Key takeaways:
- ‘They want diesel gone, so the wind resounds with their environmental ethic.’
- Frontier Power Systems has once worked in Ramea, N.L., lodging wind turbines that eased the community’s diesel consumption by 15 percent.
A firm in Georgetown, P.E.I., is making a new wind and energy storage system for remote districts to displace 50 percent of the diesel fuel areas used for power generation.
Frontier Power Systems has been working in renewable power for decades, including building large-scale wind ranches on P.E.I., and is now launching a demonstration project in Ramea, a small island off Newfoundland.
“Our goal is to lower the fuel consumption by 50 percent in this community. And that’s far above what’s ever been done in Canada,” Frontier’s general manager Carl Brothers.
He said the NextGen Arctic Power System takes the best technology from existing wind turbines and puts it in turbines better for northern communities with no key to cranes.
“We’re going to establish our wind turbines in conjunction with our battery system, and we are going to turn the diesel off for extended periods,” Brothers illustrated.
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He said the goal is to turn off Ramea’s diesel generators almost 25 percent of the time and generate enough excess wind power to provide thermal heat for community buildings.
Demonstration project
Brother stated that one of the challenges for firms like his to this point had been the high cost of energy storage, which he said has come down dramatically because technology has improved with the thriving popularity of electric cars.
He said the firm has also been concentrating on building what he calls “medium wind technology,” compared to the vast turbines used on many large wind farms on P.E.I.
“One hundred kilowatt turbines were standard 30 years back, but now they’re four and five-megawatt turbines, but the 100-kilowatt turbines from 40 years ago or 30 years back, the technology was much less developed than it is now.
Source – cbc.ca
