UPDATE : 12/21/10 - Redriven no longer gets their turbines from the SWG - Yangzhou Shenzhou Company. More than a year ago they started making their own parts in China. Redriven has their own factory in China run by Cameron Grant. None of the parts of my turbine are manufactured by SWG - Yangzhou Shenzhou Company.
Paul Gipe is
THE authority on Wind power. In his book,
Wind Power, he says “ Rotor diameter says it all”. What you are looking for is energy not power. Your ability to capture the wind’s energy is what is important. Of course hub height is also important. The trade off with hub height is the ability to service the turbine. We settled for 80ft in order to get the ability for a hydraulic tilt up tower.
Gipe also says that the power curves given by manufactures are just “informed guess work” and should be viewed with “ a good dose of skepticism.”
The power curve is made up of:
Star-up Speed (starts turning)
Cut-in Speed (start producing power)
Rated speed (speed that it reaches is rated power)
Peak power (Max power it can produce)
Cut-out speed (Speed that the generator stop producing power and go into protection mode)
Furling Speed (For turbines with tail vanes)
Wind Speed Bin (A way to produce discrete data from continuous data)
The Redriven Turbine’s published data in this area is superior to other 10KW turbines. Longer blade diameter, low start up wind speed the ability extend the peak power with the active yaw points to a better performing wind turbine.
However! Another big consideration is reliability. Everyone expects to get many years out of a wind turbine. This is my biggest concern in picking the Redriven product. It is very new and doesn’t have a proven track record of performance. If the product has many issues, will Redriven and my installer be able to be able to keep the installed based operational and be profitable during the five year warrantee period. Will we be able to get parts to keep the turbine working long enough to get our investment back?
I started my investigation trying to find out about the Chinese company that make Redriven’s turbine. I did a search with the terms Redriven and China and came up with shipping documents
http://www.importgenius.com/importers/redriven.html
Yangzhou Shenzhou shipping to Redriven in Canada.
As soon as you go to the SWG - Yangzhou Shenzhou web site it is clear that is the Redriven product. Same look, same tower, same hydraulic lifting mechanism.
http://www.f-n.cn/
I did some investigation on the Internet and found that Redriven’s supplier is SWG - Yangzhou Shenzhou. They have been in business for 12 years. ISO 9000 certified.
One of the best sites for seeing the product that the Chinese manufacturer sells that I have found is
http://www.evolvegreen.ca/catalog/item/6319999/6614526.htm
They have many manufacture PDFs
http://shenzhougenerator.en.alibaba.com/
also shows the wind turbines.
