Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [119]
On paper, the 33M-VS was capable of making electrical power for five cents per kilowatt-hour. Five cents wasn’t just cheap: It was fossil-fuel cheap. The company promoted the new innovation as the Five-Cent Turbine and treated it as a technological savior for the problems besetting the wind industry in particular and renewable energy more broadly.2 “For years, the wind industry’s goal has been to produce power at rates similar to oil’s: roughly a nickel for a kilowatt. Machines now operating in California can produce energy at 7 cents per kW,” Time summarized. “In areas of consistent high winds, the next generation, currently being deployed, will bring that cost down to 5 cents by 1995.”3
The 33M-VS was the leading light of that next generation. With a name that evokes a spy plane or a sports car, the turbine had cost $70 million to develop at a time when being a millionaire still meant something. It was bigger than its predecessors and produced three times more power than Kenetech’s previous generation.
Aside from the size, it didn’t look much different from what most people know as a modern wind turbine: white and oblong with three thin blades facing into the wind. What mattered was the insides. Thanks to a completely redesigned electrical system, the 33M-VS was going to use the wind’s gustiness, not fight it. In handing Kenetech their environmental innovation award for 1993, Discover magazine rhapsodized,
Unlike previous turbines, the 33M-VS is rigged to roll with the wind’s punches. When gusts whip the rotor, the generator shaft is free to speed up in response. As the shaft’s rotation speed changes with the wind, the alternating current that flows from the generator swings up and down in frequency. But between the generator and the utility grid lies an electronic power converter. This device first converts the variable-frequency current to direct current, then switches it back to alternating current at a fixed 60 cycles per second. So the generator feeds an even current to the utility grid. And the wind gust problems—wear and tear and wasted energy—have all but blown away.4
During the first wind-power boom, engineers discovered all sorts of things about how strange, powerful, and three-dimensional the wind is. In some of those early places like the Altamont Pass, the movement of air from the cool Pacific into the warm San Joaquin Valley shredded the first machines put in its path.
The worst part was that in those extra-strong gusts of winds was where the most electricity was to be had. The power in the wind varies with the cube of its speed, so if we power ten lightbulbs at one speed, we can power eighty at double that speed.5 Makers of electricity-producing turbines had long been hamstrung, though. They couldn’t use the upper range, or the lower for that matter. They had to design for the middling wind because electricity is generated by the smooth, steady rotation of special magnets. Give those magnets the jitters and the power quality degrades. Given that wind power already had a spotty reputation with the utilities, turbine makers had to sacrifice production to ensure that they delivered the steady electricity required by the grid.
So no matter how fast the wind blew on almost all the turbines designed in the 1980s, the rotor, which is the part of the turbine that transmits mechanical energy to the generator, had to rotate at the same speed. If the wind blew too fast, the machines had to be slowed down at just the moment when they would have been producing the most electricity. 6 But with its new power electronics, the 33M-VS was going to change all that.
The company’s (in)famously confident management team was more than happy to tell investors that their new machine was going to revolutionize the wind industry. On October 12, 1992, the company held an initial public stock offering. Though they intended only to sell one million shares at about $10 a piece,