51–60 of 178 posts
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?
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-datash…
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[…
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 h…
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[…
Is anyone seriously proposing a wind turbine monoculture for energy generation?
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 h…
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-datash…
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[…
What people need to realize is that if we go to renewable, electric energy, in most cases this will also involve efficiency improvements. Many fossil fuel based processes are horribly inefficient, with electricity you can often avoid doing things like "80% of our energy goes into heating up the air around whatever we're doing".
That said: Yes, we'll need a lot of wind turbines.