I've probably driven past the place on the motorway (M4 J11) a hundred times, and always liked the look of the big wind turbine.
Anyway, I went for a walk over to the turbine today, very interesting it is too.
Strangely it is not as big as I thought it would be, but it is still very impressive, they've got a little visitors area too with various information boards and a electronic readout of power generation.
It's apparently capable of some 2MWatts with sufficient wind, but today(being fairly calm) it was mainly reading 0.000MW although it did climb to 0.028MW (28KiloWatts) for a short time.
I took a few pictures on my camera phone.
What was quite interesting was the way this turbine works. There is no actual gearbox in there, apparently the 'Annular Generator' is driven by the blades directly. I assume that this must be a DC generator which then feeds a large invertor (there were some large green enclosures round the back which made a fairly high pitched whining.
This idea (as apposed to a conventional gearbox system) seemed to work though, the turbine was very quiet as didn't produce the usual kind of whine you associate with these things.
Anyway, a fun way to spend your lunch hour, if you find this sort of thing interesting.
-Dan