Wind turbines are at the heart of D&WS's business and central to our philosophy.
Our approach is to offer our clients the best wind turbine technology for a certain project and even before price is considered we examine issues such as climate, logistics, servicing and maintenance, longevity, reliability and survivability. In our systems the wind turbines are a key generation component to be relied on - not simply a gimmick - and we strive to deliver a product with the lowest life cycle costs, based on running for twenty years.
D&WS offers a range of turbine sizes, models and brands. These include machines from as small as 20KW up to giants of nearly 2MW; constant speed and inverter coupled variable speed units; and turbines on stand alone and large interconnected grids. D&WS has no direct affiliation with any particular wind turbine company, but we have established good relationships with a number of these and found their products very suitable for the clients we service.
D&WS have long term operational experience with Westwind wind turbines (most recently at Exmouth and for Cocos Islands), Vestas wind turbines (at Esperance) and ENERCON wind turbines (in Denham, Esperance, Hopetoun and Albany). We are also examining the use of special large cyclonic wind turbines from Vergnet for several sites and hope to see the first use of these novel turbines in Australia in the near future.
For grid connected wind farms we strive to provide a wind turbine that can add value to the network into which it is connected. We have, for example, researched and developed voltage control technology which can limit the impact of a wind farm on the local distribution system. We are also currently developing an embedded wind/diesel technology which can be used to defer costly network upgrades - this is known as an "end of grid product" and is being investigated for a project at Bremer Bay in Western Australia (Bremer Bay).
On stand alone systems, the wind turbine is a fuel saver and its input size depends on the type of generation portfolio already there, the diurnal match of wind speeds with load and the sophisitication of the control available. Just about anyone can put a wind turbine into a remote diesel or gas system, but running one continuously with up to 80% wind penetration without system outages or voltage variations is much harder. We have been doing this for nearly twenty years now and are experienced with full life cycle issues.
D&WS is also experienced with the planning issues associated with wind farms. In some locations obtaining social, environmental and statutory approval for a wind farm is difficult and costly. However, we have obtained such approvals for single turbines installations and large wind farms, and are skilled in the necessary stakeholder and issues management. In the Downloads section of this site is a paper which discusses our approach to this issue in some detail.
