FUNDAMENTALMENTE ENERGIA » Antarctica http://alishakhtur.com Ideas y Experiencias Sobre el Mercado Global de Energía Sun, 20 May 2012 11:00:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Antarctic wind farm to test limits of renewable energy technology http://alishakhtur.com/2010/01/19/antarctic-wind-farm-to-test-limits-of-renewable-energy-technology/ http://alishakhtur.com/2010/01/19/antarctic-wind-farm-to-test-limits-of-renewable-energy-technology/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:00:48 +0000 Ali Shakhtur http://alishakhtur.com/?p=394 The world’s southernmost wind farm has been opened in Antarctica and is providing power to New Zealand’s Scott Base and the US McMurdo Station. The three-turbine Ross Island wind farm, in a region where winter temperatures can approach -60 Celsius, is designed to supply about 11 per cent of the power used by the bases, cutting their diesel consumption by a projected 463,000 litres per year.

There is still a large experimental aspect to operating wind turbines under such extreme conditions. “The philosophy is to get this one up and running, get it operating for a year, and it can show us the way forward,” Scott Bennett, the project manager with Meridian Energy, told Reuters.

Meridian Energy is the New Zealand government-owned power company that built and runs the turbines.

The Ross Island wind farm is not Antarctica’s first wind-power installation. That honour goes to Australia’s Mawson Station, which has two turbines up and running.

We wish both projects well. If successful, they could pave the way for wind turbines to replace fossil fuel-fired generators at many remote resource extraction projects. That includes mines in chilly parts of Canada and China that produce the metals used in solar cells.

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