Combining Turbine Outputs? [RE-wrenches]

[Richard L Ratico]

Dave,

I agree with Matt and would add the following:

In my experience if you are moving 200 amps at 480 Volts some 700 feet you may
need at least 2 parallel runs per turbine, 6 or more total.

I'm assuming you'll be going underground, in conduit. Taking amperage and 5%
voltage drop into consideration, you are talking some big wire here, perhaps
700kcmil copper, using one run per turbine, or parallel runs of 4/0 per turbine
. Pulling conductors this size, that distance, resembles real work. Combining
the output of three turbines, in one run, seems impractical. I've only worked
with 500 kcmil copper max. Wrestling Tom Lane's gators might be easier. In any
case, it is often more economical to use parallel runs because the ampacity of
conductors does not increase linearly with conductor size. 

It might be most economical to use a transformer/s and boost the output to grid
voltage at the turbines. Perhaps this is what you had in mind.

Hope this helps.

Dick Ratico
Solarwind Electric 

--- You wrote:

I'm working on the design of a 3 wind turbine project.  Each turbine is 
65kW at 480V, 3-phase, 200 Amps max.  The machines will be located about 
700 feet from the point of interconnection (POI) and rather than bring 3 
sets of parallel cables back to the POI, I'm thinking that it would be more 
economical to combine their outputs in the field and run a single set of 
cables back to the POI.

Does anyone have a suggestion on what type of equipment is available to 
establish a code-compliant 3 into 1 combiner bus? I'm imagining some kind 
of pad-mounted NEMA enclosure, but quite frankly, this is bigger than 
anything I've ever done and I'm quite clueless about the options.
--- end of quote ---

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