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Bergey Windpower Case Study National Wind Technology Center, Boulder, Colorado |
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Research and Demonstration Turbine |
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The National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) is part of NREL (National Renewable
Energy Laboratory), one of US-DOE's national laboratories. the NWTC, with
a staff of 80 and an annual budget of ~ $20 million, is America's lead research
organization and facility for wind turbine research. It is located outside
Boulder, Colorado in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. While the NWTC
has only a modest annual average wind speed (4.5 m/s or 10 mph), it is a very
good place to test the robustness of a wind system because it regularly gets
wind storms with winds in excess of 54 m/s (120 mph). Dozens of commercial
and prototype wind turbines have been damaged or destroyed by these fierce winds
while undergoing testing at the Rocky Flats site of the NWTC.
A 10 kW Bergey wind turbine was installed in 1984 at the US-DOE Rocky Flats facility (which became the NWTC in 1995). The photo above shows the Bergey turbine installed on its 30 m (100 ft) Tilt-up tower, with the main laboratory building in the background. Over the years this turbine has been used for grid-intertie tests, blade structural load tests, battery-charging tests, and has been shown to thousands of visitors. This turbine is currently in use on a village power test set-up on a different tower. This Bergey Excel, now 15 years old, is the longest running turbine at the NWTC. |
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