When designing a generator for a wind turbine it is important to adapt the generator to the source, i.e. the wind conditions at the specific site. Furthermore, the variable speed operation of the generator needs to be considered. In this paper, electromagnetic losses in direct driven permanent magnet synchronous generators are evaluated through simulations. Six different generators are compared to each other. The simulations are performed by using an electromagnetic model, solved in a finite element environment and a control model developed in MATLAB. It is shown that when designing a generator it is important to consider the statistical wind distribution, control system, and aerodynamic efficiency in order to evaluate the performance properly. In this paper, generators with high overload capability are studied since they are of interest for this specific application. It is shown that a generator optimised for a minimum of losses will have a high overload capability. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.