Product Pick of the Week - Superconductors for efficient wind energy plants

An efficient, robust, and compact wind power plant with a 10 MW superconducting generator is being developed by partners from industry and science within the recently established EU project SUPRAPOWER.

Superconduction enables considerable savings of energy and raw materials. Within SUPRAPOWER, researchers at KIT’s Institute for Technical Physics (ITEP) develop a rotating cryostat cooling the superconducting coils down to minus 253°C – a temperature crucial for electric current flow without resistance.

Wind power will make a major contribution to the energy turnaround. Efficient power generation by means of offshore power plants requires powerful, reliable generators that do not cause disproportionately high logistic efforts and do not require complex foundations.

Using generators with superconductors, performance can be increased to 10 MW while at the same time reducing the units’ weights and sizes. Besides, superconducting generators can be built with less than one hundredth of the quantity of rare earths required for manufacturing the currently most frequently used permanent magnet generator. Superconduction, hence, allows setting up of efficient, robust, and compact wind power plants at reduced building, operating, and maintenance costs.