Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

iflscience.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 178 posts

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

#101

Post by fbdab103 »

jayGlow wrote: post #72
tjoff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the US Midwest has a ton of wind power, if you drive through there you have a decent chance of seeing a truck carrying a blade. pretty interesting stuff. obviously those are a lot smaller than this windmill though.

If you drive through Iowa, it seems like you will see nothing but windmills. Just an enormous amount of installed capacity.

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

#102

Post by fbdab103 »

tinco wrote: post #23
bobthepanda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The blade is usually manufactured as a single fiberglass piece. With how big this thing is I imagine it's manufactured somewhere directly at the shore, and just lifted onto a boat directly from the factory. The base is segments (shaped like calamari rings), which are big but usually can be transported by road, but the big ones probably can't pass under bridges.

How technically challenging is building(?) printing(?) these pieces? Presumably they need to withstand enormous amounts of strain. Can you produce an impromptu factory anywhere, or does this require sophisticated equipment that benefits from fixed installations?

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

#104

Post by askvictor »

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.

Given that the wind is pushing it, wouldn't the blade tip's speed somehow be naturally limited by the wind speed?

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

#105

Post by fbdab103 »

doodlebugging wrote: post #81
jl6 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low density of wind power actually makes it much harder for an adversary to take out a country's energy production capacity. Currently, that well-aimed missile could hit a nuclear plant and cause devastation as well as the loss of multiple gigawatts of capacity. The equivalent wind power would be spread across hundreds or thousands of turbines, spaced kilometers apart. Destroying one wouldn't have the same impact…

Missiles with integrated guidance systems are in every modern inventory. I mentioned the possibility of the loss of a single turbine to one missile and left it up to the reader to extrapolate the consequences if the one firing the missile had a large number of missiles at their disposal. Satellite data available allows one to pick high value targets with high precision. I hope that conflict between Taiwan and China n…

I am not sure what is your point. Do not ever construct critical infrastructure because it might be targeted in war? You say window turbine, but that could just as easily be a coal plant, hospital, car factory, legislative building, etc.

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

#106

Post by askvictor »

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?

We should really stop building skyscrapers, as they cause plenty of birth deaths too.

And stop destroying their habitat, and changing the climate which is destroying their migratory air currents and on-route stop-overs.

TLDR: there are plenty of direct and indirect things that cause a _lot_ more bird deaths. Don't let perfect get in the way of good.

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

#107

Post by tuatoru »

Animats wrote: post #83
jameskerr wrote: post #44

Giant turbines out in the ocean with regular gales and storms. That must be a massive challenge to construct.

These are advertised as "typhoon resistant". Like all big wind turbines, the props are variable pitch, feather under excessive wind, and rotation stops. The big trouble spot is the gearbox and its bearings.[1] These big turbines are advertised as "semi direct drive" turbines, which means they only have one stage of geared speed step-up. Large wind turbines are very slow compared to desirable generator RPMs, and the b…

Truncated-pyramid floating wind turbines shouldn't have as much of a problem with this, as the loads are closer to traditional transverse and axial.

(Picture two flat-topped letter 'A's, one behind the other, with a crossbar going from the top of the front one to the top of the back one. The blades spin around this crossbar, an axle. The generator can be at one end of this axle, or in the blade hub. The whole structure is floating, moored at one corner, and can rotate to keep the blades facing into the wind as required.)

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

#108

Post by askvictor »

jl6 wrote: post #50

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[…

There are designs for floating turbines (but they still need to be anchors to the sea floor). Though I wonder if, on scale, they could be made into a flotilla that would only need a smaller amount of anchors for the whole thing, and also be towed around if needed.

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

#109

Post by jakewins »

askvictor wrote: post #104
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.

Given that the wind is pushing it, wouldn't the blade tip's speed somehow be naturally limited by the wind speed?

At least in sailing, you can go a lot faster than the wind; I assume the same is true for these blades.

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

#110

Post by tuatoru »

throw0101a wrote: post #78
jl6 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low density of wind power actually makes it much harder for an adversary to take out a country's energy production capacity. Currently, that well-aimed missile could hit a nuclear plant and cause devastation as well as the loss of multiple gigawatts of capacity. The equivalent wind power would be spread across hundreds or thousands of turbines, spaced kilometers apart. Destroying one wouldn't have the same impact…

> The equivalent wind power would be spread across hundreds or thousands of turbines, spaced kilometers apart. Take out the transformer station at, or transmissions line from, the wind farm.

That is not specific to wind technology. The risk is much worse with legacy coal, gas and nuclear power stations.
Post reply on HN