Hello everybody on HIVE! My name is Jasper and usually I write to you from Cape Town, South Africa... but not today!
I work for a South African division of a German renewable energy company. This week, everybody in the Cape Town office has come to Germany to meet some of our main colleagues here. Other divisions from other markets (Spain, Panama, Canada, Sweden, Turkey) are all coming together to have a company party near the end of the week as well - the first since Covid-19 started, so a happy time for us all to finally meet one another.
On Monday we got to see the inside of a large modern turbine. It’s hard to believe that there are already models coming out that are even larger than this, and tough to predict how much bigger they can possibly get!
Come on the trip up into the sky with me!
It's quite difficult to fit something so big into the photo! The hub and nacelle are 125m above the ground at the top of the tower, and those blades are 75m long!
So here are some of its neighbors from a little bit further away! That powerline would look massive if it weren't for the turbines in comparison.
Perhaps some cars at the base of the turbine we're visiting will help with understanding the size? Actually the cars are on our side of the turbine and would look smaller if they were right next to it... haha!
Now we are inside, at the bottom, and looking up - the cables are for a tiny elevator that can fit two people. If that elevator were to break down, well there's (gulp) the 125m ladder with a safety cable to escape back down to the ground!
The elevator is quite slow and takes several minutes to get to the top
Now we are at the top inside the nacelle - through the wall is the rotor hub where the 3 blades connect. A type of shaft that spins (because of the wind blowing the blades around) is coming through the wall underneath the steel platform
This shaft goes into a gear-box (blue), where a massive gear cog turns medium, and then small, gear cogs to significantly increase the speed of the final spinning shaft, which is then fed into the electricity generator (black). The electricity is then put into a transformer to step up the voltage all the way to 24kV. The electricity is then fed into a very thick bunch of cables that is sent down the middle to the bottom of the tower. From there, the powerline will be sent underground until it reaches the site substation where another transformer will step up the voltage to match the large powerline in the area (where the electricity, from all of the turbines in the wind farm, connects to the grid)
Let's poke my head out to see the view - notice I'm wearing a harness and I'm clipped to an anchor for safety
The blade looks strangely disproportionate from this angle as it goes from quite close to 75m away. If you look closely you will see many more turbines in the distance beyond the two you can see easily. This part of Northern Germany has many, many windfarms and, along with Denmark just to the North, was basically where wind energy was pioneered in the first place!
I hope you enjoyed my photos, and that my explanation was easy to understand? Shout if you have any questions and let's see if I know how to answer them!
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