A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#268 of these bad boys produces the same power output as one modern BWR (100% optimal and constant wind power availability).
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#3It is a thing of 220m diameter and 260m tall.
It is just sad, that nytimes is happy to convert meters into feets, football fields and Empire State Buildings, but doesn't want to show metric numbers in a footnote, so I wouldn't need to find a converter to make sense of those numbers.
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#4It is a thing of 220m diameter and 260m tall. It is just sad, that nytimes is happy to convert meters into feets, football fields and Empire State Buildings, but doesn't want to show metric numbers in a footnote, so I wouldn't need to find a converter to make sense of those numbers.
I don’t know, the diagram of the turbine next to the Empire State Building made it much easier for me to picture standing near it. Awe-inspiring bordering on a kind of primal fear.
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#5The "who has the biggest turbine" race between wind turbine OEMs is the Formula 1 of the wind industry. It's mostly about bragging rights and long-range R&D. The vast majority of new turbines being installed today are in the familiar 2-4 MW class. The >10 MW turbines are more important as an R&D platform than as an actual contributor to energy production.
4 MW class onshore turbines first introduced in 2017 are just now starting to hit their stride and be installed at large scale.
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#6Does anybody have good data on how size improves usage and efficiency? I would ideally like to see statistics of how large a turbine hits what power output during a year.
I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of days in the year (at least Temelín in Czechia)
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#7Does anybody have good data on how size improves usage and efficiency? I would ideally like to see statistics of how large a turbine hits what power output during a year. I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of da…
I don't have numbers but generally, compared to smaller turbines, a larger blade length means a faster blade tip to maintain the same rotational frequency (the end of the blade will be going faster around the turbines circumference). This creates more noise, and noise is a HUGE limiting factor, so they increase the turbine's torque to get more power from slower rotations. That means a larger, more complex, and more expensive generator in upfront and maintenance cost.
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#8A good use for a wind turbine far from the power grid is to power ammonia production at the base, which otherwise needs only air and water feedstocks.
If erected on a farm, it provides both fertilizer and fuel for the farm, and any surplus for neighboring farms. Since the requirements for both inputs are wholly predictable, the value proposition is ironclad.
A great advantage of this use is that it is extremely tolerant of intermittent supply; when wind is slack, you just leave off production; and produced ammonia is, exactly, storage, for as many barrels as you care to bother filling.
There have been several recent projects demonstrating practical small-scale catalytic production of ammonia. An amazing thing about ammonia as fertilizer is that saturated aqueous solution may be injected behind a plow disc and be taken up by soil bacteria so quickly that no odor can be detected, following behind the plow. Injecting ammonia while plowing probably produces much less runoff to waterways than the much more frequently seen surface spraying.
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#9How the hell do they build / erect something like this?
Re: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
#10Does anybody have good data on how size improves usage and efficiency? I would ideally like to see statistics of how large a turbine hits what power output during a year. I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of da…
> how size improves usage and efficiency
The power of a wind turbine scales linearly with the swept area. The swept area scales as the square of the height.
Furthermore, wind turbine power also scales with the third power of wind speed, and wind speed goes up with height (though not linearly).
So you can see why the physics of the problem are strongly incentivizing size increases.