131–140 of 178 posts
What is the point of adding a time component in there? They always say weird things like this that make me double take. "Wait... does one revolution power 36,000 homes for a YEAR???" What's really annoying is that they aren't even wrong, just annoying.
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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?
Afaik, they are built in dedicated factories but usually on the same continent (at least!) as where they are going to get installed.
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That is crazy, but, on the other hand, seeing this rotate faster than once every two seconds would be insanely fast.
Here's turbine in Denmark that lost its brakes and disintegrated in 2008. The description says the tower was 60m tall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
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If they do break the sound barrier, that's also when the efficiency drops iirc. So I guess they'll switch it to a heavier load or RPM, or apply the brakes? Not sure how that works for a wind turbine
I presume the pitch is adjustable, so unless the mechanism fails you can just relax the pitch like pointing a sailboat directly into the wind to depower the sails.
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Here's turbine in Denmark that lost its brakes and disintegrated in 2008. The description says the tower was 60m tall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
You'd think there would be a backup brake kit on these
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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.
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So are people, yet we are afraid of nuclear power…
Bird death from turbines small-scale and highly predictable. Deaths from nuclear can range from zero to regional catastrophe and it's basically impossible to predict when it'll happen and how bad it'll be. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the risk profile is SO different from wind.
As is the power generation profile. Wind/solar/tidal are important to develop, and the risk profile should include whatever peaker or storage backs up the variability in generation.
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Pick your desired percentage of wind in the future energy mix. Even if we say 25%, it's still going to need millions of turbines. And our energy demands are not shrinking.
> And our energy demands are not shrinking. I think they should be, but even if they aren’t, there still is the observation that a kWh of electricity often can produce more of what we really want (light, motion, compute power) than a kWh of oil (about the only thing we can efficiently convert that into is heat) For example, Google tells me - petrol is about 12 kWh/kg, - the modern fiat 500 has a 47l gas tank, - Tesla…
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.