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Insight into emerging clean-tech industries, with a focus on sino-european relations.

Featured Article: Development of Wind Turbine Generator Technologies

April 28, 2011 by Chunfeng

In recent years, wind energy has been developing rapidly in respond to the growing emphasis of renewable energy globally. The wind turbine technologies have also gone through several fundamental innovation challenges.

One of the key development areas is in drive train arrangement. With the turbine size growing bigger and bigger, from 500kw to today’s 7MW, There is increasing variety in current drive train arrangements. From traditional gearbox and conventional high speed generator to direct drive (gearless) and to hybrid.

Typical geared turbine has a rotor attached to a main shaft driving a high speed generator through a multi-stage gearbox.

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Featured Discussion: Phil Jones

February 23, 2010 by jason

Phillip D. Jones, a Climatologist from the University of East Anglia, was one of the may scientists whose emails had passed through the Climatic Research unit, and were leaked during the computer breach.

I thought it was interesting to see that the man last week stated to the BBC that there hasn't been statistically significant warming since 1995, and that the warming during the medieval period was more significant than today. I guess what he's referring to is this neat little graph:

/sites/default/files/Medieval-northern-hemisphere-warming-period.png
Northern Hemisphere temperatures through the "Medieval warming" period (source: Wikimedia commons)

If the warming is not as large as it was during the medieval period, then I suppose the black lines are computer extrapolations?