When size mattersWords: Harry Kyogoku, Zephyr Corporation

70 PES: EUROPE

CORPORATEFOCUS

When it comes to creating renewable energy, the Zephyr Corporation has learnt that size is now more important than ever before. Founded in 1997, the Japanese firm’s success has soared with a continued growth in sales of their Micro Wind Generators and Airdolphin models. With the European market top of their agenda, the corporation’s success shows no signs of slowing down, however, Harry Kyogoku explains why they are interested in selling a little closer to home.

At Zephyr, our aim is to encourage growth within the domestic market and this is looking more and more likely. The private sector accounts for 40% of total sales of Zephyr in Japan, with their attentions steered firmly toward the environment. The public sector, including government and municipalities make up a further 20%, as do schools, and the remaining 20% is bought by customised applications such as: mountain lodges, remote surveillance monitors and emergency use.

Despite having been established for more than 20 years, the small wind generator (SWG) market is still to get off the ground on a global basis. However, as the recent entry of powerful new products in progress in Europe, USA and Japan has shown, the small wind market is now starting to show healthy growth on an annual basis of more than 30%, and it could account for 600 million to 1 billion euros of business by 2015 if certain conditions were fulfilled.

Action

If action were taken to ensure industry standards were met to protect consumers from purchasing poorly configured SWG’s, which exceed Betz limits or total kinetic energy in the wind, then the cause of detrimental damage to the market could be largely avoided. For example, performance specs on the amount of actual, measured output power (not theoretical), noise level and safely features (actually tested) must always appear on the brochure so that customers can make the right choices from a variety of products.

The challenges we face are the fact that SWGs are still downplayed as quite a few products have been offered by optimistic manufactures with little design knowledge and experience. There is still a lack of gate-keeping mechanisms for safety and basic robustness within the industry, and if this practice prevails, then the quality level and the capacity factor of generators could reach the level of practical use by all domestic as well as industry users.

There should also be a continuous and healthy entry of new and powerful products and states and governments should provide various incentive/ subsidy and support programs. In Japan, for example, the government subsidy programme for SWG’s is almost ready to take off this year, which reminds us of the PV incentive programmes in Japan a decade ago which propelled a small PV business society to major global industry. With international as well as local wind industry associations the domestic market growth could really take off.

As an EWEA member, we are anxious to work with members to enable small wind business to grow in Europe.

Airdolphin noise

The subject of noise pollution from the turbines is always a popular complaint and the typical reaction of engineers who respond to customer complaints of “too much noise” is usually to reduce the spinning speed or to change the shape of the blades at the expense of losing

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generating power and efficiency. However, one of our younger engineers finally found inspiration from nature, owls to be specific. The wings of the birds allow them to soar to their prey without their wings making any noise. After studying and emulating the shape of the wings, the spinning noise of the blades was drastically reduced by 35db or more. This makes our original ‘Silent Disruptor’ blades much more suited to urban locations as the level is practically below that of environmental noise.

IT technology

IT technology has enabled us to collect generated power and weather data to measure continuous output power: per hour, per day, per week, per month and per year and to judge the efficiency and the capacity factor per single generator or as a multiple number on wind farms. This continuous monitoring of the operation of all turbines for remote diagnosis and quick maintenance services is useful for wind farm operations. Zephyr’s original bi-directional spinning control system enables the generators to optimize the generated power by adjusting the internal software of each generator from the remote site even after they are installed. Anti-vandalization modules can be incorporated whenever needed and then the location of each turbine can always be remotely traced.

Challenging PV market

Among the exclusive performance features of Airdolphins, we are emphasising that our company is challenging the PV market with its small wind systems which out performs PV in terms of efficiency and capacity factor under the average wind speed of more than 4.5–5.0m/s and occupies far less space for installation. Although our systems are inherently complementary with the PV systems when they are combined as hybrid systems. Our systems are also complimentary with the large wind systems especially where the power transmission lines are not available, where the scenic beauty has to be preserved, or on the high elevation sites .

The challenges we face are the fact that SWGs are still down played as quite a few products have been offered by optimistic manufactures with little design knowledge and experience. There is still a lack of gate-keeping mechanism for safety and basic robustness within the industry, and as an EWEA member, we are anxious to work with members to enable small wind business to grow in Europe.

Exclusive dynamic wind energy “captureability”

Exclusive dynamic wind energy “captureability” of Airdolphin wind generators offers instantaneous power generation of say, 1,000 watts or more, at turbulent wind flow of 0.3 of one second as the feather-like low-mass blades can react to it. The patent applied swing rudder can also react to sudden changes of wind directions and quickly follow those changes, generating the maximum amount of electricity all the time. Airdolphin maintains power generation from a breeze, to 50 m/s gale winds thanks to our original spinning control software. The capacity factor beyond 20 m/s maintains as high as 60%. (Our beta-site test results proved that the capacity factor of Airdolphin in many cases exceeds that of large wind generators.)

One Airdolphin wind generator can generate 700 kWh to 1.0MWh under 4.5 to 6.5 m/s wind speed, although the same average wind speed does not always give you the same result at the same location due to fluctuations in average wind speed during each given time frame.

Global warming

We are committed to fighting global warming. According to the IEA report on the CO2 Emmisions from Fuel Combustion 2005, Japan produces 0.39 Kg of CO2 to generate 1kWh of electricity. Based on this data, one set of Airdolphin could reduce 300Kg to 450 Kg of CO2. As the wind speed goes up, the amount increases in a cubic scale.

Small scale wind farm

We are working on the plan of a major Japanese electronic manufacturer, which has 500+ branch offices and factories in Japan, to install two Airdolphins in each facility which will add up to 1,000+ Airdolphins running annually. The output power data will be accumulated through the Internet at their headquarters in Tokyo. This is a different type of wind farm concept, and the plant is expected to generate 1.2GWh of electricity which is equivalent to the same amount of electricity used by 400 households in Japan and reduces more than 500 tons of CO2 a year. Naturally, the concept of small wind farms has many possibilities, one of which is “Off-shore SWG plant”. Since an Airdolphin as a module weighs only 17.5Kg, you could install and stack even thousands of them on the floating platform. The height of the masts do not have to be as tall as the wind force near the sea surface is as high as higher elevation points.

The trends

The problems surrounding the SWG’s have included them not generating enough power, producing too much noise vibrating too much. They have also broken down in the past due to strong wind conditions and all of these factors have led to a loss in consumer confidence. Recent trends seem to be moving sideways in terms of design development, with the focus being placed on the wrong areas. Although the market should be left open for new designs, our concept, from the very beginning of the Airdolphin project which started in 2002, has been to get the best possible part of wind energy potential, and to design a product which has the lowest possible mass and highest wind energy conversion efficiencies (we have defined it as “the best dynamic wind captureability”) to accomplish the best possible capacity factor.

The global wind business still has a strong potential to keep growing, not only in Europe but also worldwide. The small wind market has the potential to at an even higher rate, not only in the grid-tie market in Europe and America but in stand-alone grid systems. Recently, Zephyr and SMA in Germany have agreed to work jointly and develop these markets together on an international basis. We are also looking at offshore small wind farm concept because of its economy, ease of construction, including the use of floating platforms or boats, and have started investigating its possibilities with the Japanese government as well as the UK, Malaysia and Singapore. Small offshore wind farms are a good low-cost alternative, especially where there is not much shallow underwater plane available in countries like Japan.

For the immediate future, America, Europe and Middle to East Asia, including Japan, will become another important market for its wind potential and the size of GDP, especially the USA and Canada. Other markets such as Africa will be the type of business on a project basis, but the potential is again huge.

As if to drive home the importance of size, recently we have reached an agreement with the “Wild Bird Society of Japan” to confirm that they have not received a single report of Zephyr’s 4,000 wind generators installed in Japan killing a bird for the past ten years!! The reason seems to be that, unlike large models, birds can see the whole running shape of small generators and that the generators seem to look like enemy birds. ■

Harry Kyogoku is General Manager of the Zephyr Corporation, for further information email kyogoku@zephyreco.co.jp

PES: EUROPE 71

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