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by Cameron Smith
At a test site half way up the eastern side of the Escarpment at Collingwood, where the view over Nottawasaga Bay is stunning, Al Paulissen and John Worts are fussing over a windmill -- a wind turbine they call it -- stretched across the ground like a new-age totem pole at rest.
They had lowered the 30-metre-high, tubular steel pedestal to do a minor adjustment, and now they are trying to thaw a brake cable that runs inside the pedestal up to the wind turbine. While the pedestal was lying on the ground, the cable froze to its side.
For most of the day they’ve had an ancient diesel heater, once used to warm aircraft engines, blowing air into the pedestal from the bottom. They’ve thawed about three-quarters of the distance they have to go.
The structure is hinged at the bottom, so it can be easily raised and lowered. But if the brake doesn’t work, the propeller blades will start turning as it goes up, and that could be dangerous.
It’s minus 15 ° Celsius. Yesterday it was above freezing. Tomorrow it will be minus 25° and colder still overnight. Paulissen and Worts fret, because if the last of the brake cable isn’t thawed before nightfall, they’ll have to start all over again tomorrow. And tomorrow will be colder.
It doesn’t thaw the whole way.
Welcome to Canada and the trials of developing a wind turbine that will work in cold weather.
The frozen cable is only a minor blip in the journey to market. Paulissen and Worts are so close to the end of that journey that they have ten commitments to buy their system.
What makes their wind turbine attractive is that its small and a fraction of the cost of the big, million-dollar wind turbines that we’re used to seeing in photographs, with three propellers thirty metres across. They can produce 600 watts of electricity. This one has a 30-watt capacity and runs on two propellers that are a total of ten metres across.
Because of varying winds in Ontario, the turbine will operate at about 25 per cent of capacity, producing enough electricity for about nine energy efficient homes, each with a family of four.
It will come in two versions, one for $56,000 and the other for $53,000. Remote sites needing electricity are a prime target. But Paulissen and Worts figure the turbine should also be attractive to farmers who have electricity bills of more than $5,500 a year. A farmer could get a tax break for rapid depreciation that would allow the turbine to pay itself off in seven to ten years, they say.
Since it would have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years, a farmer could have free electricity for the next 20 years.
The design is French, developed by Vergnet S.A. located on the outskirts of Paris. Since Vergnet’s sales were mainly to people in remote tropical sites, changes were necessary for coping with Canadian winters.
After spending almost $450,000 -- half of which came in a grant from Natural Resources Canada which wants to see a small, inexpensive turbine on the market -- the alterations are done. And Paulissen and Worts’ company, Wenvor Technologies Inc. of Guelph, has a 65 per cent interest in a Canadian partnership with Vergnet.
To adapt the system, they substituted cold resistant metal alloys for castings that turned brittle in the cold; made propellers of light-weight fibreglass, instead of wood which were noisy and heavy; developed a generator to meet Ontario Hydro’s requirements; cut costs by a third; and added innovations such as a hydraulic damper which, when there is a quick wind change, eases the turbine more gently into its new position.
Everything for the system is manufactured in the Guelph area.
After the two men loaded the aged heater on a trailer, and looked forward to another day battling the cold, I thought there might be a little cursing. But when you’re this close to a goal, I guess you can ignore frozen fingers.
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