111–120 of 178 posts
Similar wind speeds happen every afternoon in "the Slot" in the SF Bay. Maybe we should decorate the area with a similar giant windmill. It also happens to be when peak pricing is in effect.
I've been thinking along the same lines recently. The shallows just next to Emeryville seem ideal for this, and would aesthically match the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. I'm not sure if or why this hasn't been proposed yet.
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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?
If wind turbines were the number one bird killer, wouldn't figuring out the best color to paint the blades or other mitigation strategies be worth it?
They are not.
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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.
In the 80s we had GROWIAN [1], which I found utterly fascinating as a kid. I have always been under the impression it proved that ultra-large turbines were a dead end. Maybe they will be rehabilitated? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growian EDIT: I always remembered GROWIAN as a single blade system, but apparently that was its successor Monopteros , which only ever reached the prototype stage.
From your own link: > Some lessons were however learned from conceptional mistakes made in its construction, e.g., the futility of trying to reach profitable installation sizes without taking intermediate steps > The point of view that multi-MW-yield wind turbines were technically and commercially infeasible gained some currency after the failure of the project, but was eventually superseded by technical progress. Be…
> The partners as well as the BMFT also had political motives connected with the project. Günther Klätte, management board member of RWE, stated during a general business meeting: "We require Growian [in the general sense of large wind turbines] as a proof of failure of concept", and he noted that "the Growian is a kind of pedagogical tool to convert the anti-nuclear energy crowd to the true faith".[6] A similar statement regarding the incurred financial burdens was reported of Minister of Finance and former Minister of Research Hans Matthöfer: "We know it won't do anything for us. But we do it to demonstrate to the wind energy advocates that it doesn't work."[6] After the Green Party had derided the installation as the electricity provider's "fig leaf" on the occasion of groundbreaking in May 1981, the RWE took internal measures to make sure that publicly a position of open-mindedness towards alternative energy production was emphasized while public interest in wind energy was allayed.
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…
At 123m blade length, this should be maybe 1 MW more. Looks like the original article, which claims power for 36,000 "homes", is using roughly 1 home = 0.5kW. In the US it's more like 1 home = 2kW.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/570678/biggest-wind-turb...
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?
In other words, wind pushing the middle of the blade could accelerate the tip, even if the tip only produces drag.
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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…
... But how many missiles would be used to take down a massive wind farm vs taking down a single nuclear reactor? Regardless of whether the enemy has lots more missiles, they still have a finite number of them. Those missiles cost money. War is as economic as it is kinetic. Using those missiles to disable power generation means they can't be used on other targets. Overuse of ammunition eats into stockpiles or forces…
(in short, as I understand it: lots of cheapass drones each carrying a small rock, insignificant by itself, converging on the target from every direction, only coming together as a lethal weapon at the very last minute)
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The worst case is worse, but nuclear disasters are so rare and reactors produce so much power that nuclear is safer than wind in terms of deaths per TWh. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Let's stop subsidizing their accident insurance then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
It’s a necessity, and extremely logical and reasonable.
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Birds won't be happy, unfortunately. Yet, better than wrecking Earth's cycles by pumping to much garbage in the atmosphere like we do today.
Painting the blades lowers the number of collisions significantly.