By Tina Casey, Cleantechnica 

Now is the time for the US distributed wind industry to blossom and spread its tiny turbines across the land. Coal has collapsed in a steaming heap, the COVID-19 crisis has stomped all over the market for oil and gas, and the burning of the US west coast will most likely convince more people to pay more attention to the benefits of smaller wind turbines. Here to help do the convincing is the US Department of Energy, which apparently did not get the memo about saving all those coal jobs.

Small wind turbines are the focus of a push to grow the distributed wind sector in the US, with help from the Energy Department (screenshot courtesy of Bergey Windpower).

The Case For Distributed Wind & Tiny Wind Turbines

To be clear, the distributed wind sector is not confined to tiny turbines, or even small or mid-sized turbines. The defining factor is how the turbines are used. In the view of the Energy Department, distributed wind refers to turbines that are used for on-site electricity generation, for example at a farm, a medical center, or a school campus. Also included in the category are wind turbines that support a local distribution grid.

Although large-scale turbines of 8-10 megawatts and more could come under that definition, much of the distributed wind focus is on the small and mid-sized turbine categories. That includes everything under the 1-megawatt marker and all the way down into the micro scale range measured in a handful of kilowatts.

So, who needs a tiny wind turbine in their backyard? Though some urban and suburban locations fit the bill, a primary focus is on rural households as well as farmers and other rural businesses. The Energy Department has been making a big deal about distributed wind because it can assist economies in far flung areas where major new transmission infrastructure is expensive or impractical.

Beyond its application to rural economic growth, a strong US distributed wind industry would support extra resiliency and reliability for both local communities and the national grid, as an element in the Energy Department’s broader focus on grid modernization and  distributed energy resources.

The agency is also promoting the US distributed wind industry as job-creating agent for both the domestic and export markets, helping to boost the nation’s wind manufacturing profile globally.

More & Better & Smaller Wind Turbines

Up through the last century, the small wind turbine category was hobbled by an unregulated, wild-west environment that left plenty of room for overstated promises, if not outright hucksterism. Now it’s the 21st century, and the small wind industry has matured with new certification and standardization measures supported by the American Wind Energy Association.

That leaves the challenge of bringing turbine costs down to a competitive level, and that’s where the Energy Department’s Competitiveness Improvement Project comes in. CIP is a cost-sharing program launched in 2013 under the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with the aim of accelerating deployment of small and mid-sized wind turbines.

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In the most recent development on the turbine cost-cutting score, last month NREL selected seven US  wind firms for funding through CIP. None of them have crossed the CleanTechnica radar before, which just goes to show how quickly the industry has been growing while we weren’t looking.

The selection also demonstrates that the small wind sector can generate electricity and jobs all over the US, and not just in the wind-rich midsection.

Two Vermont firms are included in the mix. The CIP funding will enable Star Wind (aka Star Wind Turbines) to take steps toward certifying its uniquely styled 45 kilowatt, “low-wind-speed-optimized, six-bladed horizontal-axis wind generator,” explains NREL.

United Wind LLC will polish off its prototype “Class III rotor, advanced system controls, and integrated storage for the XANT M 95-kW wind generator, allowing this system to provide expanded grid services and creating an autonomous 100-kW energy system” (note: as of this writing, unitedwind.com redirects to Ecocycle).

Pennsylvania also lays claim two of the chosen ones. Matric Limited (aka Matric Group) is working on the wind power inverter end of things, which is important because wind turbines produce electricity in direct current (DC) mode, and you need an inverter to switch onto alternating current (AC)

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