By Michael Sauerbier
Our wind farms will soon have an upper floor! Researchers in Brandenburg are testing the wind conditions at a height of 300 meters using the world’s largest met mast. The first results promise a lot.
Large train station in small Klettwitz (6000 inhabitants, Oberspreewald-Lausitz). Researchers, politicians and entrepreneurs are celebrating the future of wind power on a former opencast mining dump near the Lausitzring. In the middle of the forest, the Dresden company Gicon built Brandenburg’s tallest structure within four months: the world’s largest wind measuring mast.
The steel giant is peppered with sensors from the ground up to 300 meters away. They measure wind strength and direction, air pressure and humidity, temperature and even bat flights. The data should answer the question: Is it worth building wind turbines that are twice as high as before?
Martin Chaumet from the Federal Agency for Leap Innovations shows the first results. “At an altitude of 300 meters, the wind blows on average 50 percent stronger than at 100 meters,” says Chaumet, “the power output is three times as high there – and twice as high as at 150 meters.”
The new findings have drastic consequences. “High wind turbines can generate electricity almost anywhere,” says Chaumet happily, “for example next to large industrial plants like BASF in Ludwigshafen. Greetings from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg!”
Where there are already wind farms, State Secretary for Economic Affairs Michael Kellner (Greens) wants to “put in another floor with the high propellers – for more electricity yield on the same area.”
Gicon boss Jochen Großmann was already convinced by the first measurement data. “Next spring,” he promises, “we will build the first 300-meter high wind turbine in Klettwitz!” It’s a worthwhile deal: With double the electricity yield, the construction costs are only 50 percent higher than for a 150-meter wheel.