Green Leaf Report

I arrived today at the WindPower 2008 conference in Houston - I’m so excited to attend!  So far we’ve only attended for one partial day, but I’ve already met some great new people and learned things about wind that I didn’t know I didn’t know.

After our registration, we headed over to the poster exhibit- this was the most technical display I’ve seen in a long time.  It was a very well laid out exhibit- grouped by Operations & Maintenance, Project Development, and many other categories: exhibitors showed both theoretical and practical wind applications on their posters.  I learned about the reasonable hurricane risks for on-shore Texas coastal wind towers, as well as the Delaware perceived tourism risk for off-shore wind development. 

I liked the dampening controls dreamed up by Clipper engineer Khanh Nguyen to reduce wear on the wind turbines, and I also enjoyed hearing an Engineering Professor for Milwaukee give me an esoteric explanation of his on poster, and then tell me that the poster of the gentleman across the aisle was ‘impossible.’  Maybe we’ll see fists flying tomorrow.

In the exhibition hall, Vestas has a two story booth that I might like to live in- they also have a truck out front of the convention center holding an enormous single wind blade.  This convention is just huge, with over 10,000 listed attendees.  there’s a separate job fair area also- I’m building a list of skills under demand.  I’ve also asked multiple vendors their feelings on the political risk associated with tax rebates for the industry.  More will be coming tomorrow…