http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/3/16/183628/827
Hi. I'm Pete Stanaitis from western Wisconsin. I was trying to ask a quesstion of "Friendly Texas" related to the above thread, but his email is apparently not working. And, I couldn;t figure out how to get back to the thread above to try to add to it.
Here's our situation, and my question:
Did you ever get your grid-tied induction generator going? If so, do you have any words of wisfdom to add? Are you still working on it?
If you are, here's on info source you may not have seen:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3726/is_200010/ai_n8909370
It's called "Induction Generators, what can go wrong", but it's a pretty good read, and NOT negative.
My son and I want to build separate 25kw to 45 kw single phase grid tied power generation systems that will be driven by spark ignition engines fed with wood sources producer gas.
I saw the infromative thread on an otherpower discussion group this morning and wanted to know if you guys had gotten further than we have.
We know we can produced the mechanical power, but, of course, the grid-tie thing is the issue. We got (we thought) a long way on the path to success, working with our local utility, on using the induction motor technique that you guys discussed. We had found a source company to rewind 3 phase induction motors to output single phase, becuase we couldn't find single phase induction motors big enough. We found a source of (we thought) the electrical.electronics package that would do the job.
We were about ready to start spending money when we had a sorta "final" meeting with the line supervisor. At that point they said, simply "nice idea, but no thanks."
They told us that we shouldn't have any problems getting conventional generator systems that came with all the controls, since folks used to sell them power for demand situations back when diesel fuel was cheap. Yah, but those systems probably started at 10KW or higher.
Just yesterday, I thought that I'd give up and go get a big enough inverter, complete with controls, like the solar and wind guys use. Yup, think $50,000 to $80,000 or more!
So, we are sorta back to square one. 25KW to 50 or 75KW seems to be the unreachable range.
Pete Stanaitis