Lightning Protection for Wind Turbines

29th International Conference
Lightning Protection for Wind Turbines
June 23-26, 2008
Uppsala, Sweden

 

 

Wind turbines are the fastest growing source of electrical energy, with annual growth rates of about 30% in recent years, totaling 94 GW generator capacity installed world-wide by the end of 2007. More than 20GW of wind power was installed in 2007, which was also the year when the USA became the biggest market for wind power, with 5.2GW of new wind power generation capacity, followed by Spain, China, India and Germany.

In terms of lightning protection these numbers would translate into tens of thousands of tall structures, each of an average height of more than one hundred yards, placed at windy locations and therefore very exposed to lightning. Given the frequency of lightning occurrences in the regions of the world where this new expansion is taking place, all these new wind turbines will be hit several times by lightning during the 20 years in service life.

This makes lightning protection an important challenge, and it is obvious that given the numbers of wind turbines now being installed, it cannot be done on an individual wind turbine basis, but has to be met by the wind turbine industry by implementing standardized lightning protection in their series-produced machines.

Click here to read the paper written after the 29th International Conference that took place in Sweden (may take some time depending on your internet speed - 16 pages, and 1.29MB).

In this paper, the IEC TC88 project team 24 takes the reader on a brief tour of the new update of the IEC 61400-24, and includes an introduction to fundamental wind turbine anatomy.