p

DEVELOPING NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS FOR WIND

TURBINES
David Wood
School of Engineering
University of Newcastle
Callaghan NSW 2308
Abstract This paper discusses a number of issues concerning the development and use of
national and international standards for wind energy utilisation. After listing the main
standards currently available and briefly discussing some advantages and disadvantages of
standards, two case studies are described of which the author has personal experience: the
development of an Australian standard for noise assessment and the revision of the
international standard for the safety of small wind turbines.
Introduction
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the main instigator of wind turbine
standards. These include:
IEC 61400-1 (1999-02)
IEC 61400-2 (1996-04)
IEC 61400-11 (1998-09)
IEC 61400-12 (1998-02)
IEC 61400-13 (2001-06)
IEC 61400-21 (2001-12)

Wind generator systems Part 1: Safety requirements.

Wind generator systems Part 2: Safety of small wind
turbines.
Wind generator systems
Part 11: Acoustic noise
measurement techniques.
Wind generator systems Part 12: Wind turbine power
performance testing.
Wind generator systems
Part 13: Measurement of
mechanical loads.
Wind generator systems
Part 21: Measurement and
assessment of power quality characteristics of grid connected
wind turbines.

To this list may be added the following Technical Specification (TS) and technical Report
(TR) which are not full IEC standards:
IEC TS 61400-23 (2001-04)
Wind generator systems Part 23: Full-scale structural testing
of rotor blades.
IEC TR 61400-24 (2002-07)
Wind generator systems Part 24: Lightning protection.
Note that the list includes the year and month of introduction. The first three on this list are
undergoing major revision. In addition, there the following are work(s) in progress:
IEC 61400-3
IEC 61400-14
IEC 61400-25
IEC 61400-121

Wind generator systems Part 3: Design requirements for offshore

wind turbines.
Wind generator systems Part 14: Declaration of sound power level
and tonality values.
Wind generator systems Part 25: Communication standard for remote
control and monitoring of wind power plants.
Wind generator systems Part 121: Power performance measurements
of grid connected wind turbines.

(The standards and information on the works in progress can be obtained from the IEC web
site: http:\\www.iec.ch\)
All these standards are new, and the oldest one, dating from 1996, is currently under
revision. This situation reflects the rapidly increasing significance of the wind as an energy
resource. Safety, performance, and noise are the most important issues.
Australia either adopts these standards as appropriate, develops its own, or relies on de facto
adherence. The last arises because virtually all large turbines comply with the appropriate
IEC standards a process requiring design certification and type approval with
organisations such as Germanischer Lloyd or Underwriters Limited - and Australian utilities
to date have bought only complying turbines. For some turbines and wind monitoring
activities, Australian Standard AS 3995-1994 Design of steel lattice towers and masts may
also be appropriate. For smaller turbines, the only relevant national standard is the AS 4059
Stand-alone Power Systems (Part 1: Safety requirements; Part 2: System design guidelines;
and Part 3: Installation and maintenance) series.
Standards Australia has recently established two new committees, EL-048 Wind Turbine
Systems and EV-016 Wind Turbine Noise. The first had its inaugural meeting in March
this year, and the second in August. The main tasks of EL-048 are to participate in the
development of TC 88 standards, to recommend to Standards Australia which Standards are
to be adopted in Australia, and to develop appropriate Australian standards. EL-016 has the
more specific task of developing an Australian standard for noise assessment, based in part
on New Zealand NZS 6808-1998 Acoustics the assessment of sound from wind turbine
generators. Note that this standard and the projected Australian counterpart do not conflict
with IEC 61400-11 which is concerned only with the determination of the sound power level
of the turbine.
This paper intends to give an overview of standards for wind energy, covering the need for
them, the development process, several issues of implementation, and some thoughts on
future developments. The presentation is biased towards the authors personal involvement
in IEC TC 88, MT2, the maintenance team revising IEC 61400-2, as well as EL-048, and
EV-016. Because noise is an obvious and important issue for wind energy, it is the first
case study. The second case study discusses the development process for IEC 61400-2.
The Purpose of Standards
Hunter (1994) lists nine purposes:
1. to safeguard the public against dangerous products
2. to safeguard purchasers against goods which are unfit for use
3. to promote best practice within an industry
4. to promote consumer and public confidence in a product
5. to give companies adhering to the standard a competitive edge
6. to facilitate export
7. to provide the basis of third party or self certification
8. to provide the basis for legislation
9. to provide the basis for contracts between manufacturers and customers
This list may be extended:
10. to assist regulatory bodies in establishing criteria for assessing wind turbine
developments, and
11. to give some measure of security in this increasingly litigious world.
Some of these purposes are obvious and desirable, but others, such as the influence of
standards on product quality, may not be.
It is very likely, for example, that noise
standards have had a beneficial impact on technology development, particularly in the area of
t lit
M tl
i d t bi
t t t
t t
l
l it i d
d t f th

wind speed. Although the corresponding frequency is usually below the threshold of
hearing in the infrasound region harmonics of the blade passing frequency, often
generated by the gearbox, may give rise to a tonal contribution to the sound output. This
contribution can be small, but still extremely annoying. NZS 6808 (and other standards)
include a method for determining the presence of tonality, and suggest that a significant
penalty (5dB) be applied to any turbine displaying tonality. Partly as a consequence, tonality
is no longer considered a major problem with wind turbines.
Hunter (1994) lists no disadvantages of having standards, but there is at least one: the cost
of compliance may be prohibitive. For example, design certification and type approval has
been estimated to cost around $100,000 for small turbines. This amount is comparable to
that than for larger machines, and is not strongly dependent on turbine size. For a turbine
selling for around $20,000 (about 5 kW in rated power) or less, this cost is a major hurdle.
The Process of Developing Standards
The development of IEC standards is a long and complex business. It will be described only
briefly here, using the revision of IEC 61400-2 as an example. IEC TC 88, MT2 was
formed about 3 years ago and hopes to complete its draft revision after a meeting in Tokyo in
October. The draft is then referred to IEC TC (Technical Committee) 88 who oversee all
wind turbine standards. The draft is then circulated to interested member countries of the
IEC1 (in this case the Participating and Observer members of TC 88) for review and
comment as a Committee Draft (CD) document).
The comments on the CD are then considered by IEC TC 88, MT2 and appropriate revisions
made to the draft. Depending on the volume and type of comments, this process can be
repeated a number of times until the maintenance team is satisfied that the draft is stable and
can go forward to the next stage, which is circulation as a Committee Draft for Voting
(CDV). Members can still submit comments but Participating members must also vote on
whether the draft is suitable to go to final ballot for acceptance as an IEC Standard. The
CDV draft must receive affirmative votes from at least 67% of the Participating member
countries on TC 88 and negative votes must be less than 25% of all votes received (i.e. from
Participating, Observer, and other members of the IEC). (Thus Participating members on a
TC have more say in standards development on that TC but all members of the IEC can
express their opinion on any standard being developed.)
The comments on the CDV are considered and, if the document is accepted, it is then
circulated as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). If a CDV is voted down, it goes
back to CD for further development.
Participating members must vote on the FDIS and any negative vote must be accompanied
by a technical reason. The only comments that are considered at this stage are editorial
comments. Again the FDIS must receive affirmative votes from at least 67% of the
Participating member countries and less than 25% negative votes from all votes received. If
the FDIS receives sufficient votes, it is published as an IEC Standard, otherwise it is revised
at the CD or CDV stage.
.
Development of Australian standards is begun whenever Standards Australia identifies a
need, and establishes an appropriate committee after calling for nomination of committee
1

There are 3 grades of membership for a country on an IEC Technical Committee (TC). These are:
Participating, which requires active contributions to the development work being undertaken;
Observer, which means that a country automatically receives all committee documents but does not have to
be active on the TC. It can still comment or vote on documents; and

members from interested organisations. The two wind turbine committees have members
from academia, the Australian Wind Energy Association, the utilities that purchase turbines,
the electrical industry, and noise consultants. Committees may also invite observers to
participate. For example, the first meeting of EV-016 was addressed at some length by Dr
Andrew McKenzie, a prominent U.K. noise consultant. The committee may simply
advocate the acceptance of an appropriate international standard or it may develop a
completely new local Standard. As a general rule, committees tend to adopt applicable
International Standards (either totally or with Australian variations), as Australia is an active
trading nation and hence aligns its practices with its International norms. If there is no
applicable International Standard, or if the International Standard is too complex or doesnt
cover Australian conditions (e.g. voltage requirements), committees may develop local
standards.
The development of Australian Standards follows a similar pattern to that for IEC Standards.
Committees obtain a draft starting document (eg an existing International Standard or a
member writes a preliminary draft) and this is reviewed and revised by committee members
until it is considered stable. It is then circulated for Public Comment and anyone can submit
comments on the draft (including committee members). These comments are then
considered and the draft polished as needed. The draft is then forwarded to Postal Ballot by
committee members. All committee members are required to vote and any negative vote
must be accompanied by a technical reason. If there are any negative votes, the committee
usually meets and significant effort is made to resolve the negative vote(s). After resolution
of any negative votes, the draft is published. Documents can be published if there are
outstanding negative votes as long as there no significant objections to it. Thus Australian
Standards are consensus documents with widespread support.
Case Study 1: Wind Turbine Noise
Visual and noise pollution are usually the main community concerns about any wind farm
development. With modern graphics, the former can be addressed, if not resolved, but
noise is often difficult to address. Noise perception is subjective, so that a proponent of, or
stakeholder in, a wind farm development is less likely to object to its noise than, say, the
owner of the adjacent property. NZS 6088 recognises this by suggesting that the wind farm
owner - often the farmer whose land contains the wind farm - be exempted from noise
assessment. Noise is difficult to measure accurately; even establishing the background level
before the wind farm is erected can be problematic. Background noise measurements are
affected by many factors including time-of-day, the irregular passage of cars, trucks, and
aircraft, rain, and the presence of frogs and other animals. This leads to some uncertainty in
determining the appropriate levels of the background noise. It is also dependent on wind
speed, increasing at roughly 1 dBA/(m/sec). A considerable number of measurements is
often required to establish that dependence. In most cases, however, the critical wind
speeds for noise are fairly low, around 5 8 m/sec, and these are the most common.
LP, the A-weighted sound power level of the turbine (in dBA) its strength as a source of
sound and noise can be determined with reasonable accuracy using the techniques of IEC
61400-11, although variations do occur between nominally identical turbines. To convert LP
into the sound level at any other location requires a mathematical model for the propagation.
It is easy to formulate a simple model on the assumption that the sound propagates
hemispherically from the source, leading to the following equation for L A, the A-weighted
sound pressure level at a distance R (in metres) from the turbines nacelle:
(1)
as given in slightly different form in NZS 6088. The second last term in Equation (1)
measures the attenuation of sound by the action of viscosity and other real-gas effects. The
coefficient is typically 0.002 dB/m, but is strongly dependent on the frequency of the
d (i
i
h
f h f
hi h f
) A
b d
l i

will accommodate this dependence, but even this more accurate, and more complex, form of
(1) does not include ground absorption, and the effects of the local topology and
meteorology, Wagner et al. (1996) and Section 9.3 of Burton et al. (2001).
Fortunately Equation (1) is generally conservative, i.e. it usually over-estimates the noise
level. However, it is not always the case that wind farm noise levels have been overestimated; a number of the complaints about the noise from early British wind farms were
caused by unusual circumstances, such as a house in a wind shadow beneath a steep cliff
with turbines along the summit. High winds lead to high turbine and background noise at
the summit, but high turbine noise only in the wind shadow. It is also likely that the more
complex, and hopefully more accurate, forms of (1) will be developed as the costs of
improving the noise estimation are outweighed by the ability to put more turbines on the
particular site.
The usual noise limit on a wind farm is the backgound level + 5dBA. As the background
level depends on wind speed, it is also usual to stipulate a minimum allowable noise level.
This is often taken as 40 dBA, as there is evidence that this will prevent serious sleep
disturbance and is compatible with realistic background levels in country areas where wind
farms are usually sited, e.g. ETSU (1996). The main issues to be addressed by EV-016
appear to be in the direction of recommending noise limits as well as the inherent limitations
on the repeatability of background measurements and the mathematical models to predict
noise propagation, especially in complex terrain.
Case Study 2: Small wind turbines
The technology level of small turbines2 has generally lagged that of larger machines, e.g.
Clausen & Wood (2001). The main reason is that, apart from the micro turbines used for
yachts and similar loads, small turbines are made in small numbers. Furthermore, the
manufacturers tend to be backyard companies who cannot support a significant research and
development effort. As a consequence, only a very limited number of turbines have been
approved to the current IEC standard (61400-2), van Hulle (1996). However, the U.S.
Department of Energy is funding a major effort by the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) to support the development of a number of new small turbines by
selected American manufacturers. The support includes field testing and type approval at the
NREL test site, Forsyth (1997).
It is likely that the revised IEC 61400-2 will be considerably more difficult to satisfy than its
predecessor. This is an outcome of several factors, the main one being the rapidly
increasing knowledge of the behaviour of small turbines (from a very low base level). For
example, there were no known measurements of the turbine yaw rate the rate at which its
orientation changes as the wind direction changes before the revision began. This is
despite the fact that yaw rate controls some important structural quantities such as the blade
root bending moment. Much of the yaw rate data considered by MT2 has come from the
NREL program. The increased sophistication of the revised standard is likely to be a major
concern to many manufacturers because of the cost of compliance, and, as noted above, this
cost is not strongly dependent on turbine size. This places the standard development process
in a difficult position; on the one hand, it is reasonable that very small turbines have a
reduced safety requirement, but the standard must treat larger small turbines in a manner
that is as close as possible to the treatment of large machines according to IEC 61400-1. It is
likely that the main concession to micro turbines will be in the form of excluding the tower
from the certification process.

According to the draft revision of IEC 61400-2, a small turbine is one with a rotor swept area of less than
200 m 2. This equates to a power ouptut of about 50 kW. In practical terms, a small turbine is often
identifiable by its tail fin. This free-yaw arrangement, in contrast to the yaw drives on large turbines, is

The draft revision allows safety to be assessed in three ways of increasing sophistication. At
the lowest level, the simple equations for quantities such as blade root bending moment are
prescribed and must be applied with a relatively high safety factor. The second level
requires the use of an aeroelastic analysis such as the commercial package Bladed
produced by Garrad Hassan and Partners, but lower safety factors can be used. Finally, a
turbine can be approved by extensive field testing to determine the critical loads.
Summary
Wind turbine standards have appeared rapidly but will stay for a long time. They serve
many important purposes, from allowing the assessment of undesirable side-effects such as
noise, to being strong drivers for the development of technology. It is remarkable that, even
though these standards have appeared only recently, most have been through at least one
revision. This is an indication of the rapid maturation of wind turbine technology as well as
the newly evolving areas of application, such as off-shore wind farms.
The process of developing standards is a complex balance between the needs of
manufacturers, certifying bodies, and the other interested parties in between. It is unlikely
that standards will ever be universally accepted, but, on balance, are likely to continue to
have the beneficial effect that they have had to date.
Acknowledgments
My involvement in wind turbine standards work has been supported by the University of
Newcastle, whom I represent on EL-048, and EV-016, Standards Australia (in a similar
capacity for MT2). Attendance at MT2 meetings has been supported by Standards Australia
and ACRE, the Australian CRC for Renewable Energy through the agency of Dr Bob Lloyd.
I am also very grateful to Mr Geoff Webb, secretary of EL-048 for enlightenment on the
complex processes involved in developing standards
References
Burton, T., Sharpe, D., Jenkins, N., and Bossanyi, E., (200). Wind Energy Handbook,
John Wiley & Sons.
Clausen, P.D., and Wood, D.H., (2000). Recent advances in small wind turbine
technology, Wind Engineering, vol. 24, pp 189 201.
ETSU (1996). The Assessment and rating of Noise from Wind farms, Engg & Tech.
Support Unit, Dept trade & Industry, UK, Report ETSU-R-97.
Forsyth, T.L. (1997). An introduction to the small wind turbine project Windpower
1997 Proc. Am. Wind Energy Assoc., pp. 231 - 239,. (See also the Dept of Energy web
site: http://www.eren.doe.gov/wind/small.html.)
Hunter, R.S., (1994). Progress in the creation of standards for wind turbines, Wind Energy
Conversion 1994 (Proc. 15th B.W.E.A. Conf.), G. Elliot (ed.), M.E.P.
van Dam, J.J.D., Forsyth, T.L., and Hansen, A.C. (2001). Strategies for Refining
IEC61400-2: Wind Generator Systems-Part 2: Safety of Small Wind Turbines, in Wind
Energy for the New Millennium (Proc. 2001 Eur. Wind Energy Conf.), P. Helm, A. Zervos
(ed.), WIP, pp 268 271.
Van Hulle, F.J.L. (1996). Validation of design criteria for small wind turbines, European
Wind Energy Conf., Sweden.
Wagner, S., Bareiss, R., and Guidati, G., (1996). Wind Turbine Noise, Springer-Verlag.