Without wishing to unfairly denigrate the ethically motivated pioneering commercial early adopters, until recently most commercial and light industrial locations which have installed micro wind turbines have done so for marketing purposes. Quite simply electricity from the grid has historically been cheaper than electricity from microgeneration such as wind turbines, and so the marketing advantages have needed to outweigh the financial costs associated with their installation.
An advantage of microwind over, say, solar is the simple visibility of a small wind turbine in terms of making a public statement. This is particularly true on flat roofed structures where solar panels tend to be hidden in the “dead ground” on the centre of the roof where they are not visible to the general public. In contrast it tends to be better to locate a micro turbine near the edge of a flat roofed building (to take advantage of the side of the structure as a wind concentrator) and so this amplifies the visibility of the microwind turbine. Microturbines are far better from a marketing perspective in addressing a passing public than renewable microgeneration sources such as ground source heat pumps (which are entirely hidden from casual view) or biomass and CHP projects which both suffer from being externally indistinguishable from fossil fuelled power plants (and in the case of biomass tend to result in undesirably frequent large vehicle movements).
The marketing benefits associated with microgeneration are no less valid today (except of course for those companies who are worried about over-cynical clients) but as the cost of microgeneration falls so the financial gap is closing. Furthermore in many countries taxation systems are changing to allow expense associated with microgeneration in commercial and industrial properties to be written off against tax. This change is part of a process termed “recapitalising the energy industry on the other side of the meter” and essentially rebalances the playing field for microgeneration versus centralised generation which has long enjoyed this tax benefit.
Some commercial locations install small wind turbines in order to increase security of supply. This works only if they install a minimum amount of battery capacity as part of an uninterrupted power supply system (UPS) feeding a set of “maintained” circuits. Then – and the details will vary depending on exactly what their priorities are – they can either choose to feed the battery bank direct from the wind turbine, or they can choose to feed the “maintained” circuits via a grid tie inverter. If they simply feed a conventional building electrical layout with no UPS then whenever grid power is absent the safety circuits in the grid tie inverter will shut down the wind turbine.
At Ampair we are happy to supply our micro wind turbines to any sort of commercial customer (almost) irrespective of their motivations. On the one hand we are keen to increase our production volumes so as to reduce our costs (and prices) as fast as possible, and on the other hand we appreciate that even the most cynical of marketing led installations are normally only the most obvious part of quite complex internal motivations within a company where there is often a genuine interest in “trying out” the technology so as to understand what will be increasingly possible. We even work with oil & gas companies ! In fact we are particularly keen to work with oil and gas companies as many of the companies – and the people in them – are very committed to transiting to a post hydrocarbon economy and we would like to help them make the change.
