Live data from Hacker News

The world’s largest wind turbine has been switched on

iflscience.com

71–80 of 178 posts

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

#71
post #46

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…

Siemens Games RE has one as well.

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/one-day-one-turbine-359mwh...

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

#72
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A German company says they can transport blades of up to 100m length as a single piece [1]. For longer things I'd guess there is no option other than to manufacture them on site or near-site, as the Danes are doing for offshore projects [2]. [1] https://www.doll.eu/de/produkte/schwertransport/nachlaeufer-... [2] https://www.wiwo.de/technologie/wirtschaft-von-oben/wirtscha...

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.

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

#73

They have installed these in the Taiwan Strait where, in the event of war between China and Taiwan, one well-aimed missile knocks out power to 36000 homes or businesses. Obviously the first target and the juiciest targets are those that disrupt and disable the adversary's ability to produce the means and materials of conducting warfare. Therefore power generation, factories that produce munitions or that can be quick…

TFA is about offshore wind turbines, which would seem to address your concerns about having one built near your house.

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

#74

They have installed these in the Taiwan Strait where, in the event of war between China and Taiwan, one well-aimed missile knocks out power to 36000 homes or businesses. Obviously the first target and the juiciest targets are those that disrupt and disable the adversary's ability to produce the means and materials of conducting warfare. Therefore power generation, factories that produce munitions or that can be quick…

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.

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

#75
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.

This made me think that people in the West imagine East Asia like Japan or Hongkong, ie. everything is packed and very small. But China in general really is like the US (and indeed the country is of similar size): everything tends to be big. Certainly, coming from Europe, everything is huge in China.

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

#76
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.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do wind turbines kill more birds than cats?

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

#78
post #74

They have installed these in the Taiwan Strait where, in the event of war between China and Taiwan, one well-aimed missile knocks out power to 36000 homes or businesses. Obviously the first target and the juiciest targets are those that disrupt and disable the adversary's ability to produce the means and materials of conducting warfare. Therefore power generation, factories that produce munitions or that can be quick…

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.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GE Haliade X, smaller but not by a lot, maxes out at 7 rotations per minute, giving a rotor tip velocity in the vicinity of 80m/s. Generally noise considerations mean you don't aim for a tip velocity faster than that, although for a turbine that is only installed in offshore or other uninhabited locations, you might design for a higher tip velocity. Despite some advantages to higher velocity, though, consideratio…

> The GE Haliade X, smaller but not by a lot, maxes out at 7 rotations per second I think you meant per minute. Per second would mean that the rotor tips are travelling faster than SR-71.

Yes. Thanks.

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

#80

They have installed these in the Taiwan Strait where, in the event of war between China and Taiwan, one well-aimed missile knocks out power to 36000 homes or businesses. Obviously the first target and the juiciest targets are those that disrupt and disable the adversary's ability to produce the means and materials of conducting warfare. Therefore power generation, factories that produce munitions or that can be quick…

TFA is about offshore wind turbines, which would seem to address your concerns about having one built near your house.

Believe it or don't, I read TFA and added a little color to the situation since most of us understand that great technology like high-capacity turbines has the potential to be useful in more locations than just offshore installations.

As time passes and we are able to make the switch from fossil fuel sources to renewable sources we will find ourselves with a requirement that we produce as much power as possible in the smallest footprint. There will always be people who don't want a turbine near their house. That's a simple fact. One of the original arguments against wind installations in California was the argument that it spoiled the view since no one wanted to see a bunch of turbines along a scenic ridge, they preferred the unmolested vistas of their childhood. Later, they focused on noise issues, which are valid concerns, and many states worked with operators and other stakeholders to design a set of guidelines or restrictions on minimal offsets from habitations.

Texas is not one of those states and so wind turbines of any size can be installed within the wind farms without taking into consideration existing habitations. Most operators solicit public input though in the case I mentioned, there is no record of any notice to affected people that the wind farm might have an impact on their use of their property or quality of life.

It is a lot like the problems we had here during the Barnett Shale boom about 15 years ago where operators bought mineral rights all over North Texas and began drilling for natural gas and then fracking those wells so they would be economical to produce. There were no restrictions in most cities and communities on offsets to housing, schools, businesses, etc and so, as the industry has done so many times in the past, they took advantage of that situation and began drilling knowing that they could deal with those problems later.

Over a course of years some communities passed regulations limiting drilling locations and other parts of the operation in a bid to prevent drilling wells just over a fence and the building of compressor stations in neighborhoods.

I think if you had a compressor station, even one with all the noise attenuating walls around it, near your own house you would also keep a wary eye on any attempts to bring other noise sources into your area that will interfere with your quiet enjoyment of your private property. The low frequency rumble from the compressor engines is not attenuated by the puffy walls and travels for large distances like ground roll on a seismic record. I am a geophysicist and for me, when the compressor starts up it is like feeling the initial part of an upsweep from a vibrator except that the upsweep never makes it to the higher frequencies. It's just a low frequency rumble that doesn't stop until the compressor engines stop.

My mind doesn't get stuck on actualities, I look at possibilities, probabilities, and consequences and for that reason I can see that something like a huge turbine installed today in an offshore generation configuration could easily be employed later as a component of an onshore generation farm.

I know that puff piece article didn't cover any of that ground since it was not designed to tell any part of that story.

Post reply on HN