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The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

iflscience.com

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Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#41

Post by tommiegannert »

Got curious what the power rating of the blade pitch control system is. Couldn't find a size reference, but KEBA [1] sells motors and drivers at the 9 kW and 22 kW levels. Nidec [2] at 26 kW.

So just controlling the pitch (presumably of a more average turbine) uses the (peak) power of heating a house in Sweden. Noted that the duty cycle is low, but still.

[1] https://www.keba.com/download/x/18628e52a3/pitchone-datashee...

[2] https://www.nidec-industrial.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/...

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#42

Post by tjoff »

mschuster91 wrote: post #19
bobthepanda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you transport something like this in pieces, or as a single blade?

A German company says they can transport blades of up to 100m length as a single piece [1]. For longer things I'd guess there is no option other than to manufacture them on site or near-site, as the Danes are doing for offshore projects [2]. [1] https://www.doll.eu/de/produkte/schwertransport/nachlaeufer-... [2] https://www.wiwo.de/technologie/wirtschaft-von-oben/wirtscha...

That is on land, there is a reason a lot of wind production is close to a harbor.

So near-site in practice means, near-harbor.

Possibly you can have an agile vessel doing the last stretch so that you can change that to ~near-sea.

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#45

Post by thinkcontext »

mirko22 wrote: post #27
throwbadubadu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insignificant on many levels. If we should care for that we should stop all fossil fuel consumption right now, stop eating meat, and most importantly, stop putting glass windows into our cute buildings. Why are these questions always in wind turbine posts before anything els?

Cos some people care about birds? How does eating meat factor into this?

Most people who bring up birds wrt wind turbines don't care about birds, eg Donald Trump.

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#46

Post by Animats »

The picture looks strange. You can see a ship through the turbine blade. That seems to be because ifisicence took a promotional picture with lettering and leaf decoration from here [1] and "cleaned it up" with some photo tool.

General Electric and Vestas both have 14 megawatt wind turbine prototypes in operation. This seems to be a prototype deployed in a large installation. It's not in the catalog yet.[2] Mingyang has been delivering some 12 megawatt units. Two years ago they announced a similar model with slightly shorter blades.[3]

[1] http://www.myse.com.cn/en/

[2] http://www.myse.com.cn/en/cplb/info.aspx?itemid=578

[3] http://www.myse.com.cn/en/jtxw/info.aspx?itemid=825

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#48

Post by gWPVhyxPHqvk »

windows2020 wrote: post #12

I wonder what paint job would best prevent birds from being destroyed by this. It looks like sometimes one blade is painted black for this purpose. How do bird deaths from wind turbines compare to other manmade objects?

Bird deaths from wind turbines are essentially a rounding error, probably less than a million a year. On the other hand, cats kill billions of birds per year.

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#49

Post by antisthenes »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #39
ninkendo wrote: post #5

123 meter blades, that’s insane. This means the tip of the blade travels 772 meters in a single rotation. The speed of sound is 340 meters per second, meaning if it travels more than 0.44 rotations in a second, the tips of the blades are breaking the sound barrier.

The GE Haliade X, smaller but not by a lot, maxes out at 7 rotations per minute, giving a rotor tip velocity in the vicinity of 80m/s. Generally noise considerations mean you don't aim for a tip velocity faster than that, although for a turbine that is only installed in offshore or other uninhabited locations, you might design for a higher tip velocity. Despite some advantages to higher velocity, though, consideratio…

> The GE Haliade X, smaller but not by a lot, maxes out at 7 rotations per second

I think you meant per minute.

Per second would mean that the rotor tips are travelling faster than SR-71.

Re: The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

#50

Post by jl6 »

The world used about 180,000TWh of energy in 2022[0]. That requires about 21TW of generation capacity. If we assume wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 30% due to the intermittency of wind, we would need about 69TW of nameplate capacity.

If each of these turbines is rated at 16MW, we would need about 4.3 million of them.

Is there enough space?

Let's assume turbines should be spaced 10 rotor diameters apart[2]. A turbine of this size (246m diameter) would need to have about 2.5 * 2.5=6.25km^2 of dedicated space. So we will need about 27 million square kilometers of open sea space.

Coincidentally, that's the same as the total area of continental shelf in the whole world.[3]

Continental shelf depth is up to 200m.[4]

The deepest wind turbines today are in depths of 59m.[5]

What should we conclude? As long as we figure out a way of building turbines in deeper water, or perhaps floating turbines, and a way of manufacturing the required materials (hopefully without recourse to fossil fuels), the project seems just about plausible. But it would be a truly planet-scale endeavour.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Wind_farm

[2] https://ideasmedioambientales.com/wind-turbine-spacing/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_shelf

[4] https://www.britannica.com/science/continental-shelf

[5] https://www.sse.com/news-and-views/2023/04/world-s-deepest-o...*

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