The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 6:16 AM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #69

hannob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing primary energy with useful energy. 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 wi…

I don't mind being conservative for this exercise, and renewables have their own inefficiency issue: we'll need to accept the inefficiency of using electrolysis to produce the hydrogen needed to synthesize the feedstocks needed to run petrochemical processes (e.g. producing plastic), because energy production isn't the only thing that depends on fossil fuels.

Post by adrianN » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 6:39 AM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #69

hannob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing primary energy with useful energy. 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 wi…

I don't mind being conservative for this exercise, and renewables have their own inefficiency issue: we'll need to accept the inefficiency of using electrolysis to produce the hydrogen needed to synthesize the feedstocks needed to run petrochemical processes (e.g. producing plastic), because energy production isn't the only thing that depends on fossil fuels.

Post by kitd » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 7:21 AM UTC

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.

Post by adrianN » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 7:32 AM UTC

giomasce wrote: post #76

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[…

I heard that the total wind power across the whole world is something like 20 times the total power humanity needs. So if we ended up doing this, we'd stealing some 5% of power from the wind, which is quite a lot. This itself could have significant climate consequences. Solar shouldn't have this problem, instead: the amount of power we receive from the sun is ridiculously larger than what we can ever thing to consume…

Post by stephenr » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 8:08 AM UTC

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.