<< Previous Issue | December 1999/January 2000 | Next Issue >> | ||
Over The HorizonClean Green New Zealand -- Not!New Zealand likes its clean, green image, so there was some embarrassment when the country was awarded the Fossil of the Day citation at the recent Climate Change Convention in Bonn, Germany. The award was made by the Climate Action Network, an international coalition of environmental and renewable energy groups, who noted that New Zealand had "increased greenhouse gas emissions by 30% since 1990 while having promising to halve them." "New Zealand needs action plans now to reduce greenhouse gases if we are going to keep faith with our climate change commitments", said Paul van Lieshout, chairman of the New Zealand Wind Energy Association. "The message for New Zealanders, the Government, and all political parties, is clear. Government must do more to ensure the environmental and economic level playing field is in place to support the development of new renewable energy generation options. Wind power remains the most technically and economically viable renewable energy option -- but while subsidies to fossil fuel exploration and power generation projects remain in place this viable option will be lost." According to Australian research, New Zealand's net greenhouse gas emissions per capita apparently now exceed those of Europe and Japan, and are only just below Australia (the worst in the world), the US and Canada. Wind energy proponents have long cited renewables as a means of achieving the country's ambitious greenhouse target. A NIWA research project is gathering information on wind speeds and turbulence with the aim of helping power companies decide where they can get the best results from wind farms. By precise determination of wind speeds, NIWA scientist Dr Steve Reid hopes to be able to improve the basis for investing in wind farms. The project has extended what is known about wind, predicting output energy, power quality, mechanical stresses of wind turbines and turbulence characteristics. Reid says an important part of the project was finding out the kind of wind characteristics that occurred at the tip of wind turbine blades. That was done with acoustic sounders, which transmit and receive sound pulses, and are placed in the tips of the blades. "Wind-speed over the area swept by the turbine blades is the most important parameter for resource evaluation. With increasing turbine sizes, new technology for measuring winds in the blade area is needed. This is above the heights reached by most mast systems, which go to only about 50 metres." |
||
<< Previous Issue | December 1999/January 2000 | Next Issue >>
All contents of this site copyright © 1990-2007 Webcentre Ltd. All Rights Reserved |