Cost effective fully fed wind turbine HTS generator: An alternative to existing generators in offshore wind farms

The Wind Industry has been focusing more on offshore wind farms for the last 10 years. Since from the commercialization, the wind industry has been changing towards market trends and become market driven too. Current research is focusing on, how to reduce the downtime due to the system components like gearbox and environment conditions like harsh weather and inaccessibility factor. A suitable means is required to have a reliable operation of the wind farm/wind turbine with better efficiency and less cost. Hence High Temperature Superconductivity (HTS) based machines replacing the existing one will be more compact and with direct drive configuration will eliminate the gearbox problems. The cost of HTS wires can be reduced by volume/bulk production and thus optimized system design with low cost has been achieved. This paper compares all possible configurations and describes how renewable energy generator units can be simplified in order to bring manufacturing & maintenance costs down and increase reliability which is of utmost importance for remote and offshore farms.