Spanish windmills In ten years, Spain has gone from having a few - TopicsExpress

Spanish windmills In ten years, Spain has gone from having a few leftover windmills from the time El Quijote was written, to being the second world power in wind energy. Named after the Greek god of the winds, eolic energy is changing the landscape in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. If we don’t have trees, we at least have wind, and this is not just hot air. I was recently in the small town of Fuendetodos, half way between Madrid and Barcelona, where the painter Goya was born. The hundreds of children visiting his museum appeared to be more interested in watching the windmills circling incessantly over the church spire than going to see the sketches and etchings of the famous artist. You surely can’t miss them. Iberdrola, one of the biggest electrical companies in Europe has close to one hundred windmills in this park. When at peak capacity, they can produce a total of 132 MW of power. Forty of those units have a nameplate power of 2 MW each and they are simply huge. The tower is like a four meter diameter pipe sixty seven meters high. If this were not big enough, each of the three wings is forty meters long. Every tower has an internal elevator to reach the top for maintenance and inspection purposes. A 2 MW windmill costs around 1 million Euros, not small change. The windmills are extremely automated to be able to make it in extreme weather conditions. They start turning when the wind is above a certain speed and they are stopped during wind storms. All are operated from a control room some two hundred kilometres away. Interestingly enough, the windmills not only produce energy but they also consume some, and it is not their own. They do that when the wing angle must change to maximize the power generation, or when the mill is constantly orienting its position, always trying to search for that elusive and ever changing wind direction. Windmills are not the total solution to the energy crisis. Electricity cannot be stored and therefore you need some other generating capacity for days when wind is scarce. This, unfortunately occurs when you most need it, which happens to be when the weather is at its coldest or hottest. The current law in Spain makes it still profitable to produce windmill power down to an average of 28 % of the full nameplate power. In the Fuendetodos park, the windmills function 68 % of the time. That is equivalent to 32 % of the full or maximum power which in this case, is an average of 42 MW. You could say there is a lot of wind there. Contrary to popular belief, windmill power is not cheap and must be subsidized substantially. This is because of the installation investment, but above all due to the maintenance cost. The Fuendetodos park has a small army of expert tradesmen that must lubricate all moving parts adequately, check for wing wear,keep the complex electronics in shape or even tighten each one of the thousands of bolts once a year. Windmills are good for the communities that have them. Normally the town receives a percentage of the generated power, and that makes Fuendetodos a rich town now. But not everyone is happy about having these monsters on the horizon. Some environmentalists claim that birds get killed by the rapidly turning wings while others object to them on aesthetic reasons alone. Some energy specialists even claim that windmills, because of their unpredictable output, make it necessary to have ready spare fossil fuel generating capacity, which is expensive and inefficient. One way or the other, windmills will be increasingly part of the countryside vistas. Until something better comes along, they are a major part of the 20 % renewable energy that our politicians in Brussels have decided we must have by year 2020. The Fuendetodos residents can rest assured that their improved services will continue for a long while. Juan Vila