keeping our heads down and not seeking additional orders. I could try and explain what all this has done to the factory move or our cash flow but that is a story for another day. Likewise this has not been doing wonders for our steady-state business to have all this going on or a frozen factory move. As you will appreciate this is just the bare bones of an even more involved situation so please excuse me if I have missed out details.

Cold Shores - Skiing For Land Mine Awareness

This is just a quick blog entry to publicise the Cold Shores expedition; the 2010, British led attempt to traverse the Arctic Island of Svalbard. I used to do a fair amount of mountaineering and this looks like good hard fun. It has a more serious side which we think is a worthy cause. Many British servicemen and those of our allies and innocent civilians in conflict zones worldwide, have become casualties as a result of landmines, and The Halo Trust is an organisation which actively works to remove these weapons. You can read more about them at http://www.coldshores.co.uk/.

We supported them by helping them through the process of specifying and sourcing a solution to power their communications and photographic equipment. They initially came to us with the intention of using our wind turbines but we identified that this was not the best option and that some solar and some specialist battery systems were more suitable for their needs. We don't ordinarily get involved in small solar projects but because of our long experience in expeditions and our sympathy to the cause we have worked to provide them with a solution. We had their leader - Dave Leaning - in for two days and customised the gear for them and taught them how to use it all and made sure it worked with their comms and photo gear.

Over to them now and good luck. You can help them by donating money either to the expedition (these things do cost a bit) or to Halo Trust at http://coldshores.co.uk/donate . You can monitor their progess on line over the coming weeks.

Ampair 600 photos from France and Norway

I have just received some nice photos of off grid Ampair 600 units. The first is from Norway where it replaces an old Lakota unit, and the other three are from southern France which are a bit sunnier. The installer was very happy with the final picture.

Shipshop / Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne at BOOT Dusseldorf

Our distributor Shipshop / Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne will be exhibiting at Boot Dusseldorf in HAll 11H74. This is the German boat show and is from Jan 23 - 31, 2010.

Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne
Geibelstrasse 9-11, 47057 Duisburg
Contact: Georg Seifert
Tel +49 203 352 044
Fax +49 203 355 432
info@shipshop.de
www.shipshop.de

Ampair 6000 progress update

A quick update on where we are with the Ampair 6000. Basically we have started installing and as a result are finding a few snags that we had not flushed out in testing at our own site.

On one site in Scotland the client wiring was not ready and so that installation has not been commissioned yet. We've since had a problem at another site and have asked the Scoittish to hold fire a moment in case we want to make a change to anything - it is a very long way away in case we switch it on too soon.

At a site in eastern England we used a new alternator design that has had bench testing but not had live wind testing at our site. We pulled it forwards in the build sequence because that client wanted the new alternator which is smashing from a performance perspective as it includes a few lessons from testing of the first batch. We've had a lot of problems which are probably because of this decision. We suspect that the alternator is the cause of the problems but equally the site is showing issues with earth leakage. Or it could be a combination of both alternator-inverter and inverter-grid. To add insult to injury our nice remote monitoring system has decided to be uncooperative on this site of all sites. Need less to say we are furiously trying to get to the bottom of this as it affects all turbines that naturally fit into the production sequence after that one. And unfortunately each time we go to site the wind does not blow much. We've struggled with this for two weeks now.

Another site further south has been installed and is going live any day now with the initial batch of alternators which will help us in trying to flush out these problems. We are also building various test rigs and looking to fly a new style alternator here at the factory if the wind cooperates (which it did not when we last tried).

The assembly sequence is going fine and the mast installs are going fine so that side of things is good. The remote monitoring is still a work in progress but is making progress. We are trying to improve a few installability issues with our electrical package - to be truthful more maintainability than installability. These have become more evident as a result of trying to troubleshoot the new alternator unit.

So not quite where we'd like to be, and we are very much scratching our heads on the new alternator unit. But progress none the less.

As it happens two days ago I was at the BWEA annual conference in Liverpool and a colleague at another small wind turbine company told me they'd recently had to switch off all their machines due to a manufacturing defect they found. He said he was getting a lot of grief over this and that clients are absolutely expecting right first time. He found that rather unfair as even Boeing are late by two years on their 787, and often major auto manufacturers are late with new product development or have to do recalls. And these major companies have enormous resources which for sure small wind companies seldom do. His view is that consumers have become detached from the underlying engineering reality as a result of virtual reality and marketing. Anyway I guess we'd better plug away at learning how to solve our issues and this blog post is just to update everybody the same way I updated the visitors to our stand at the BWEA conference.

Ampair 6000 video and on BBC television

A couple of weeks ago the BBC visited us to film for the BBC2 Working Lunch programme, including the Ampair 6000.
They broadcast the footage on the same day that the British government made a number of announcements about green jobs and their latest low carbon strategy. They edit things immensely so it doesn't matter how balanced we try to be as the odds are that the clip they use will only be a short segment. So they get the balance from the overall programme rather than from individual clips. In a way that's a pity because the interview segment they used with me was about jobs in the UK and I come across as being quite parochial but I guess that's par for the course and they do their best. They took some footage of the Ampair 6000 as well as the inside of our workshops which they used as the backdrop. They also contrasted our creation of a few jobs and being the UK's oldest turbine manufacturer with the announcements about the Vestas plant closing and the loss of about 600 jobs on the Isle of Wight. As I've said many times the UK government is a lot better at paying consultants to write strategy papers than it is at doing things in practice.

I was going to post the link to the BBC website for people to see but it cannot be viewed outside the UK and expires after two weeks. We did ask them about putting it on our website but it costs £1,150 for a 12-month licence for a 2-minute segment which is a joke. So I went out in the field this morning and took a clip of the Ampair 6000 running in winds between 4-6m/s. If you look carefully in the back left you can see smaller Ampair turbines on poles by our factory. This movie runs OK in QuickTime, not sure about other viewers.

Energy Saving Trust report - "Location, location, location"

The Energy Savings Trust have released a very short report into their Domestic Small-scale Wind Field Trial with the snappier subtitle 'Location, location, location'.

The EST claim to be a non-profit making organisation acting as a bridge between government, consumers, and trade bodies. From where I sit they have the same existential objectives as any other organisation and in practice are funded by the major utilities and central government through a system of levies, contracts, and subsidies. They are one of the better para-state organisations and I pay attention to a lot of their work but always ponder why it is being written.

The report itself is the result of over a year of work and 57 sites. They consulted industry prior to starting the work and as a result they expanded the scope from just being a building-mounted urban microwind trial to include freestanding smallwind in rural locations. After a great deal of behind the scenes coaxing and persuasion they ultimately cooperated with the Warwick Wind Trial which front run them. They are not technology discipline experts and have subcontracted analysis of the trial results to Southamption University which is why they still have the capacity to make embarassing gaffes from time to time, sometimes so fundamentally that I was looking forwards to the opportunity to read the full report to check their methodology. Unfortunately although industry encouraged the trial to include vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) they seem to have evaded the trial net. This trial includes some Renewable Devices Swift units which is very unusual as they are seldom in independent trials.

The published report is frighteningly thin and bereft of almost all the data one would like to see. This is the most obvious thing that has already caused a lot of comment around the world. The other thing that is very obvious to me is that there is no data from the Warwick sites and this is a shame as they are not confidential and we as an industry have already taken our lumps for them. So I suspect that the EST sites include a series that are incredibly embarassing for one or more parties. (I know it can't be us as we only injected units into the EST trial via the WWT).

In advance of publication they met with the various turbine manufacturers to discuss results. Although they discussed the Ampair-specific data with us they did not show us the report, likewise for the other manufacturers. There is a lot less in the public report than I anticipated. It is my understanding that there is a much more comprehensive private report which has been sent to the study funders but I am not sure if this includes the datasets. I personally am uncomfortable inasmuch as I do not know what is being said in that other report which upsets me as I believe it is being made available to one participant, but there are many things I have no control over and so just have to accept as the way the world is. I see from the report that one of the project partners is the Scottish Government and another is the UK government department called DEFRA. It might be that a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to either of these would gain you access to the other report although I doubt it. The EST themselves are a quasi-governmental body and so I believe are ordinarily sheltered from FOI requests.

Perhaps the reason that the EST have such a slim public report is that they are seeking to do the minimum of damage to the industry. There is a long history in the UK of mainstream journalists being only too keen to trash literally anything ("if it bleeds it leads") and certainly when I listened to the EST being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme (equivalent of NPR at drivetime) I felt that EST were doing their best to be low key and supportive but realistic which is probably the most appropriate stance. The same balanced message seems to have come across on the other news items and I think they have done a good job in this respect.

The EST have provisionally agreed to analyse the datasets in support of the IEC / IEA 61400-2 ed 3 revision work that is going on, but not to release the raw data to the IEC / IEA committee. Therefore they will be asking the University of Southampton to conduct the analyis and release only the analysis results into the committee. The area of interest is the suitability of the existing wind class definitions in small wind design & (strength) testing. This illustrates on the one hand that EST are being very protective of their raw data (presumably for commercial reasons), but on the other hand they are trying to be supportive of the smallwind community in its efforts to move forwards. In contrast to some other recent UK (quasi) government funded work the EST are to be praised for this level of support.

You can download the report here.Domestic_small-scale_wind_field_trial_report_July09.pdf

On a different note one commentator has already pointed out that their are photos of Proven turbines on every page so I went through and counted the photos to see how balanced a view of the industry it gives:

Proven = 8
Windsave = 3
Eoltec = 3
Renewable Devices Swift = 2
Ampair = 0
Eclectic = 0
Zephyr = 0
Iskra = 0

MREA small wind conference

Last week I was lucky enough to go to Wisconsin to the MREA Small Wind Conference. This was two days of fun ! Luckily the weather was nice when I eventually arrived, after a night in Philadelphia because of extremely bad weather which delayed the connecting flight. Almost everybody there was a small wind professional and there were lots of side meetings going on. Well worth it for anyone in the Americas who is into small wind. The micro wind side of things is pretty much frowned upon though.

I crammed three presentations into two slots which may be of interest. The first is a pretty standard Ampair commercial.

Ampair%20for%20MREA%20conference%2C%20rev%202%20%28June%202009%29.pdf

Then I delivered two presentations on some of the UK trials. One is from the Warwick Wind Trials which were run by Encraft. The other is from the Energy Savings Trust trial and is all they wanted to release prior to the full trial report coming out sometime soon. Both were with kind permission of the relevant trial management.

Encraft%20-%20DS%20for%20MREA%2C%20June%2009.ppt.pdf

EST%20Field%20Trial%20-%20Presentation_D%20Sharman.pdf

In the WWT slideset one slide is repeated twice. I'd meant to put up a slide with turbine failures on it and photos of dead Ampairs, Swifts, and a Windsave. Maybe it was just as well it didn't make it in.

There wasn't a single boring presentation there. One evening Bergey sponsored a load of beer out at the MREA site where they were preparing for the annual MREA Fair which was very welcome and they were the most popular model. Proven seem to have a very good following in the area, ARE seem to be up and coming, and Southwest were well represented as ever. There were about a dozen other manufacturers and a couple of hundred small wind installers and such like.

Ampair 600 and Ampair 6000 certification

This was a recent email to all our distributors that has a wider significance.

On the downloads page http://www.ampair.com/ampair/resources_downloads.asp we have now added four new documents in the "certificates" area which are sufficiently important that I write to you all.

The first and most important is the summary test report for the Ampair 600 in the 230V grid connected Mk 2.5 version. This report is issued by NaREC who are a well known and widely respected independent test laboratory. It summarises testing in accordance with BS EN 61400-2; BS EN 61400-11; BS EN 61400-12-1; and BS EN 61400-14 standards as amended by the BWEA Small Wind Safety & Performance Standard.

For those of you who do not know BS EN 61400 is exactly the same as the IEC 61400 suite of wind turbine standards. The -2 part deals with safety & durability, the -11 part deals with acoustic noise, the 12-1 part deals with power performance, and the -14 deals with acoustic tonality etc. The BWEA standard makes some amendments to incorporate recent industry experience and is aligned with the equivalent (but still draft) AWEA standard.

I believe we are the first small wind turbine company to release these particular test reports publicly. This is a very important step for us which on the one hand has the potential to assist us and on the other hand has the potential to harm us. The independent testing carried out in the preparation of this summary test report is absolutely unbiased and extremely rigorous. This means that the client can rely on the contents. It also means there is nowhere for us to hide. You will note if you read the contents that the reference power was measured as 231W which is lower than our stated rated power of 600W. Similarly the reference annual energy was measured as 481 kWh/yr which is lower than our stated rated power of 1232 kWh/yr. There is no escaping the fact that these numbers are lower than we stated and we think it is an important step forwards for the industry that we have the courage to put these independent test reports into the public domain. You will also know that we have always claimed lower numbers than are commonly claimed in the industry for machines of this size (1.7-1.8m diameter rotors) and yet in the independent trials such as the Warwick Wind Trials and the Delta/Zeeland Windtest the Ampair 600 has been shown to be one of the better performers, or in some circumstances the best performer. You will note that the Ampair 600 is designed as a Class I turbine which is the strongest turbine available, and you will also note that it achieved 100% reliability on test.

The performance of the Ampair 600 in the 230V grid connected Mk2.5 configuration is lower than we would like because of the way the turbine interacts with the inverter. We are working very hard to improve this. We have at this time no reason to doubt the performance claims we are making for the Ampair 600 in the battery charge 24V or 48V versions. In due course we will conduct independent testing of the battery charge versions but independent testing is a very expensive process which we struggle to afford and so we will delay that until we think it is economic to do so. This will probably not be until we put forwards the next revision of the 230V grid connected turbine for independent testing. We expect to receive no government subsidy for testing in the UK.

We would like to thank both NaREC and TUV-NEL for their patience and support during this testing process. They are leading the industry in terms of offering a commercially available and affordable small wind turbine testing and certification process. We look forwards to cooperating with them on the next stage which is that of certification under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme which is a requirement for grant funding of some clients in the UK.

We encourage you to use these reports to register the Ampair 600 for any local certification schemes in your countries. If you do so please can you keep us informed so that we can understand your local processes and coordinate your activities where appropriate.

The other three documents are the certificates of conformity for the Aurora PVI 6000 which is the inverter used in the Ampair 6000. These are the grid connection standards to the Spanish EMW, German VDE, and UK G83 standards. Those of you who are making preparations for installing Ampair 6000 units may find them helpful.

Ampair reveals Award Winning new 6kW wind turbine

Ampair, the Berkshire, UK based company, has just revealed photographs of its sleek new 6000W x 5.5m turbine, the latest in a long line of reliable, rugged and quiet wind generators. This impressive turbine recently won the prestigious Rushlight Windpower Award 2008 and the company is now accepting orders via its distributors.

The new machine has a rotor diameter of 5.5 m and is ideal for supplying power to remote farms or rural houses, telecoms systems, public buildings, schools or industrial infrastructure, either offshore or onshore, for 230V grid connection or for 48V battery charging.


Photograph shows:
Ampair 6000w x 5.5m on 10m mast supplying a farmhouse in Berkshire, UK

Like all Ampair turbines, it is manufactured from high quality marine grade materials making it particularly suited to remote, coastal or cold-weather applications and in keeping with the company’s quality ethos is designed to be compliant with the IEC 61400-2 standard for a Class I turbine, which means it can be easily and safely installed worldwide. It is a fully sealed unit that does not require costly annual servicing.

A range of mast options is available. As with all turbines, more height gives greater power because of the increase in wind speed so Ampair can supply masts from 10m to 30m in a variety of styles including monopole or lattice; guyed or unguyed.

The price for the grid connected 230V system on a 10m mast is just £13,500+VAT. As Ampair’s managing director David Sharman says “We have always worked on an unsubsidised commercial basis and see no reason to charge the high prices that are the norm in the 6kW market. In my opinion, the current grant subsidies from Westminster and Scotland to favoured manufacturers are propping up this practice and are a distortion of the market and should be withdrawn immediately.”

Since 1973 Ampair has been recognised as a leader in small wind turbine technology with over twenty thousand units installed worldwide. There are Ampair turbines from the Antarctic to Alaska, and the Solent to the Sahara including some of the harshest environments known to man. The lessons learned from this continuous history are always incorporated into every generation of the company’s products, ensuring an extremely high “return for investment” level due to reliability and longevity.

The family-owned Ampair is Britain’s oldest wind turbine manufacturer and is proud to be an independent and thriving manufacturer with strong export sales through its network of global distributors. Additionally, the company prides itself on its after sales service and boasts that it can still service and maintain units going back over many years, often by the same experienced technicians who manufactured them decades ago.

The new Ampair 6000 fits neatly into a slot in the market which Ampair has been working to fill for several years to satisfy the rising demand for a turbine of this size made to Ampair’s high standards.

MORE INFORMATION:
T: 0845 3890660
F: 01344 303312
E: sales@ampair.com
W: www ampair.com

ATTACHMENTS:
Ampair product range, 2009
CD%203116%20Ampair%20product%20range%202009%20%28rev%201.0%2C%2015%20April%202009%29.pdf
Ampair 6000 specification sheet
Ampair%206000%20x%205%205%20technical%20specifications.pdf
Ampair 6000 drawings
ASMB00261.pdf
Rushlight awards logo

Ampair photo for print use

Ampair press release text as .doc
Ampair%20reveal%20new%206Kw%20wind%20turbine.doc
Ampair press release text as .pdf
Ampair%20reveal%20new%206Kw%20wind%20turbine.pdf

French hill farmers and British feed in tariffs

On my way back from the European Wind Energy Conference in Marseille a few weeks ago I called in to see an old neighbour of mine who runs a farm in the Pyrenees. After convincing the sheepdogs that they knew me (these are the genuine sheep guard dog variety) I found him and his daughter with their flock of a few hundred sheep who were busy lambing. They thrust a litre Coke bottle full of warm goats milk in my hands and we got on with feeding the lambs. They keep a few dozen goats and use the spare milk for the rejected lambs or the runts.

After an hour of this we went out into the yard and he gesticulated at the conifers behind the barns and told me he was about to cut them down. His explanation was that he had just leased out the south facing roofs of all his barns to a solar company. He is at about a 1000m altitude and his roofs have no obstructions on them and face nicely south at 30 degrees slope which makes them almost as perfect as one can get for solar. The leasing company is going to pay him a annual rent provided he files all the paperwork and keeps the roofs clean and unshaded – hence no pine needles. The leasing company is going to sell the power back to the grid under the new French feed-in-tariff laws and then they are going to securitise the future energy sales in the financial markets. The feed-in-tariff in France is about 40 cents/kWh or so (I forget the exact number). Feed in tariffs are one of the types of microgeneration tariffs I have described in previous blog entries.

Since electricity in France usually costs 10-15 cents/kWh someone is subsidising this deal. Basically that someone is the average person in France who is subsidising the few who have the opportunity to put solar on their roofs. These are normally affluent middle class people along with quite a few farmers with handy roofs, most of whom are pretty poor in the area I know (these are not the grain baron variety). The same thing has happened in Germany and Spain. So most (poor) folk are subsidising a few (rich) folk make more money.

And it gets even more eye watering – because of the way any guaranteed income stream can be securitised the finance community get mega rich setting up all these deals. Don’t get any silly ideas that there will be serious job creation going on in France because all the factories churning out these solar panels already exist. They’re all in Germany, Spain, California, and Japan who were the first to put in feed-in tariffs and who have spare capacity, oh and China. So there has been a real first-mover advantage for those countries who got their industry moving and from here on in poor local taxpayers subsidise middle class property owners and rich financiers.

Actually in France they have ways of making sure that some solar factories will get built to provide some local employment. The same feed-in-tariff legislation will be introduced in the UK next year (2010). The difference in the UK is that the UK is so far behind in the solar manufacturing game, and has governments who couldn’t organise building a factory if their salaries depended on it (which they do, but don’t realise) and so there will be precious few solar jobs created apart from the first flush of installation work.

However in the UK we do have a small wind turbine industry. If we were German we would introduce a feed-in-tariff for wind turbines but not for solar. In fact that’s why the Germans introduced a feed-in-tariff for solar (which they make) but not for small wind turbines (which they don't make). After all they had no intention of playing fair – nor did the Spanish, or the Japanese. Common sense would dictate that we would set a modest feed-in-tariff. Just enough to encourage sensible growth in the domestic small wind industry without fostering the sort of solar roof-leasing by imported solar I’ve described above, and certainly not enough to set off a boom and bust boondoggle. And if we do decide to be generous and give some tariff to solar then surely we would be sensible and set it at a lower level than for small wind.
It would be nice to think this wouldn’t it ? So obviously sensible to build up British manufacturing industry ? Let’s see.

A couple of weeks ago we got a call from a company called Datamonitor (http://www.datamonitor.com/) who were reading our blog entries about microgeneration tariffs and wondering if they could quote it. They rang back later to say that they’ve decided to redo the work from scratch which I think is a backhanded way of saying that they intend to sell the report they are going to write. When folk like Datamonitor start covering the tariff space that indicates they think there’s money to be made.

It's going to be fun the next few years isn't it.

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update April 2009

The April update from the Delta / Zeeland trial has arrived, with the March data.

Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%28end%20Mar%202009%29.pdf

The energy consumption figures have been updated and some quite drastic downwards revisions have occurred. This is odd and I do not know why it has happened but it does not affect the trends.

The mystery of the zero power output from the Windwalker has been somewhat clarified with the note "the Windwalker was installed in January 2008 but has not operated".

The trend remains that the Ampair, Skystream, and Fortis are the good performing economic turbines with the Zephyr AirDolphin working well but being expensive.

The Ropatec 3kW seems to have gained a dramatic improvement and is now outperforming the Ropatec 6kW which is most odd. As an aside the planning permission request for a 6kW Ropatec at our local Tesco supermarket has just been withdrawn.

The Turby has now been repaired.


Sander Mertens of Ingenious has done some analysis of the site layout in the figure above (supplied by Fortis, courtesy Sander Mertens) in which the red line is the row of turbines which runs from NW to SE. It has been confirmed that in the spreadsheet the turbines are listed from NW to SE, so the 6kW Ropatec is at the North and the Windwalker is at the South. Since the wind direction is generally from the SW it might be thought that this slightly favours the most southerly turbines. However because of the housing estates to the SW and a belt of trees to the NE it turns out that the most northerly three turbines are the best located. Sanders has indicated the areas of wind obstruction in orange dots on the image.

Sander Mertens is speaking at the forthcoming International Small Wind Conference organised by the BWEA and BRE which is on 22, 23 April 2009 in Watford, London. It will be interesting to hear more about this trial.

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update March 2009

The latest results have come in from the Delta / Zeeland trial of small wind turbines in the Netherlands. They do not normally release public results at one month intervals so I expect it is because they want to announce some news.

Their email gives the following information:

1. The Renewable Device Swift turbine was removed on 31 January 2009 and will be replaced by a Raum 1.3.

2. The Raum 1.3 turbine has been installed but the inverter has not been installed yet. Installation is expected to be completed in mid April 2009.

3. The Turby has had a fault during all of February 2009.

Looking at the data it seems to support all the trends that were in place, i.e.:

- The vertical axis turbines are the worse performers.

- The Ampair, Fortis, and SWW Skystream are the best performers.

- The Zephyr AirDolphin is technically a good performer but commercially so expensive it is not commercially attractive. In fairness to Ampair I should point out that our installer has put an price on the Ampair that is unusually high so we too are labouring under an heavy economic burden.

The strongest wind month was January with an annual average of 4.4m/s. Some people are commenting that winds on this site are unusually low but I disagree as they are in fact typical of the 12m height wind speeds at most rural locations where substantial communities live. It is extremely unusual to find large groups of people living in winds of higher than this and recent work in the UK tends to support our observations (see the Warwick Wind Trials and the EST microwind trials).

Other comments I have heard are that there is wind shadowing occurring between turbines. There may be some truth in this as the turbines are on a line SSE-NNW and the average wind has come from almost dead S. So anyone is immediately downstream of the Skystream (the most efficient wind harvester and with a large diameter) coulfd reasonably raise this as an issue. There is obviously scope here for a quick undergraduate project to explore this issue further. I don't actually know the sequence of turbines in the line.

The results can be downloaded here:

.Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%2812m+%29.pdf

As always those manufacturers who have had the courage to participate are to be commended. Doing stuff like this in public is difficult for small companies. Also the Delta / Zeeland trial organisers are doing a good job and showing that pretty basic but independent trials can yield very informative results for consumers.

UK microgeneration tariff update - March 2009

There has been feedback from three utilities and I have updated the rate information and the calculation tool which can be down loaded below. I have not agreed with all their comments (suprise) but as before note that most of the people working in the microgeneration teams in the utilities are trying to do a good job with very little visible support from their organisations.

PDF version - information only:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf

Excel version - includes working calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

There has also been feedback from readers of this blog who have found it helpful and which was our aim. Here at Ampair we concentrate on design & manufacture of small wind turbines and small hydro turbines. The rest is over to our distributors / installers and the wider public who hopefully include a few of our clients.

More information and explanation is in our blog entry below:

http://www.boost-energy.com/boost/2009/02/uk-microgeneration-tariffs.html

UK microgeneration tariffs - February 2009

[Note that the spreadsheet calculator have been updated in the March blog entry above. However all the explanation and information below will still be useful.]


UK microgeneration tariffs
For 35-years Ampair has concentrated on manufacturing battery charging systems – our wind turbines, micro hydro turbines, and solar PV systems. Over the last couple of years the grid-connected version of the Ampair 600 wind turbine has been available but even so we have had relatively few grid-connected clients. We expect this to change over the coming years. A client who is running one of our prototypes recently asked for our advice on the best deal available from the UK electrical utilities for a microgeneration tariff. This caused me to delve into the current tariff deals and this blog entry discusses the results. Even better you can download our handy little spreadsheet calculator that will help you identify the best deal for you. The spreadsheet can be used in other countries.

The UK has one of the most complex grid systems in the world from a regulatory and commercial perspective. In this blog entry I will ignore most of the complexity and just talk about “the utilities”.

There are a bewildering array of tariffs available to clients even before we get into the specialist discussion of microgeneration tariffs. Again I am going to just concentrate on the microgeneration tariffs, and specifically only on the electrical tariffs (because yes, thermal tariffs are coming one day).

The structure of microgeneration tariffs
It used to be that customers on the electrical grid paid the utility for three basic elements:

- a meter charge

- a connection charge

- a tariff per unit of electricity (per kWh) that they import from the grid, i.e. £/kWh import. This is what you pay for normally when you buy electricity, i.e. electricity that you imported into your house from the grid.

In addition to this customers with grid-connected microgeneration have two more elements to consider:

- a tariff per unit of electricity (per kWh) that they export to the grid, i.e. £/kWh export, sometimes known as a feed-in-tariff

- a tariff per unit of renewable electricity that they generate, called a ROC which stands for Renewable Obligation Certificate

Now let”s look at these in more detail because you will need to understand the system to figure out what is the best deal for you.

What is a ROC
In the UK the utilities are forced to buy a certain amount of electricity generated from renewable sources. The quota they must buy is supposed to increase over time. Every generator of renewable electricity is given a Renewable Obligation Certificate (a ROC) as they generate electricity. Then they sell the electricity to the utilities and separately they sell the ROC certificates. The sales take place in an auction process but we don”t need to worry about that – all we need to know is that the renewable electricity we generate has two values, firstly for the electricity itself, and secondly for the ROC. The extra value of the ROC is supposed to help pay for the extra cost of building expensive wind farms and hydro stations rather than cheap coal fired power stations. In your case it helps pay you to install your microgeneration system.

If you have lots of ROCs you can go to the auction and sell them yourself. But if you only have a few you might prefer to sell them to your utility company so as to avoid the administration. You can also sell them to intermediaries who may offer you a higher price than the utilities, and who will then bundle them with other people”s ROCs to make a more attractive auction package. You can only sell ROCs to the intermediaries if your utility has not locked you into a contract which forces you to sell them to the utility. This is what I mean when I talk about “locked ROCs” and “unlocked ROCs”.

One ROC certificate is supposed to be for quite a large chunk of electricity and is worth about £40 - £50 at auction. So in practice it is ordinarily simpler for the microgeneration owner to sell their ROCs to the utility who is prepared to accept partial ROCs and pay a £/kWh fee for them. The utility will then bundle them with lots of other peoples” partial ROCs to make a useful quantity for administrative purposes.

In the future ROCs will get banded and microgenerators will get even more ROCs but let”s not discuss that except to bear in mind that over the next few years there will be more money for the householder from selling their ROCs, which is generally a good thing.

An important thing about ROCs is that they are given for the generation of renewable electricity and it doesn”t matter whether you use that electricity yourself or whether you export it to the grid. But it does mean that you must have an electricity meter in the correct location to count the renewable electricity that you generate. This ROC meter is in a different position than the import meter (see picture). So you can get paid even if you keep all the electricity to yourself !

Electricity metering for an export tariff (feed-in-tariff)
When the microgenerator produces electricity the electricity can either be consumed in the premises or any left over must flow out into the grid (please don”t try storing it in batteries if you live in the UK – it”s not a good idea but it”s too big a discussion for this blog entry). This is often called feeding-in to the grid which is why these tariffs can be called a feed-in tariff. The less electricity you consume the more is left over and the more that will flow out into the grid. The technology makes sure that electricity you make is consumed in preference to electricity you import. In the old days electricity that flowed out into the grid would have turned the meter backwards but these days the utilities install meters that will turn in only one direction (in the old days people could steal electricity by rewiring their meters in reverse until anti-theft meters were invented). So unless you change your meter the electricity will still flow out into the grid but it won”t be counted. (By the way be very careful if reading American websites as they often talk about “net metering” as if it was literally turning the meter backwards which it isn”t).

Because of the invention of anti-theft meters a special meter has to be fitted that keeps two totals – the electricity imported and the electricity exported. This is often called a smart meter and some of these bidirectional meters are smart meters, but not all of them. The people you will talk to in the utilities will call all of them smart meters or export meters and it is best just to use the same name as they do so as not to confuse things.


You will still pay your normal amount for the electricity imported. But now we come to the good bit - by law in the UK the electricity companies must offer you a price for the renewable electricity you export. Unfortunately the bad bit is that some of the electricity companies bend the law by offering a price of zero for electricity produced from most renewable microgeneration technologies. So this means they can tell the politicians that they fully support customers who wish to make a cleaner environment, and then they go out and offer a price of zero. The politicians and Ofgem (the energy regulator) aren”t very good at fining the companies for this downright evasive behaviour which is because of something called regulatory capture, i.e. the politicians and regulators tend to do what the utilities want rather than what voters want. If anybody doesn”t believe me I suggest you ring up EON.powergen and ask for an export tariff for hydro microgeneration. Actually things are now better than they used to be and EON.powergen and Scottish Power are pretty much the laggards in this respect. You won”t be able to find anyone on the Scottish Power switchboard who will understand what a microgeneration tariff or a feed-in tariff is (of course I hope they read this blog and are shamed into cleaning up their act – or that Ofgem fine them).

Over the last few years things have improved in this respect but let us discuss another way some companies evade their responsibilities. In order to get paid for exporting electricity to the grid you will need an export meter. Actually getting an export meter fitted can be a very daunting prospect for a customer who is struggling to cope with the terminology and the technology. Helpfully EON.powergen will not install an export meter for you and will not tell you how to get one fitted. So although EON.powergen will pay you £0.10 per kWh of solar electricity you export, most clients will never get paid because they”ll never be able to get an export meter fitted. Remember that EON.powergen discriminate against electricity from wind, hydro, and fuel cells and will pay zero for that. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that some utilities were really going out of their way to be difficult. I should point out that EON are a German company and have cooperated enthusiastically with the German government to support a feed-in-tariff in Germany so it is obviously possible for EON to do it if they want to, it”s just that they obviously don”t want to enough in the UK. Maybe German politicians are a more determined lot than British politicians, who knows. Lest anyone think I am beating up on EON you should try telephoning Scottish Power because I still haven”t managed to figure out the secret words to find anyone who can talk to me (and I”ve tried please, and I”ve tried talking to managers on three different phone lines). Another company who are somewhat difficult about export meters are British Gas / Centrica who will also not tell you how to get an export meter fitted and will not fit one for you. By the way BG Centrica will pay you a huge 5p per kWh you export which is getting pretty close to that magic zero I was talking about earlier.

Whilst I am on the subject of export meters if any company tries telling you that they are not permitted to arrange an export meter I am afraid it is absolute nonsense. Yes I fully understand that there are huge regulatory issues around the subject of export meters but some companies manage to be helpful and still comply with the spirit of the regulations so it can be done if they try. Congratulations to Scottish and Southern Energy for showing the way in this respect because not only will they fit an export meter but they will also do it for free. It took them about two weeks to turn up and fit mine when I asked them as an experiment (I figured I”d better try it out on myself before I sent them to a client). It took the technician about half an hour to fit the export meter.

How much will you be paid
Some companies have decided to make the customer”s life easier by paying a lot for the ROCs but paying nothing for the actual exported electricity. This means that you don”t need an export meter, they don”t worry about the hassle of fitting an export meter, nobody has the cost of an export meter, and everybody is happy provided they pay you enough. This is what Good Energy and Ecotricity do and they will both pay you around £0.10/kWh for the ROC value which as we will see later are probably the best microgeneration deals available in the UK.

Although RWE.npower will not advise you on fitting an export meter and will not fit one for you they have a different way of making the customer”s life easier. If you want they will assume that you export 50-60% of the electricity you produce and pay you an export tariff for that amount, plus a small amount for the ROC. So they pay £0.035/kWh for the ROC and £0.10 - £0.12/kWh for half of the power as your export tariff. This works out slightly stingier than the Good Energy and Ecotricity deals. Perhaps their import tariffs are slightly cheaper in which case they may still be a better utility to choose as your supplier.

With Scottish and Southern it is a similar deal to RWE.npower except that they fit a meter for free. The actual rates they give you are higher for the ROC and lower for the export tariff compared with RWE.npower but the total benefit tends to work out about the same for most people. On balance I tend to prefer the Scottish and Southern package versus the RWE.npower package for two reasons. Firstly if people have real meters then they are incentivised to minimise electricity consumption which is the best way to save money and look after the environment – the assumptions made in “profiling” discriminate against people learning better behaviour. Secondly Scottish and Southern Energy don”t discriminate between different types of renewable electricity (except for one of their tariffs, discussed below).

Let me discuss the discrimination issue further. Here at Ampair we manufacture wind turbines in the UK and we sell them to British customers (and we export them all over the world). Then a utility will pay a feed-in tariff of say 10p per kWh for electricity from one of our wind turbines but it will pay 12p per kWh for electricity from a solar panel. Almost all solar panels sold in the UK are imported from Germany, Spain or China and I do not see why we should be encouraging British consumers to buy imported solar panels rather than domestic wind turbines. What we should really do is to force the utilities to offer the same tariff for all technologies and then let the client decide which is the correct technology for the client”s site. In this I am at least principled unlike the German government which has launched their solar industry using a tariff that discriminates in favour of their domestic solar manufacturers and against British small wind turbine manufacturers. I am also annoyed in this respect by Scottish and Southern Energy who should know better, and are offering 20p per kWh but only for solar.

To put all these numbers in perspective the feed-in tariff for solar microgeneration in Germany is about 40p per kWh. A shame the Germans discriminate against small wind turbines or we would have a nice business over there, or in Spain, or in France. Oh and compare the export tariffs with the import tariffs – if the utilities could organise their billing systems they would be making a profit out of you producing electricity which they buy from you at a lower cost than they sell it to your neighbour, i.e. your capital investment would be subsidising them. Something”s not right here and it won”t be right until the export tariff (excluding the ROC element) is at least equal to the import tariff as a minimum.

Understanding your utility partner
I prefer to think of the utilities as partners rather than suppliers as it gets me in the right frame of mind. Even though I may sometimes be disappointed by their behaviour they do have an important job to do. For example they have to give you continuity of supply when your microgeneration system isn”t producing, and they have to handle all the administration, and they have to pay you some money. If you are lucky they may even have to pay you more than you pay them.

Choosing between them can be difficult. Even the first step of getting the relevant information out of all of them is practically impossible – as I”ve said before I challenge you to get past the Scottish Power switchboard. As a general rule their websites are unhelpful. Some have tucked microgeneration away in a corner of their energy efficiency section, but even then they don”t give important information such as tariff rates and telephone numbers. Some of them make assumptions that are wrong or unhelpful. And some don”t exist at all. Trying to phone the telephone numbers which can be found is depressing as they are almost all routed to answering machines or are disconnected. So I also tried ringing all the switchboards just like a standard client would. After a great deal of perseverance I was able to get through to the right specialist department most of the time. Typically it took about four – six telephone calls per company and about 45-60 minutes on hold plus a lot of coaxing on my part. I have admitted failure with Scottish Power as my life is too short. With EDF they get the runner-up prize for the worst switchboard as their people refused to talk to me unless I was in an EDF region. In the end I gave up with the EDF switchboard and used a number I found elsewhere on the web.

Once I had got through to the specialist department I got the data I needed and explained that I would be putting it on the Ampair blog. It turned out I already knew some of the people from various industry committees and most of them are a good bunch. In general the specialist microgeneration teams are small and include pretty committed people who are not very well supported by the organisations they are in. Don”t get mad with them as they are mostly trying to change things for the better. They are also supposed to be their organisations experts and I am afraid that a substantial fraction of them do not yet know sufficient to advise their organisations authoritatively which is worrying – they tend to be staffed by the less experienced personnel. The four organisations who stood out for their better level of knowledge were Ecotricity, Good Energy, Scottish and Southern Energy, and RWE.npower.

I have made a note of all of the microgeneration tariff information, including the tariff names and the telephone numbers of the specialist departments on the attached spreadsheet. This alone should be a huge step forwards if you want to compare your options and make any further enquiries. I”ve sent this to those utilities which I had the email addresses of and updated it where I got given corrections. I have not bothered to record website details as most were so appalling, with one or two exceptions.

Excel version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

PDF version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf

I fully understand the issues that the utilities are grappling with, including the ones they don”t want to talk about in public. This is already a long enough blog entry so I”ll discuss that another time. In the meantime let”s get on to the next topic, that of actually choosing your utility partner

Choosing your utility partner
Assuming you are at least partly motivated by financial considerations you will want to try and understand which utility is giving you the best deal. The second page of the spreadsheet is a calculation tool which I have put together to cope with most circumstances and will explain next. I have locked the spreadsheets to prevent you deleting calculation cells by accident, but you can change data in some yellow cells which I have deliberately left unlocked.

Firstly if you have no connection to the electrical grid then you should choose the Good Energy “homegen offgrid” tariff. This means you rely on batteries.

Secondly assuming you are like most UK customers you are a grid-connected client. So look in the top right corner of the second page of the spreadsheet where there are some bright yellow cells. Enter values into these:

- Enter your average annual total consumption in kWh (which may be called “units” on your electricity bill). A typical UK house might use about 3,000 – 6,000 kWh/yr but it can be a lot less and I use about 1,200 kWh/yr in a 2-bed maisonette.

- Enter a default import rate. This just helps put all the utilities into perspective. It will probably be in the range £0.12/kWh - £0.15/kWh at the moment.

- Select your microgeneration technology. You will need to put your cursor on this cell and select from wind, solar (PV), hydro, or fuel cell. Some of the tariffs are only available for some of the technologies and so depending on what you select the calculation tool will “grey out” the tariffs that cannot be used for your technology. If you want to have multiple technologies I am afraid the utilities aren”t so good at coping with you unless you choose one of the tariffs that is available for “all technologies”.

- Enter your average annual total generation in kWh. If you have a 1kW microwind turbine and are in a city this might be as low as 100kWh but if you have a 6kW small wind turbine and live on a windy hill this might be as high as 8,000 kWh/yr. So this depends on your technology of choice and on your location. If you are not sure then your microgeneration installer should be able to advise you. Alternatively you could look at the Encraft website for some handy prediction calculators for the various technologies. Please do not telephone Ampair – although we make wind turbines we are not an advice line and instead you should telephone our distributors who organise installation if you want to buy one of our turbines.

- Enter your likely export fraction in %. If you are installing a lot of microgeneration compared to your consumption then this might be as high as 75%. If your microgeneration is relatively small compared to consumption then it may be nearer to 25%. If in doubt try 50%.

Now scan down the spreadsheet and you will see that the white cells are the likely size of your annual electricity bill after taking into account the electricity you don”t need to buy as well as the money you are paid for ROCs and electricity you export. In almost all circumstances I find that Good Energy and Ecotricity tie for joint first place, and that RWE.npower and Scottish and Southern Energy tie for joint second place which is why I have put these four at the top of the spreadsheet.

To improve the accuracy of your prediction and to allow you to update the spreadsheet as new tariffs become available you can also enter data into the light yellow cells. It is probably worth contacting the utilities of interest to find out the applicable standard (i.e. import) tariffs as this may swing the selection between the different utilities (especially if you also buy gas from the same utility).

These calculations do not take into account the cost of fitting an export meter but the better four utilities have structured their tariffs so that this is essentially zero as discussed above. If a company insists on you buying an export meter and is unhelpful then it is probably a pretty good indication that they don”t deserve your business.

With RWE.npower you can sign up to “juice” which ensures that the electricity you import comes from renewable sources. They will not charge you extra for this and any RWE.npower customer can sign up (spread the word). Using renewable sources is a given if you buy from Good Energy or Ecotricity but often their import tariffs are a bit more expensive. I am not sure of the situation with Scottish and Southern Energy in this respect but they are definitely very committed to their large scale renewable energy projects so they deserve support as well. A lot of people criticise the small print in the commitments of these four companies but at least they are trying.

Summary
This is complicated but the little spreadsheet calculator makes it a lot easier. A car is complicated as well but society teaches us about cars from the day we are born – one day society will teach us all about using and conserving energy from the day we are born. In the meantime I hope this helps explain your options.
The four utilities I put at the top of the spreadsheet are also the four who I find most supportive in all the industry meetings and discussions which is a welcome surprise. That doesn”t mean we always agree with each other.

If you think these feed-in-tariffs and ROC prices are too low contact your MP and ask when we will have a microgeneration feed-in tariff of 40p/kWh common to all technologies including wind and hydro. Don”t take no for an answer and don”t allow your MP to be evasive on the need for the tariff to be a common rate for all the microgeneration technologies. Don”t be fobbed off with delays. There”s an election coming quite soon and you can remind your MP that they work for you and not the other way around.

Also ask when Ofgem are going to fine the evasive utilities so as to drive the message home that this is getting serious.

I hope that soon this spreadsheet is out of date and the worse performing utilities have improved dramatically.

Excel version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

PDF version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf