The Culture and Market on Wind Project Financing. The French Experience.

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Summary 
 
 
My thesis analyses wind energy under different aspects, particularly I focused on 
the culture and market of wind energy in France. In order to have a real basis for 
analysis, I studied the case of Nordex France S.a.s., a company that produces wind 
turbines and installs wind parks. The most inspiring part for me was that it had a 
specific office dedicated to communicational and educational matters.  This office 
has been in effect for more than 3 years, as an organised structure, in which has 
policies that focuses on bringing awareness about wind energy. Nordex France 
communications concentrates on the following tasks: 
1) the inauguration of wind parks; 
2) pedagogical visits of parks; 
3) fair trade stands; 
4) the opening of the site of Nordex France. 
After the construction of each park, an inauguration takes place. It is an enormous 
event (about six months are necessary to organise each inauguration), with the 
purpose of providing accurate information on wind power. The inauguration has a 
fundamental importance since in that moment there is the active exchange with 
Nordex (through many Nordex s employees) and the community, which ask many 
questions about the park, including wind energy, turbine functionality, and 
avoided pollution thanks to the use of wind power.  
In fact, Nordex strongly believes that the understanding and acceptation of wind 
power to the general public is an investment in creating peace between wind 
turbines and anti-wind citizens.   
The communications  office of Nordex France also organises the parks visits for 
various audiences: for school pupils, chiefs of companies (that are generally 
oriented to invest in wind energy), administration department of the Tower House. 
 
Another peculiarity of this company is Windmoney, a tool for financing the wind 
project. Inserting the relevant data in this program, permits it to have a business 
plan with various provisional information, which is always requested from the 
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invertors, the banks and the other stakeholders that take part in the investment. I 
examined Windmoney of France, afterwards, I started with the analysis of 
Windmoney for the United States (in fact, Nordex is strongly oriented to operate 
in this market). This second analysis took tremendous effort because of the US 
market complexity: there are fifty states and as many wind energy laws and 
territory incentives, there are double taxation laws (national and federal taxes) and 
there are two markets for green certificates (voluntary and compliance markets). 
 
Even though France is not the leading country in the European classification for 
wind power installation, it shows continuous growth each year. Moreover, it 
provided me a good opportunity to study in depth a corporate case and to 
experience a country where wind energy shows favourable consideration.  
 
Writing this thesis was an extraordinary experience for me, since it permitted me 
to plug into a new reality where I could use my previous skills while improving 
my professional and linguistic knowledge.   
 
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Chapter 1 
 
Wind energy 
 
 
1.1 What is wind energy 
 
Today the energy sources used to create electricity differ in many ways, including 
in their environmental impact. Worldwide, conventional source of energy means 
generating electricity by using fossil or nuclear fuels   forms of power generation 
that impact health and the environment through air emissions and other effects.  
 
Electricity markets are changing, however, offering clean ways of producing 
power while giving consumers the possibility of choosing how their power is 
generated. One of these choices is power from renewable sources that is marketed 
as green power. In fact, this kind of power is not involved into greenhouse 
emissions, therefore their impact on the environment is extremely lower than 
conventional energy sources.  
 
One of these renewable sources, and the one that will be studied in detail in this 
analysis, is the energy of wind, or better the power captured from wind. 
 
Wind power is attractive because it is a widely available and renewable source of 
energy that produces neither pollution nor climate-changing greenhouse gases. 
Once the turbines have been installed, the only  fuel  need is wind. And global 
wind resources are so vast that they could easily meet the world s current energy 
needs, at least in theory. In fact, to combat climate change, the European Union 
has set itself the goal of deriving 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 
2020, with a large portion coming from wind power. In America, a recent report 
by the Department of Energy laid out a plan to reach 20% wind power by 2030. 
And these ambitions may be dwarfed by Asia, which seems likely to become the 
biggest market for new wind installations within five years. 
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Wind is a form of solar energy, in which when sunlight heats the Earth, it also 
heats the atmosphere. As hot air rises, cooler, heavier air rushes in to fill its 
place thus creating wind. For more than 2000 years people have captured this 
energy with windmills and used it to do useful things, such as grind grain or pump 
water. By the late 19th century, windmills were also being used to produce 
electricity. Compared with traditional windmills, however, modern wind turbines 
are far more efficient. 
 
 
1.2 The progress of wind energy 
 
Modern wind power got started after the first oil crisis in 1973, when countries 
began to look for ways to generate energy from sources other than fossil fuels. 
Denmark, which was almost entirely dependent on foreign oil for its electricity, 
was hit particularly hard. But it had one abundant potential energy resource: wind. 
So, in the mid-1970s, the country embarked upon an ambitious research project to 
develop the technology. 
America also began research on wind turbines. With funding from the government, 
large organizations such as Boeing, an aerospace giant, and NASA, America s 
space agency, began designing large, multi-megawatt machines. The researches 
were and are still focused on large size turbines, since bigger machines with larger 
rotors sweep a larger area and they can also collect more energy from the wind. 
 
Entrepreneurs and start-ups also began tinkering with designs that appeared on the 
American market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those machines were much 
smaller, and there were a wide variety of them, including models with two-bladed 
rotors spinning about a horizontal axis, and vertical-axis machines. The Danes 
also experimented with different designs, but by the early 1980s a standard 
Danish architecture had emerged: the three-bladed, horizontal-axis, upwind 
machine. 
Two-bladed rotors had some disadvantages. Because they are not as dynamically 
balanced as three-bladed rotors, they are harder to design. They also typically spin 
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faster to extract a similar amount of energy as three-bladed designs, which makes 
them noisier. And people prefer the look of three-bladed rotors. 
 
In the early days, wind turbines operated only at fixed speeds. If the wind became 
too strong, a simple mechanism prevented the blades and rotor from turning any 
faster. A limitation of this design was that the rotor had to be able to cope with 
wind fluctuations without being able to adjust its speed, putting enormous stresses 
on the blades and drive train. And to start with, knowledge about the impact of 
gusts on turbines were limited. To cope with the uncertainty, Danish engineers 
designed turbines conservatively, making them very heavy for their size. 
Over the years, however, scientists at Denmark s Risł National Laboratory and 
other research institutions conducted tests which helped them develop 
mathematical models that could predict how the components would be affected by 
stretching, bending and vibration. This enabled engineers to optimize the 
machines and reduce their weight. By the late 1980s components started to 
become much lighter, allowing companies to scale up their turbines while keeping 
weight gain to a minimum. 
Around the same time, researchers also started developing ways to manage and 
reduce the effect of gusts. Turbines equipped with variable  pitch  could adjust 
the angle of their blades and limit the force with which the wind was able to act 
on the rotor and the drive train, reducing wear and tear. This system worked even 
better in conjunction with variable-speed turbines, which were developed in the 
early 1990s. Such machines operate at high efficiency over a wider range of wind 
speeds, converting more of the wind s kinetic energy into electricity and allowing 
the rotor to adjust its speed to that of the wind, thus further reducing the impact of 
gusts on turbine structures. 
 
All these advances have allowed manufacturers to produce ever-larger machines 
and to build turbines with longer blades for a given output rating. This has several 
benefits. Since longer blades sweep a larger area and capture more energy from 
the wind, the turbine produces its rated amount of power at lower wind speeds, 
and will therefore run at its rated power a higher percentage of the time. And 
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because the drive train does not have to be scaled up, the turbine generates more 
energy for a given cost. 
Today s machines extract around 50% of the kinetic energy in the wind close to 
the theoretical limit of 59%. 
 
 
1.3 The functioning of wind turbine 
 
The terms wind energy or wind power describe the process by which the wind is 
used to generate mechanical power or electricity. Wind turbines convert a portion 
of the wind s kinetic energy into electricity.  
Table 1.1 shows the various parts of the turbine, in particular the nacelle, that is 
the mechanical heart of wind turbine.  
 
Table 1.1 Inside a wind turbine 
 
 
       Source: www.nordex-online.com