PERCHED ON THE edge of Boston Harbor in Charlestown is a long white box about the length of a football field. Inside is a testing facility where the Patrick administration hopes the future of wind turbine technology will be discovered.
The Wind Technology Testing Center is the largest facility of its kind in the country, testing turbine blades for manufacturers from across the nation and around the world. It puts each blade through rigorous testing to see if the blade is durable enough to survive the stresses and strains of 20 years of operation.
The facility, a division of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, is part of an effort by the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick to turn the Bay State into a hub for the nation’s wind power industry. Patrick has pushed hard to make Cape Wind the country’s first offshore wind farm, and he’s investing $100 million in a New Bedford marine terminal that he hopes will service Cape Wind and the other offshore wind farms he hopes will follow it. The wind testing center, open for two years, is a beachhead on the wind research front.
“Essentially, why we’re here is to make the existing crop of wind turbines and turbine blades more reliable by thorough testing,” says Rahul Yarala, executive director of the center.
The facility was built with $24.7 million in stimulus funds awarded by the US Department of Energy and a $13.2 million grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. The testing center leases land belonging to the Massachusetts Port Authority.
Yarala says the center is currently earning enough money from its tests to cover 60 percent of its $2.5 million annual operating budget. The center employs nine full-time engineers and technicians and hopes to be self-sufficient within the next year or two, he says.
The facility can test up to three blades at a time, not by spinning them around, but by shaking them up and down and side to side. Testing usually lasts about six months. The facility can handle blades up to 90 meters long, but most of the blades the center has tested so far are between 40 and 50 meters long and weigh between eight and ten tons, Yarala says. It costs about $500,000 to test a 50-meter blade.
The center has tested 11 blades in the past two years and is expecting to test three more this year. The center currently has six active clients and has tested blades produced by General Electric; LM Glasfiber, based in Little Rock, Arkansas; and Blade Dynamics, which is based in London but has a US office in New Orleans.
“We’ve talked to about 10 companies. A couple of them have slowed down, so we’re not seeing any work from them,” Yarala says. “Long term, it’s in that range of 10 to 12.”
Yarala says the test plan for each blade is unique and takes time to plan. At the end of the testing process, most blades are purposely broken in order to learn the blade’s breaking point.
“Our test engineers develop test plans working with customer blade designers,” he says. “When a blade comes in, we spend about a month preparing it.”
The center’s so-called life test measures flap and edge fatigue, which involves swinging the blade up and down or side to side in order to test its durability against wind forces the blade would experience in real-world conditions. Yarala says each blade is swung through a minimum of a million cycles, up and down or side to side, over the testing period, which is an around-the-clock operation.
During the testing process, the blades are covered in sensors so engineers can monitor the blade for any signs of defects. There is even what looks like a remote-controlled car that can drive up to the tip of the blade to check for cracks.
“The engineers can crawl about halfway inside to inspect thoroughly,” Yarala says. “If there’s a small crack, they want to know it before it cultivates into a big one and they can’t salvage it.”
Yarala said that the center is important for companies because the industry is so young, and it costs so much to make even minor repairs once the blades are put into operation.
Matt Kakley, communications coordinator for the Clean Energy Center, says Massachusetts currently spends 80 percent of its energy dollars out of state. He says the Wind Technology Testing Center is part of an effort by the Patrick administration to bring some of those energy dollars back into the state.
“It’s really kind of important for us to take control of that, and try to keep some of that money here and foster renewable energy sources that will help the environment at the same time,” Kakley says. “It’s really been a mainstay of the Patrick-Murray administration.”