Ronan Daly is a wind engineer. He studied engineering in college and he enjoys his job, working with a wind farm developer in West Cork.

“We’re very lucky in Ireland,” he says. “We’ve got a great wind resource, considered one of the best in Europe because it’s on the western edge of the continent.”

There are lots of ways to generate electricity and scientists are always looking for ways to replace gas-belching power plants with more efficient methods. One of the cleanest forms
of power generation is wind farms, which use giant turbines to harness the power of the wind.

Wind farm location

Ronan is involved in the whole process of building a wind farm – from speaking to the farmers with suitable land to dealing with environmental issues and deciding where the turbines go, how big they should be and what way to angle them. His company, SWS, has wind farms all over Ireland.

The tiny bit of information needed is the wind speed. “This is an anemometer which can record the wind speed,” says Ronan. “Generally you need a year of wind data in order to fully analyse a site. We start using computer models to actually try and determine the wind resource at the site. Then that’s when you start working on the layouts and you can see the potential energy.”

There are some key factors which decide where you can put a wind farm, such as:

• How windy the site is
• The planning climate in the area – are there houses or protected structures nearby?
• Is the location near the electricity grid?
• Is there good access to the site?

Giant turbines

So how do the turbines on a wind farm work? “Blades capture the energy in the wind and convert it into electricity via a generator mounted on the top of the tower,” says Ronan. “Each turbine weighs 110 tonnes and has a capacity of 850 kilowatts which is roughly enough to power 600 homes”

Ronan studied engineering at University College Cork. “I decided I’d do civil engineering because I felt it was a good base degree to have,” he says. “I went on to do a master’s then in the sustainable energy research group. I’m surprised at how much of what I learned keeps reoccurring.”

“Working in renewable energy is doing some good for the planet and for society in general. It’s trying to combat some of the damage that we’ve been doing for the last few decades,” he says.

Learn more:

Read more about wind farms on science.ie
[http://www.science.ie/scopetv/content/content.asp?section_id=670]

Find out the benefits of wind farms and how to develop one