This saturday I had the opportunity to take a bus tour sponsered by IEEE Chicago Section and Chicago PES to the Twin Groves Wind Farm. The bus tour was nicely organized. I met many interesting people including students at iit from foreign countries. Some of them were in some of my masters classes but they're going for their PH.D's and doing research. One guy we talked about the differences between the US and Iran. I think it is interesting how there are many students from Iran studying in the US, especially power engineering. Also there were many chinese and asian students. IIT has a lot of international students.



We had an excellent tour guide from Horizon Energy and it was nice of them to allow us to tour the wind turbines. I learned a lot from the manufacturers website but I did not reliaze the size and awe of these wind turbines until I saw them up close and better yet when their parts were on the ground to be constructed. the individual blades for the tubines looked as big as a plane!

I have many photos in my photo gallery. One gentleman was nice enough to take some photos and e-mail them to me. My camera batteries died about half-way through the tour.




This is me standing outside the service door and compartment for the wind farm individual turbine. Each unit has their own SCADA controls, generator, and meters that say what the speed it, how much energy is being generated, and the motor drive outputs of the generators. This is sophisticated technology in a sense that the generators and motor drive controls maintain synchronism with the grid. The output of the generator unit is 600 V and it gets transformed to 34.5 kV and networked with the rest of the tubrines and then stepped up to 345kV and then connected to the ComEd substation for interrconnection. Part of my job I get to see the metering at all the individual substations. Kind of geeky cool. I love it :)



This last photo I was amazed at how big these parts are! I imagine it must be fun to construct these wind farms and wish I was part of it!