New England's Largest Wind Energy Project Gets Approved
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 01. 9.08
Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission has just approved what will become New England's largest source of wind energy - the Stetson Wind Project. The $100m 38-turbine wind farm, to be built on Washington County's Stetson Mountain, is expected to generate - at maximum capacity - over 150m kWh of electricity annually, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of yearly electricity used by 27,500 households.
The turbine towers will each stand about 262 ft tall and have 253 ft blade diameters; the project is being headed by UPC Wind, a company based in Newton, MA, and will directly supply New England's Power grid. Currently, the largest wind farms in the U.S. are in Texas, California and the Midwest; according to the American Wind Energy Association's (AWEA) rankings, Texas leads the race so far, having already installed 2,763 MW, with California in close tow, with 2,361 MW installed.
Via ::Technology Review Editors: Green Light for Wind-Energy Project (blog)
See also: ::Two Maine Ski Areas Announce Wind Purchases, ::World's Largest Windfarm Gets Approval
Image courtesy of Extra Ketchup
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"57 MW of electricity annually"
So then, 57 x 10^6 joules per second per year?
Uh, perhaps you meant MWh, rather than MW. Energy per (time squared) isn't often a useful quantity.
"The $100m 38-turbine wind farm. . . is expected to generate 57 MW of electricity annually"
This is a mistake. Megawatts is a rate of energy production, not an amount of energy. Electrical energy consumption and generation are not measured in watts, but watt-hours. For example, a 100 watt light bulb running for 10 hours will consume 1000 watt-hours (or 1 kilowatt-hour), calculated as follows:
100 watts * 10 hours = 1000 watt-hours.
The same amount of energy could power one 20 watt compact fluorescent bulb for five times as long:
20 watts * 50 hours = 1000 watt-hours.
Please be careful to report the units correctly. Saying that it generates 57 megawatts in a year tells us next to nothing; that's like saying a car goes 57 miles per hour in a year, when what I really care about is how many miles it travels.
guys.. guys...
your comments just made it worse, now the article says
"57 MWh of electricity annually",
which is just plain wrong.
What should be written is:
" 57 MW of electricity ".
No need to make this more complicated.
Sorry first of all for the errors - it's been a long day/night; the post has been modified to reflect Space's recommendation. Thank you all for the input.
Yes 1.5MW / turbine x 38 turbines = 57 MW @ peak production. Why the heck did they give a company from MA the contract, seeing as how Teddy boy Kennedy thinks wind power is ugly? Ted Kennedy and MA can go to hell.
Space, 57MW of electricity MAKES NO SENSE. That's like saying 57 miles per hour of distance.
Would Jeremy Elton Jacquot please correct the article? 57MW is not a unit of electrical energy; it is a *rate* of energy production.
The Midwest is not a state. Since it is apparently being classified in this story as one, I guarantee it leads the race in wind power generation.
Let me clarify my request a bit. I think the wrong number is being quoted. 57MW sounds like generating capacity, not how much it generates. Either say that it has a peak capacity of 57 MW, or give us the number it generates in a year.
If it generates at 57MW all the time (which is not likely; that's peak capacity), and there are 8760 hours per year, it would generate 499,320 MWh, or approximately 5 gigawatts.
That's a HUGE difference. Asking for correct information is NOT overcomplicating the matter, and sticking an "h" after MW doesn't fix the problem.
some of you guys are morons and whining for nothing. turbines are rated for their peak MW so adding them all up you'd get the peak output for the group of them
heres a 3.6 MW turbine
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/36mw/index.htm
(Ugh. I meant "almost 5 gigawatt-hours". It's an easily made mistake, but my point stands.)
"is expected to generate - at maximum capacity - over 150m kWh of electricity annually,"
This is still not correct, or at least written in a confusing way:
The windpark has a maximum, or nameplate, capacity of 57 MW. This amount of power is only produced above a certain windspeed Mostly it will be producing less.
However if it would work at full capacity all the time it would produce 365* 24 h* 57MW= 500 million kWh per year.
So the number of 150 million kWh already accounts for the fact that the park do not run at fulll capacity all the time.
By the way this is not treehuggers fault, because the same confusing sentence appears on the website of Stetson
*sigh*
edgar...
"57 MW of electricity" does make sense.
It's the power that the turbines generate.
(I don't know whether it's peak or average )
no, it's not like "57 miles per hour of distance",
it's more like "57 miles per hour".
edgar... relax and think...
"57 MW of electricity" does make sense.
It's the power that the turbines generate.
(I don't know whether it's peak or average )
no, it's not like "57 miles per hour of distance",
it's more like "57 miles per hour".
Very frequently journalists (not just those from treehugger) confuse the unit of electrical energy (kWh) with that of power (kW/ MW) and invent the weird unit kW per hour. It seems journalist schools need to integrate some basic science lessons in their curriculum.
This idea is like making a el. train that gose on el. wire over the train.
Insted the the system will be reverse the train move and give or feed the energy to the wire and the energy will be use for houses?
The idea is to make a train tracs in spiral way the energy making machine shall roll done and let as say that the spiral hight is about the same as the world trade-center?