Wind Power in Spain

In Spain, Gamesa Eólica has grown to become the country's largest turbine manufacturer and the second largest in the world. Company sources say that a number of factors have led the company to take the lead. For one, they say, they have vertically integrated within Spain, designing the individual components and overseeing the manufacture of nearly all of them in the country.

To edge ahead of the competition, Gamesa Eólica has focused on pitch technology, in which blades can rotate by fractions of a degree to best take advantage of the wind speed, or to slow down to prevent a power overload. In addition, the company integrates variable speed into all turbines.

Gamesa Eólica believes that Spain's unique geography also provides a benefit to Spanish companies competing in the international market. As one Gamesa Eólica source put it, "Spain is a complex terrain, so our turbines have been reinforced to cope with that. Spain has many more mountains or hilly areas than central Europe, and this has helped us to design robust turbines that we can build anywhere in the world."

Although it is a much smaller company, Ecotecnia, Spain's second-largest turbine manufacturer, is highly competitive, focusing on reducing the weight of its turbines. They are currently developing a three-megawatt turbine with 100-meter blades, the largest of its line, that will be installed in early 2006. This giant turbine is designed for flat plains, where the increased height allows the turbine to take advantage of stronger winds. Like Gamesa Eólica, Ecotecnia is expanding around the Mediterranean region and into Asian and American markets.

Ecotecnia director Martinez says they're also researching new technologies that take advantage of minute changes in the wind and can cope with split-second outages in power. In the past, such dips in voltage, caused by brief failures in a traditional power plant or a disturbance such as a tree falling on a power line, would cause a wind turbine to disconnect from the grid.

Among the other manufacturers, MTorres stands out for its innovative technology. Its gearless and pitch-controlled windmills claim to increase performance and reliability, reducing maintenance costs. Furthermore, their offshore projects merge clean power resources with seawater desalination.

Challenges Ahead

Hurdles remain in the effort to make wind power even more successful in four main areas: variability, grid issues, centralized control center, and meteorological prediction.

Critics of wind power point to the inherent variability of the energy source as one of the main stumbling blocks to integrating it into the existing system. Yet the integration of wind in Spain has proven that variability is not such an impossible challenge.

"It's something of a red herring," said Real de Azua of AWEA. "No matter what new technology you bring on, a new nuclear plant or anything else, there's always the possibility that it's going to break down at some point, or be taken off the line for repairs and maintenance. No matter what, you have to have some margin of safety, of different types of plants that can meet the supply."

Godfrey Chua of Emerging Energy Research acknowledges that variability is a hurdle that wind power must overcome around the world. "The point is that wind power was never presented as the one power source, replacing all nuclear or coal. It's really meant to be complementary," said Chua.

In fact, while Spain has already reached 6 percent of energy needs supplied by wind power, on certain windy days the sector can meet almost one-quarter of the country's power demand.