The third week of January was a windy one in the Netherlands. This was a great test for our 3 m wind turbine on its wooded tower that we build last summer (see earlier post). The wooden tower is a self supporting structure and it has a certain flexibility; the tower moved and bended slightly at high wind speed, but remained undamaged.
We do not have a wind speed measurement system installed at the wind turbine in Delft yet, so we do not know exactly what wind speeds the turbine did face during this week. In the neighborhood there is an official measurement station of the Dutch metrological institute KNMI where wind speed is measured at 10 m height in the open field near the airport of Rotterdam. This measurement can be used as a reference for the situation in Delft, although our turbine hub height is a little bit higher and is not in the open field; there are some trees nearby at the south. The average wind direction during this week was south-west.
The graph of the average wind speed at a 1 hour interval during this period is shown below:
The average wind speed during this week was 9 m/s and the turbine produced a total of 53 kWh in one week. To total energy produced from the final installation in September 2014 is over 250 kWh now, this week had a large contribution to this!