Ampair & Boost Energy Systems

Cold Shores - Skiing For Land Mine Awareness

2010-02-25T18:55:00.004Z

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 Leabning - 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

2009-12-21T19:42:00.003Z

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

2009-11-04T18:56:00.003Z

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

2009-10-23T17:49:00.003Z

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

2009-07-30T08:50:00.004Z

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"

2009-07-13T07:22:00.005Z

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

2009-06-27T20:16:00.003Z

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

2009-06-05T17:39:00.002Z

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

2009-04-14T18:31:00.004Z

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

2009-04-13T21:13:00.006Z

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

2009-04-10T14:21:00.003Z

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

2009-03-07T10:38:00.006Z

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

2009-03-07T10:28:00.003Z

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

2009-02-08T11:20:00.013Z

[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

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update February 2009

2009-02-05T15:58:00.004Z

The Delta / Zeeland small wind turbine wind trial has released another set of results so that the data now covers a ten month period through until the end of January 2009. This is a trial of eleven turbines in a row in a relatively coastal area of the Netherlands.

The previous results covered the first six months and were discussed here, here, and here.

Since then I believe that RD Swift and Ropatec have made some changes to their turbines. The smaller Ropatec (the 3kW) is now performing better but the larger (the 6kW) seems unchanged. The RD Swift does not appear to have a different performance.

The better performers continue to be Southwest, Fortis, and Ampair. The Zephyr AirDolphin also does well but is very expensive.

The results can be downloaded here.Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%2812m%29.pdf

Warwick Wind Trial seminar 13 Jan 2009 - presentations

2009-01-14T08:06:00.009Z

Yesterday the Warwick Wind Trial final results seminar took place.

From an Ampair perspective the trial has tended to confirm what we suspected about urban grid-connected microwind, i.e. technologically difficult, unconvincing wind resource albeit actually marginally better than we anticipated, and challenging economics for everyone. Nevertheless it was pleasing to see that Ampair had the highest annual power output, the highest capacity factor, and the most honest power curve. For the time being Ampair will sell into the grid connected urban microwind segment but only to customers who insist on purchasing, and who understand the limitations.

Here is a list of the speakers and the files of their presentations:

Results of the Warwick Wind Trials
- David Hailes, Encraft
David%20Hailes%20-%20Encraft%20-%20Overview%20of%20the%20Warwick%20Wind%20Trial.pdf
- Helen Brown, Encraft
Helen%20Brown%20-%20Encraft%20-%20Results%20of%20the%20Warwick%20Wind%20Trial.pdf

Current Academic Work on Microwind
- Prof Simon Watson, Loughborough University
Simon%20Watson%20-%20Loughborough%20University.pdf

An Industry Perspective
- David Sharman, Ampair
WWT%20final%20results%20%28for%20Encraft%20in%20Jan%202009%29.pdf

New Tools and Techniques for Wind Predicion
- Henrietta Stock, Carbon Trust
Henrietta%20Stock%20-%20Carbon%20Trust.pdf

Economic Opportunities for Small Wind in the UK
- Alex Murley, BWEA
Alex%20Murley%20-%20BWEA.pdf

Noise Issues and Installations Standards for Small Wind Turbines
- Dr Panagiota Pantazopoulo, BRE
Giota%20Pantazopoulou%20-%20BRE.pdf

Premininary Results of the EST Wind Trials
- Jaryn Bradford, Energy Saving Trust
Jaryn%20Bradford%20-%20Energy%20Saving%20Trust.pdf

The small and microwind industry owe thanks to the funding sponsors of the Warwick Wind Trial including Pilkington Energy Trust, the Warwick District Council, Warcick County Council, BRE, and the Energy Savings Trust. Special thanks are due to Encraft who conceived and managed the trial.

The final report is here (warning this is a big file):
- Warwick Wind Trial final report, Encraft
.Warwick+Wind+Trials+Final+Report%3Dfinal%20release.pdf

And all the previous reports and much more information on the trial can be found on the Warwick Wind Trial website

International Small Wind Conference 2009

2008-12-20T16:48:00.005Z

Two-day international small wind conference
Organised by BRE and BWEA
22-23 April 2009
Be part of the first truly international event for small wind systems!

In 2009 the UK will play host to BRE and BWEA's inaugural international conference, for a technology which is seeing unprecedented market growth the world over.

Small wind systems are taking off in a big way. Driven by government policy, planning, building regulations, climate change and increasing fossil fuel prices, microgeneration technologies are increasingly becoming an integral part of national, householder or business approaches to energy use and onsite generation.

Two days of seminars, workshops, demonstrations, educational sessions and networking opportunities will bring all constituents of the global sector together with focus given to renewable energy policy, international markets, technology awareness, technical research, and educational issues.

The conference will attract attendance from the international microgeneration industry, national Government, policy makers, the financial sector, the construction sector, academia, the media, as well as consumers and businesses interested in generating their own clean green renewable energy!

To register your interest for ISWC2009 and receive further information, contact Caroline McGill at events@bre.co.uk

-----------------------------------------------
This conference continues the sequence of one-day small wind seminars that BRE have been running for several years. It will be a two-day event which we as a small wind community can use to meet each other: suppliers, manufacturers, installers, clients, policy makers, and related parties such as planners and consultants. It is intended to be the European equivalent of the MREA Small Wind Conference that takes place in Wisconsin in mid-June each year.

Delta trial per Fortis

2008-11-30T14:40:00.003Z

Last week at the BWEA Small Wind Systems Technical Sub-Group meeting (what a mouthful, we normally just call it the BWEA tech cte) the folks at Fortis attended and gave a presentation which I have attached below, along with a press release from Fortis regarding the trial. These are both in english and give quite a lot of background to the trials which may be useful as the Zeeland Windtest literature is only available in Dutch.

The BWEA tech cte is open to companies from all countries. Anybody can join the BWEA. At the moment there are representatives from Ropatec of Italy, SouthWest of the USA, and Fortis of the Netherlands. There are some installers who represent some other manufacturers but they do not seem to actively represent 'their' manufacturers. Just contact the BWEA if you want to know more.

pres%20BWEA.pdf

Home%20wind%20turbines%20tested.pdf

Warwick Wind Trial seminar 13 Jan 2009

2008-11-24T17:32:00.008Z

The Warwick Wind Trial final results are due out early next year. This is the first public trial of urban microwind. I have yet to see the final results but each time they get more data and do more analysis the more I find interesting things inside them. The consultancy that has managed the trials is Encraft and they are holding a seminar:

13 January 2009
0900 - 1700

Hill Close Garden Trust
Warwick

The seminar includes a bus ride around to some local installations amongst which is the Wolseley Sustainable Building Centre. To book a place contact booking@encraft.co.uk .

The price is £200 per person inc lunch and coach tour, £125 per person for early birds and students.

Manufacturers involved in the trial are Ampair, Eclectic, Windsave, and Zephyr. There were also Renewable Device Swift units in the trial briefly but they were withdrawn.

The flyer for the seminar can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.
Jan%2013%20-%20Microwind%20Complete%20Picture.pdf

Torfaen eco-building

2008-11-15T17:04:00.005Z

Working through a backlog that I'm trying to get off my desk Torfaen County Borough Council were asking about the noise levels of the Ampair 100. I pointed them in the direction of Paul Gipe's trials (see here and here) and asked why.

Turns out that they have built an eco-building on one of the industrial estates they manage and they were going through a BREEAM assessment. This is an interesting project because as they point out industrial buildings (warehouses & factories) aren't usually very environmentally sound.

The Ampair 100 on the building probably is not hugely relevant in the overall scheme of things. But a lot of the other stuff certainly is. I've put the pdf download about their project below. For some reason I do not seem to able to control where blogger puts file links.

Eco-building%20Overview2.pdf

Northanger visiting Antarctic peninsular

2008-11-09T18:18:00.006Z

These two photos were just sent by Roger Robinson who was on Northanger about 5-years ago and visited the Antarctic peninsular. He apologises for the quality as these are scans from slides. They look fine to me.

I should point out that Northanger run or support various 'commercial' expeditions - just look at the Northanger website for more info. Having organised and been on both commercial and non-commercial expeditions I'm not always sure of the difference. Style surely is the real issue and we like the Northanger style going right back to the Smith Island ascent of Greg Landreth back in 1995. The chap who told me the tale of this was on the second Joint Services expedition to the island and he was impressed.

Ampair sponsor Northanger

2008-11-09T13:07:00.005Z

Greg Landreth & Keri Pashuk saling Northanger away from Hourglass Bay on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut – Canada; with the blades of the Ampair 100 they use at the top of the picture

Northanger is a yacht, two people, and a way of living. For the last 18-years co-skippers Greg Landreth and Keri Pashuk have taken the steel ketch 'Northanger' to the extreme ends of the oceans on a permanent expedition.

Ampair first joined them when they over-wintered 1999 / 2000 by freezing Northanger into the ice of Hourglass Bay on Ellesmere Island. Since then their Ampair 100 has been in constant use. Recently they contacted us for some spare blades and we recognised the yacht from our own mountaineering experiences and were very happy to discover that they had been using Ampair all these years. After that we were happy to become an official Northanger sponsor.

As with many people their electrical needs have increased of late due to adoption of more modern conveniences. They are now putting a second Ampair on Northanger and we wish them many more years of serious adventure.

Delta / Zeeland trial update - November 2008

2008-11-03T18:32:00.006Z

I have added in the price/kWh analysis on the last two slides of the presentation for the first six months of data. I didn't have time to do this before. I assume 20-year lifetimes for all units, no maintenance, and no change in wind regime. This is simplistic of course but occasionally I have to do the day job.

Delta Zeeland wind turbine trial presentation update (look at the bottom of this blog post)

Some folk have done a bit more digging into the trial:

- Olino
- Newenergyfocus

One of these includes a full NPV analysis.

The Zeeland folk have commented that they expected a 6m/s average and indeed it will be interesting to see what the average is after we have had the winter episodes in.

The Swift folk have commented about inverter tuning in one of the reports on the trial and it looks as if they will do a spot of tuning. The holy grail is auto-adaptive control algorithms which I know were discussed at least three years ago (because I answered a question at the BRE microwind seminar regarding them, ironically when standing next to one of the XCO2 / Quiet Revolution chaps: I think they now use an auto-adaptive algorithm in their QR6 unit but that's just a guess on my part) but surely have been openly discussed for longer, I've known about them for over twenty years when I was at college.

As I say in my blog I sincerely congratulate everybody brave enough to do public performance trials. In our experience it gets easier the more you do. Also as one consultant commented to me today "it's not what your problems are, it's more how you respond to them".

I've had a comment in that I am being a mite aggressive in my discussion re Tesco. I've had a look at what I wrote. To make it clear:
- I think Ropatec are a very robust VAWT with good engineers at the helm,
- I think that Ropatec made exactly the same sort of mistake that could happen to all of us (and which I have pointed out that something similar did happen to Ampair) and best wishes over the next six months,
- I think that the data shows that all the VAWTs are not (yet) good producers (and I'd love to see data on better performance in the future),
- I think that the consultant who conducted the initial pre-purchase analysis for Tesco owes Tesco a refund,
- I think that Tesco are to be congratulated for trying.

So well done Ropatec; well done to Tesco; (not mentioned but well done to Llumarlite who are the Ropatec representative in the UK); and what a shoddy job by the Tesco's expert consultant who I know did not understand the advice he was given and tried to bluff which is always a sign of an unprofessional professional.

Like I said and will continue to say, congratulations to all who have the courage to participate.

Ampair%20for%20BWEA%20conference%20%28rev2%2C%20October%202008%29.pdf

Delta wind trial in Netherlands; BWEA conference

2008-10-24T15:17:00.009Z

During the week we exhibited at the BWEA conference and exhibition and in one of the little seminar sessions I gave the usual update on Ampair etc plus I summarised the results that have just come in from the first 6 months of the Delta wind trial in Zeeland in the Netherlands, managed by Zeeuwind.

Ampair - BWEA seminar presentation c/w Delta / Zeeland windtest results: dowload pdf file from this link:

Ampair%20for%20BWEA%20conference%20%28October%202008%29.pdf

Refer to the pdf file which can be downloaded. The first five slides are just an Ampair commercial from the seminar presentation I gave.

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Ampair has been participating in the Delta wind trial in the Netherlands of small grid connected wind turbines. The first report has just been released with 6-months of data and the results are very interesting because they show clearly the state of the art in commercial small wind turbines (with Ampair as one of the leaders), and because they show the performance of several vertical axis designs.

The trial is running slightly late – this is a common feature of all such trials because in practice many products are not as available as press releases would have us believe. The trial is a collective effort of some consumer testing organisations (the equivalent of Which in the UK) and some utilities, and some provincial governments. It is taking place in the Zeeland area of southwest Holland.

Originally twelve turbines were pencilled in for the trial. Not all arrived as scheduled and so one of our Dutch distributors Eco-Energie Rietpol put forwards the Ampair 600 to fill a vacancy. The 11 turbines which did participate are summarised in slide 6. Sincere congratulations to everybody who participated for having the courage to do so – it is easy to snipe at the results but I can assure you that the participants all deserve our support. As always the people who avoid participation in these sorts of serious trials are the ones who may merit negative comment, and not those who genuinely participate and then have some public disappointment.

Eco-Energie Rietpol installed the Ampair 600 early in the year, and not long afterwards it was shut down because we needed to upgrade the blades, tail, and electronic safety circuits. The trial started whilst the Ampair was shut down and so you will notice that the first seven weeks of production data for the Ampair are essentially zero.

Each week the organisers release information to the installers about performance of their turbines but not of all the others. Last week the organisers released the summary data for the first six months of the eleven turbines that did arrive. They have given monthly production data and total consumption data. In my version which is slide 7 I have added in a row showing the net power output, i.e. production minus consumption. I have translated from the Dutch and any mistakes are my fault, sorry.

On slide 8 I have graphed the results to display installed versus net power output.

This trial includes four vertical wind turbines, two from Ropatec and one each from Turby and Windwalker. This seems to be the first time that so many VAWTs have been represented in a trial side by side with several different HAWTs and so the results would be fascinating for that reason alone.

The only two turbines in the trial which are directly comparable are the Ampair 600 and the Zephyr AirDolphin. The Zephyr is 1.8m diameter and the Ampair is 1.7m diameter but basically they are both 3-bladed upwind HAWTs. Again this is fascinating because it gives us all an opportunity to compare results from two serious manufacturers of good standing. As an industry there is a lot of consideration being given to conducting so-called round-robin tests where one turbine moves from test site to test site to compare the abilities of test organisations to reproduce each others figures. It seems quite likely that the Ampair 600 and the Zephyr Airdolphin will be used for this as they are small enough and cheap enough, yet also stable enough to survive and produce statistically meaningful results. So looking at them side-by-side is interesting.

Slide 8 is the most interesting slide. The most obvious thing is the shaded zone running crudely Ampair 600 – Fortis Passaat - Southwest Skystream – Fortis Montana. These four turbines are closest to the ideal of more power for less money and so they appear to represent the efficient frontier of the current state of the art in modern small wind turbine manufacture. All are HAWTS from manufacturers with credible histories, even if only one of them has had huge (relatively) amounts of cash to put in to product R&D.

Looking at the rest the most obvious conclusion is that there is no correlation between money invested in R&D and product performance. With one exception all of the rest are simply poor performers in terms of closeness to the efficient frontier. This does not mean that they are necessarily not worth further consideration but it does mean that from an investment perspective (whether society, shareholder, client) one should think very carefully before heading in that direction as for whatever reason they are simply expensive. I know that Ampair and Fortis are cash-poor (i.e. without VC investment to date) and we are demonstrating that we can perform and that in my opinion is the standard we should all be assessed against.

All the VAWTs are bad performers. One is so bad that it does not even make it onto the graph. In fact I am not sure it was at the test site as the Windwalker appears to have consumed 39 kWh and produced nothing. It may be that it has not been installed and the meter is reading incorrectly. I note that no price is given and so I have chosen not to graph it. The other three VAWTs do at least appear to produce but their cost/benefit is noticeably poorer than any of the HAWTs. This is in supposedly relatively clean airflow and they will argue that as the airflow becomes more turbulent they will become relatively better performers. In fact many VAWT manufacturers are claiming that they are best suited to low velocity turbulent urban airflows, but so far no good comparative data set has existed to support this claim. From the Zeeland data the best one can do is to point out that maybe the VAWTs will be better but they’ve got a large handicap to overcome.

I know the Ropatec people had some confusions in the first two months as they visited me at the BWEA conference in London. If I understood their explanation their installer put the 3kW inverter on the 6kW machine and vice versa. Towards they end of the first two months they corrected this mistake. There is some confusion as to whether the inverters have been correctly reprogrammed now. Good luck to them in the next six months. It is fascinating to observe that the Tesco supermarket chain has installed thirty plus of the 6kW Ropatec units at over £35k each in the UK as, on the basis of this data a couple of Ampair 600 or one small Fortis Passaat would have been better, and in the case of Ampair would have had the benefit of buying British.

This Turby is producing. In previous tests of the Turby this has not always been the case – note that the Turby is a serious power consumer. The Turby is spun up to speed by using the generator as a motor. It appears that whatever Turby are doing to improve their spin up algorithm is working, or that the winds are sufficiently steady on this site. But a 10:6 ratio of production : consumption does not leave much margin for error. In this respect the Ropatec layout is a clear winner in the VAWT stakes.

The Renewable Devices Swift is another non-performer. It simply is not producing. It has a 2.1m diameter and so has twice the swept area of the Zephyr Airdolphin and the Ampair 600 and so should produce approximately twice the energy. Instead it is producing less than half. Clearly their electronics design is not ideal as it is a serious power consumer, but even if we just look at power output in any given month it is producing half of the Ampair and the Zephyr. This is before one looks at the additional handicap of the huge cost of the product. Their latest claim is that they have orders for 3,000 machines and that they are silent. Well they may be silent but they also do not appear to produce power. They have not participated in any public trials before so it is not possible to comment as to whether this is an unusual result. One benefit of being a repeat participant in trials as that one can be given a bit of slack if something goes wrong in any one trial.

The Energy Ball deserves an especial good mention. The Energy Ball is one of two similar products on the market with the other being the 2kW Loopwing from Japan. Apparently Scottish & Southern Energy have just bought two Loopwings to install in the UK in Weymouth at a cost of £30-£40k or so we were told at a BWEA meeting which set us all (it was a manufacturers meeting) back on our heels with much collective gnashing of teeth. This makes the EUR 4k Energy Ball an extremely cost-effective proposition as it is the only product that is below the efficient frontier. Because of this I am not considering (for now) that the price is a true reflection of the actual commercial installed cost. I may be wrong and I will be happy to correct myself as it is a truly good result and I look forward to learning more about a design I had hitherto disregarded.

Now we get to the four machines that seem to form the efficient frontier. The Fortis units are doing exactly what I expect them to do – dependable performers that are good in low winds and not quite harvesting to the maximum in high winds. To understand this point compare April and May production for the Fortis units with that of the Zephy AirDolphin, and also look at the monthly windspeed table on the lower left of slide 7. See how the Apr/May winds obviously came through as high wind pulses contain a greater fraction of energy and how the Zephyr could more than double its performance whereas the Fortis units were held to 1-1/2 or so. This suggests that the Zephyr has over-invested in high-wind performance to the detriment of its low-wind cost-effectiveness. The Fortis designer is very focussed on cost-effectiveness and he would appear to have made a commercially sound compromise here. The Fortis installed prices are perfectly believable.

The Southwest Windpower (SWW) Skystream unit is the third good performer. For many years now Ampair has competed commercially with the SWW designs and we have been under no illusions about their competency in making cost-effective turbines (and the slickest marketing in the industry). We have been warning our bigger brethren to brace themselves and we appear to have been right to do so as the Skystream is very good – even more so if you replot this graph as a swept area graph. There are varying stories about exactly how much US government support the Skystream and SWW have received over and above the venture capital but it is paying off (I hope the UK government realise that this is a hint, but the UK government representative for microgeneration cancelled his talk at the last moment which gives you a feel for things here). I will point out that the Skystream is underpriced in this report and the true installed price is more like EUR 14k. The Belgian distributor has installed this unit and this is because the Dutch one was more expensive – someone has swallowed a chunk of cost here. Once the Skystream is upped to EUR 14k it is exactly on trend with the Fortis products.

It is time to critique the Ampair 600. Firstly our installer has overcosted this one as our boxed set only costs £2850, so an installed price of EUR 89250 is rather eyebrow raising. Reducing this to a more realistic EUR 6000 brings us on-trend, but don’t go beating Eco-Rietpol up for that price as he is well aware that fixed costs are high for small installs and he won't underprice. Secondly the energy output is low versus the Zephyr because we have effectively missed the first two months which are energy rich, because we were shutdown until week 8 whilst we waited on our safety upgrade (but that is our fault so we will take it on the chin). Comparing the next four months one sees that the Zephyr and the Ampair are trading kWh for kWh with each other which is exactly what I would expect as we are both manufacturers with an aero/mech/electrical competence and a power electronics competence and we both basically know what we are doing. In the last month the Zephyr gets slightly ahead again which is again to be expected as this was another energy rich month. I know that the inverter on this Ampair is the SMA 700W whereas the Zephyr tend to use the larger SMA units and so can better harvest the high wind pulses. Conversely however one can see that the Zephyr is a substantial energy consumer whereas the Ampair is a real miser. So I expect Ampair and Zephyr to continue to go head to head with these models for some years to come except that Ampair have a cost (or price) advantage at the momet. Once the Ampair data is corrected it is possible to draw an almost perfect line along the four efficient frontier units.

UPDATE 25 OCT 08

One thing I forgot to mention last night is that this Zeeland trial is supporting the general validity of the AWEA and BWEA small wind standards. In the Ampair 2008 catalogue we have tried to set out the information required in accordance with the BWEA standard - see page 5. One very important piece of information is the Annual Energy Production graph and for the the grid connected Ampair 600-230 this is the lower left hand graph.

At the test site the average windspeed was about 3.5m/s for the first six months. Drawing a vertical line on the AEP graph at 3.5 one can read off an annual production of 440 kWh which means that the Ampair 600 should have produced 220 kWh in the six month period. To compensate for the missing 7 weeks if we add approximately 60 kWh (per the Zephyr) to the measured 82 kWh we get 140 kWh.

This is actually a pretty good prediction (220kWh predicted versus 140 kWh actual) and a lot of the error is probably in the shape factor used to calculate the wind speed distribution. I am guessing from the limited data released so far but the Summer months have probably had a shape factor of 1.2 to 1.6 whereas the AWEA/BWEA standard requires the calculation to be performed with a shape factor of 2.0. I say this from observing the monthly differences, not because I have been crunching the data that the test sends out each week. During the winter months I expect that the shape factor will rise somewhat and hopefully in the next report it will be included. The shape factor is the small wind industry's equivalent of the solar PV industry's mythical 1000W/m2.

Of course the AEP is utterly dependent on the dependability of the power curve data. By now anyone reading should have figured out that this must be a power curve for net useful power to the consumer, and will now see why some folk prefer to give power curves that are somewhat ambiguous in this regard. It makes a lot of difference whether you measure power out of turbine or power into grid. It also makes a lot of difference whether you measure power out, or net power out. Ask your manufacturer !

Whether you trust your manufacturer is a separate issue. I have written previously (see blog for 29 December 2007) about Ampair practice in this regard. Our AEP figures in the 2008 catalogue come from the low tech approach. Now we have several further sets of data for the Ampair 600 which show it as anything from a 'rated' 350W machine to a 700W machine. Some of those numbers are high tech data logged outputs and some are low tech data logged outputs. Until we understand why the differences arise we will not be in a great hurry to commit further commercial suicide by publishing the lowest of these. Please excuse us but we already lose enough sales as it is. Again testing per the AWEA / BWEA standard helps but I see a nasty commercial dilemma coming where some machines test and publish independently certified results, but then go out of business whilst others merrily claim super-hero status and laugh all the way to the bank.

END UPDATE 25 OCT 08

I expect that we will all scurry around frantically improving our designs and carry on into the next round. These wind speeds are absolutely typical of the sort of Summer windspeeds I expect at most urban fringes in reasonable wind locations. After 12-months we will know what the annual average will be.

Now could someone please send me the name of the Tesco highly paid expert consultant and of the people within Tesco who believed him. At least I hope they get their consultancy fee back.

Good luck to all manufacturers who participated. I fully expect that we will all (Ampair included) have lots of very public failures over the next six months, and I look forward to revising my opinions as new facts come to light.

For further info on the trial see:
Zeeuwind
www.zeeuwind.nl

Tales of Alaskan woe, sort of ...

2008-10-16T18:47:00.004Z

One of our distributors in the USA told us about a client in Alaska yesterday. They have just heard back from a client they sold a couple of sets of replacement turbine blades to for the Ampair 100. Apparently they were ordered because a communications relay tower stopped functioning mid way through a storm. Since it is a helicopter ride to go and fix the aerials, and since the turbines are half way up the tower, the client figured it was sensible to take spare blades along when they went out to fix the aerials which they reckoned must have blown off the tower, because they reckoned that the Ampair probably hadn't survived either.

The client has now given the second half of the story to us. Apparently they arrived on site to find that the storm had blown the entire tower over. But the Ampairs were still intact and in full operating order. The anemometer broke at about 140 mph during the storm, probably when the tower blew over.

Like I say to all our clients, "we don't aim to make an indestructible turbine because it would be too expensive for everyone, and anyway you can always find a way to break them, but we do try to make our turbines strong".