Good winds blow on ATB wind power. The turbines installed last year started to give back very positive data that, together with the prospects opened by the recent publication of the Decree on Renewables in Italy as well as a growing need of energy independence, especially in the international scenario, portray an encouraging context for the development of this business. The technology developed by the ATB Group Renewables Division shows excellent performance, especially as regards the ATB 60.28, a direct transmission turbine with a nominal power of 60 kW and a Ø28 m rotor.
This is evident from the annual data taken from the Cancellara wind site, in the Province of Potenza, collected from June 2018 to May 31st 2019, one of the five systems installed last year between Campania and Sicily. After the first set-up stage, the machine started to be fully operational, generating in this area, where the average wind is around 6 metres per second, almost 3200 hours per year, with a capacity factor close to 40%. Based on the statistics supplied by the GSE (Italian Energy Service Manager), the system is included in that 10% of wind farms that today represents excellence, in terms of production reached, with a power up to 60 kW that are currently operational in Italy.
«We are proud of the results obtained which are perfectly in line with the expectations; expectations based on theoretical models but that are also now materialised by the operation of the machine«, explains Marco Corsetti, General Manager of the Wind Power Division of ATB Renewables. The numbers also reflect efficient and proactive management of the maintenance that, if any type of stop occurred, has been able to reduce as much as possible the response times thanks to the remote and direct support on site: enhanced responsiveness translates into greater availability and production of the turbine.
«This is reward for the enormous efforts made in research and development to constantly upgrade products». «According to the findings we can see that the machine manages to reach a nominal power of 60 kW already at 6/6.5 metres per second, doing better than the theoretical power curve (graph 1)», continues Corsetti. According to the monthly production table (graph 2), the Cancellara system reached the peak of production in March 2019, when 25 thousand kW per hour was reached, while during the rest of the year, the mean had been around 20 thousand per hour monthly. The characteristics of ATB's 'small one' perfectly satisfy the requirements of demanding clients that cannot allow any machine downtime or inefficiencies at all.
«After a long wait, the ministerial decree was finally approved in Italy; it encourages the production of energy from renewable sources», adds the manager. The provision has revised the power classes, raising the levels of excellence from 60 to 100 kW, and from this point of view, we as manufacturers have arrived with a good preparation. When we developed the concept of the ATB 60.28, we started from the idea of offering the market a robust turbine, scalable in terms of power and highly technological. The turbine was oversized to be able to respond to the different energy demands, and therefore, we did not have any problems to adapt the turbine to the new size». The 60.28 and the 100.28 are in fact two identical machines, except for the power of the generator and of the inverter. Furthermore, in the engineering departments of the Renewables Division, we have worked a lot of work in the last couple of months in order to optimisation of these machines technologically speaking. Among the most evident improvements, we can mention the increase of the machine cut out, which went from 19 to 25 metres per second.
«What do we expect in the future? We are sure that we will be able to create a product that, as it already happened with the 60 kW, will feature excellent performance and will fully satisfy the market demands, concludes Corsetti. «Confident of the prospects, we have already started the production of the new machines that will be installed in 2020».
