There's a Wind Turbine On the Horizon With Blades the Size of Trump Tower 190
merbs writes: Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades, whipping into the gusts like enormous palm trees. The vision is partly terrifying, partly inspiring, and being taken entirely seriously by the federal government and one of our top research laboratories. [Sandia National Labs, in an effort led by the University of Virginia] has unveiled the preliminary design for a new offshore wind turbine with 650-foot turbine blades. That, as its announcement points out, is twice the size of an American football field. It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York.
Oblig XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com]
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
I bet not even the Donald can build a bigger, more eco-friendly blade.
Re:Oblig XKCD (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. [bbc.com] He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.
His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.
Re: (Score:3)
Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com] [xkcd.com]
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. [bbc.com] He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.
His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.
If Trump was a real scot that episode would have ended just like that XKCD cartoon except Trump would have shown up with claymore and a wearing a kilt, his comb-over waiving gracefully in the wind as he charged the wind turbines yelling: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never spoil the view from our golf-course!” with a really piss-poor imitation of a Scottish accent.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really exclusive to Trump.
Pretty much anyone who's dropped a few $million on a shoreline estate (eg Kennedys, Walter Cronkite, David McCollough, etc) has fought against offshore wind farms on the exact same basis.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If you want an pure natural ocean view of just the sea, the horizon and the sky, then yes they will ruin the view. There are hotels that are on the coast which can charge £150 night for a sea facing view, while rooms facing inland are only £100 night.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There should be a compromise. The wind turbines get painted gold and have his company logo on the blades. Maybe somebody else can do advertising on them.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
Right. Its also roughly the size of the Empire State Building, only its not campaigning.
Capitalism (Score:2, Interesting)
Mega installation which require mega capital which allow power companies to centralize production, control distribution, and charge consumers.
It is more efficient and less prone to failure to have distributed production with small scale wind turbines, photovoltaic, etc. on peoples' homes. But then, well, where's the profit to the established interests?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Generally in wind turbines the bigger they are the more efficient they are. The blades reach up higher into wind that is less affected by ground effects.
Re:Capitalism (Score:4, Informative)
Mega installation which require mega capital which allow power companies to centralize production, control distribution, and charge consumers.
It is more efficient and less prone to failure to have distributed production with small scale wind turbines, photovoltaic, etc. on peoples' homes. But then, well, where's the profit to the established interests?
It's not more efficient. It may be more desirable for several reasons, but with wind turbines for efficiency (power produced per dollar spent) you want the big and high up. This especially applies if you are building them offshore as is proposed in this case, because buildign the base and getting there to do maintenance are high costs that depend on the number of turbines, not the power produced.
It's also not less prone to failure, at least for some definitions of failure, in that the wind is much steadier out at sea an a few hundred meters up. A professional maintenance and inspection regime also helps.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Not So Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Depends on where you build it, not on size. (Score:5, Informative)
Generally, bigger is better in wind turbines. Power generated is proportional to swept area, more mass means cleaner power which leads to more efficiency, and yes, larger, heavier turbine blades are more survivable in weather events. Modern turbines automatically self-furl as required, in much the same way that modern helicopter blades will auto-gyro in the event of an engine failure, and the mechanisms that do this work better if they are bigger.
All that being said, weather can destroy literally anything less than planet-sized. But if weather brings down a modern windmill, the damage done by the weather event itself is likely to dwarf the damage done by the failure of the turbine and tower - unlike the failure of a large hydro dam, for example. And afterwards you can rebuild it with very few worries about the kind of large-scale, long-lasting contamination that other forms of power production (such as coal or fission) create during a weather event failure.
Really only solar has a comparably benign failure mode in weather events - basically if you get hit by a flying chunk of solar panel or wind turbine blade, that's how you can get hurt, which is why some people prefer such things to be set up well offshore or in deserts.
Re: (Score:2)
Bad Unit (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
You could say it's Titanic.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you could offer the naming rights to Trump.
"For x million, we'll put your name on these yuuuuuuge blades!"
Of course the ignorant fool won't realise that his name will only be easily visible if the thing's *not* working. Hopefully the blades will rotate fast enough to make the name hard to read.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades
Now imagine those wind turbines getting hit by a hurricane.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades
Now imagine those wind turbines getting hit by a hurricane.
And now imagine them self-stowing into a "secure" configuration, until the hurricane passes.
Imagine all the turbines (Score:3)
Foot, Trump-Towers... (Score:5, Funny)
Can we use sane measuring units please?
How many stacked bananas is that?
Re: (Score:2)
And wig! ;)
LOL, yeah right (Score:2)
This does sound like something with Trump's name on it.
"Listen folks, we'll build turbines, and get the wind to pay for them."
Hahaha ... oh, wait ...
650 feet?!?!?!? (Score:2)
Remember the NASA Wind Turbines? (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA Wind Turbines [wikipedia.org] approached this scale in the '80's. Unfortunately, this was a previously-unexplored area of aerodynamics for NASA, and they had mechanical stress and noise problems (including subsonics) and were all demolished. I think there was one near Vallejo, CA being taken down when I got to Pixar in '87, and one in Boone, NC, which famously rattled windows and doors.
The art has since improved. I took a ride to the top of the turbine at Grouse Mountain, that was fun! That's the only one I have heard of where you can actually get to see it from the top.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The NASA ones are using the swept diameter for size, while the article quoting 650 ft is talking about the length of a single blade, i.e. radius. So these are about four times the linear dimension of the largest built NASA wind turbine, which is probably why it also produces about 16 times as much power.
Re: (Score:2)
Current blades are trucked in one piece (per blade) which is impressive to see. Three of them were parked on I-5 outside of Patterson, California a few months ago. There are a lot of net videos and photos which convey the scale.
Even at the current size they can't get through many highway interchanges and local intersections. The larger ones won't be able to ship in one piece at all.
Re:Remember the NASA Wind Turbines? (Score:4, Insightful)
Current blades are trucked in one piece (per blade) which is impressive to see. Three of them were parked on I-5 outside of Patterson, California a few months ago. There are a lot of net videos and photos which convey the scale.
Even at the current size they can't get through many highway interchanges and local intersections. The larger ones won't be able to ship in one piece at all.
"ship" is the point. These are designs of offshore turbines. They would probably make the blades in shipyards and transport them on a barge directly to the site.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The article says they're designed for offshore wind turbines so the blades can be fabricated in one piece near a harbor and loaded on barges to be shipped to the installation site.
Re: (Score:2)
The larger ones won't be able to ship in one piece at all.
From the article "the five to seven pieces that form each turbine blade can be more easily shipped and assembled at the point of use".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is mostly an aerodynamic issue. Pick that big an airfoil up on a crane, and it's going to swing around with great force. You have to split it up into pieces that you can manage while in the air.
Sure, but even if that weren't the case they'd still need to do it to make them transportable.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, since the area of the disc covered by the blades is relative to the length of the blade, then yes, the power is relative to the length of the blade. It is just not a linear relationship.
Re: (Score:2)
This would be going about 10RPM to stay subsonic if my math is right... Interesting what the low frequency effects would be.
Re:Remember the NASA Wind Turbines? (Score:4, Interesting)
Being an electrical engineer educated in Denmark, wind turbines was mandatory even though I specialized in digital electronics. This includes the history of wind turbines. During the oil crisis they became a hot topic worldwide and what I was told at the lectures about the US experimental wind turbines is that without prior knowledge, the engineers came up with the concept of borrowing knowledge from helicopter rotors. While it was planned to give them a head start compared to other countries, it showed the world that helicopters is a rotation to wind force converter and wind farms are wind force to rotation converter and they are two completely different topics with completely different issues. As I'm informed, they managed to completely rip a wind turbine apart in the first storm it encountered. That's not very promising for major investment.
Danish wind turbine research started by a group of hippie professors (or something) who decided on green energy. They were viewed as loons at the time, but when the oil crisis hit, they had 10 years of experience, which gave Denmark the technological edge. In the 1990s, Denmark had 6 of the 10 biggest wind turbine companies (the country had 5.5 million people at the time) and while it isn't the supreme ruler in wind energy anymore, it is still the leading edge of the technology as well as home to the biggest manufacture. There is also wind turbines everywhere. There is a total of 13 existing offshore windfarms, but only 2 of those are in the North Sea despite the article mentioning "That's why there are so few offshore wind turbines in the oceans—they're mostly Denmark's, in the North Sea". The combined power output of wind turbines exceeds the demand, but since the wind isn't at peak capacity all the time, it "only" supplied 42% of the demand last year (42.1% but 42 is likely preferred here. Easier to remember... or something).
Re: (Score:2)
Can someone set me straight here, I'm not a science man but if I'm reading that right, the difference in power generated between the old ones and the modern ones seems vastly improved, are those old ones quite inefficient?
Re: Remember the NASA Wind Turbines? (Score:2)
The wind turbine would be far more impressive... (Score:4, Funny)
Boat-Bomb Bait (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, it would be pretty easy to defend these things. Sonar installations surrounding the submerged parts, a radar on top. Torpedoes on the bottom, air to air on the top.
But, moving back to reality, this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen. There are hundreds of very expensive platforms scattered all around the world just chock full of things that don't do well with explosives (or, depending on your point of view, work just fine with them). We don't see too many terrorist attacks on oil platforms.
T
Can we tie Trump to a blade? (Score:2)
Oh god! (Score:2)
This is going to trigger my wind turbine allergy like crazy!
Blades Aren't the Problem (Score:3)
I'm no opponent to wind power, but the blades aren't really the stumbling block with making wind turbines larger and better. We want to build our wind turbines larger as they will rotate slower and capture more energy. The problem is transferring that energy through the hub of the turbine. More energy and slower revolution means huge torque which has to be sped up to generate electricity. Wind turbine gear boxes are still the constraining factor for improvements. Do we have any idea how these designs plan on handling this problem?
If anybody wants to read about an actual attempt to address this, here [nottingham.ac.uk] is a thesis on a system which uses wind turbines to run gravitational pistons to directly generate compressed air.
wonder what the effect will be on aquatic life (Score:2)
Spoiling space (Score:2)
It could be further LED lamps research & development, limiting air-conditioned and heated areas in houses by the law, limiting weight of the cars, etc. We spoil our space for living by these ugly generators so that lazy people may continue to over-eat in luxury.
Re: (Score:2)
No, we do it so spoiled brats can continue to charge the batteries on their over-indulgent toys.
Re: (Score:2)
Modern architecture makes it possible to construct a comfortable house where only about a hundred square meters are air-conditioned (heated) and the rest are open areas, patio, etc.
If it was enforced with the law we could keep the air space as it was created. It could be continued to be enjoyed by birds, aviators, hobb
East side of lake michigan (Score:2)
Energy isn't free, (Score:2)
It has to come from somewhere. So where does the energy comes from? The wind. So the wind is now 9 mph instead of 10. No biggie, but the wind where these things are not is still ten, creating vortices from the wind shear. Also shear between the artmosphere. the ocean will affect the currents, causinfg changes in the ocean ecology.
On a small scale windmils may work fine, but once you stqart ramping up to the point of provding electricity for a small town, then you are going to have a major effect on the we
Re: (Score:2)
As long as you are only affecting the weather, then no foul because, as the AGW crowd likes to loudly proclaim, weather is not climate.
Upside down. (Score:2)
Wow! (Score:2)
Re:The new rulers of this site... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York, maybe a more relevant reference point here, since we're talking scale and bluster.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But is it as big as his hair?
Re: (Score:2)
And the blades spin as fast as Trump's PR team.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd be surprised if Trump even has a PR team. He basically just says what's on his mind (instead of the usual canned responses politicians typically give) and people either fawn over it or they go ape shit.
Strange as it seems (because you can't go thirty minutes without hearing or reading his name sometimes) his campaign is spending hardly any money, so I'm not sure what kind of a PR team he could even hire with such a paltry sum. Very well disproves the notion that money buys votes. If it did, then Hillary
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, I don't get it. Media is doing the equivalent of watching a train wreck and cannot stop. For example, adults would have asked trump to reconsider going to the iowa debate, and let him know if he failed to, no more invites to future debates. You don't want to play now, then there are consequences, no seat at the table next time. And then all the media spent forever discussing his no show. Again, then should have ignored his absence. Seriously does anyone know what he will do when he gets in office? H
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
FTFY.
Re: (Score:2)
Congress?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's Trump himself, but I think that would violate all sorts of laws of nature.
Re:Pity the birds (Score:4, Insightful)
Large turbines spin slower, and hence will not do any chopping. Birds can fly around it, although some won't and it will be on par with a stationary skyscrapers that kill plenty of birds too.
Re:Pity the birds (Score:4, Insightful)
If it is far enough out to sea, there shouldn't be to many birds in the first place.
Re:Pity the birds (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, larger turbines spin at lower rpm but the tip speed is about the same regardless of size. There are physical limitations.
Actually I didn't some checking and found a paper titled Optimal Tip Speed Ratio [mragheb.com] [PDF]. The tip speed ratio is the tip speed/wind speed. The paper says:
For grid connected wind turbines with three rotor blades the optimal wind tip speed ratio is reported as 7, with values over the range 6-8.
So the optimal tip speed depends on the wind speed but for practical reasons the tip speed may be limited to non-optimal values.
Re: (Score:3)
Large turbines spin slower, and hence will not do any chopping. Birds can fly around it, although some won't and it will be on par with a stationary skyscrapers that kill plenty of birds too.
Someone doesn't understand circular motion. Small turbines with small blades spin quickly. Chop chop chop.
Large turbines with large blades spin slowly. BUT the blades are longer. The further from the centre of rotation you get the faster your velocity. I.e. Chop Chop Chop.
The birds wouldn't even see it coming. The "problem" really doesn't change.
And I use quotes because the problem is nothing compared to the death of birds caused by other human activities.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, this is probably the best way to make windmills bird-safe. The bigger the blades, the slower they'll move.
Re: (Score:3)
The RPM will be slower, but I very much doubt the tip speed will be substantially slower. I'm pretty sure the design tip speed is fundamentally a certain percentage of the wind speed, independent of the design disk diameter. That's certainly the way propellers work.
It's the tip speed that kills. As a matter of fact, larger blades are probably harder to avoid, because as they rotate they
Re:Pity the birds (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure that coming into contact with the tip of a wind turbine would kill or seriously damage you, but there's evidence that some animals aren't actually colliding with the blades. Some post-mortem studies (of bats IIRC) showed evidence of ruptured lungs (but no blunt-force trauma), implying that the animals were killed by entering the zone of low pressure behind the leading edge.
Re: (Score:3)
On the contrary, this is probably the best way to make windmills bird-safe. The bigger the blades, the slower they'll move.
They are totally alien structures to a birds perception way out there in nowhere flying at night and may not even recognized as danger until it's too late.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Pity the birds (Score:2, Insightful)
0mph is enough to kill a bird considering how many die just from hitting large buildings.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be surprised if the wind stalks were anywhere as near efficient as turbines but they may be cheap enough to build that they're still cost effective.
Re: (Score:2)
Is energy wasted in bending the stalk?
Re: (Score:2)
^ not a euphemism.
Re: (Score:2)
A windmill on this scale would to me seem to affect the wind. I mean you can't turn this big windmill without slowing down the wind. We slow down the wind, we are affecting the climate. Isn't this the thing we were trying to prevent when we started using green energy.
People have looked in to this. Compared to the total amount of wind energy wind turbines will never be more than a drop in the bucket. They may have some local effects by mixing the higher and lower elevation air but they don't have large scale effects.
Re: (Score:2)
but butterflies
I think the AC is a perfect example of the green movement. We "know" that current technology is bad and we don't know that newer technology is NOT bad, so let's have no technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Based on the part of the AC's comment I didn't quote I doubt the AC is a member of the green movement. More like an anti renewable energy supporter grasping at straws to make their argument.
Re: (Score:2)
but nature produced the mountains so any such effects are natural and can be discounted. I mean, come on, Mother Nature put those mountains there because they needed to be there to produce the perfect climate for the planet.
Re: (Score:2)
You are full of shit for various reasons, primarily that power storage technology is improving. Also, the smart grid is going to permit automated factories to simply run when there is power available, when coupled with ever-increasing factory automation. You may not have noticed, but every economy in the world is slowing down. We're out of room for expansion, so unending growth is over. From here on out it's chasing efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)
Temper, temper. Not agreeing with someone is no reason to loose your manners.
You're spreading disingenuous FUD in an attempt to attack a technology that we should have been installing en masse in the 1970s, that is to say both solar and wind. You're actively doing damage with that shit, so fuck you and the horse that rode in on you.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm actually giving several arguments, none of which you refuted. That it's your opinion it is FUD is all good and well, but that remains your opinion (which clearly was not substantiated by any arguments), and if you can't debate in a sensible way but always feel the need to flamebait and use personal insults, it's rather clear WHO is being disingenuous.
You gave no counterarguments whatsoever - unless saying "we've been installing it en masse" is meant to be a compelling argument - but just assert (from au
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly what I already commented on: you're using the 'smart grid' argument. I already pointed the drawbacks of it. In short, it's economically unsustainable IF you want to make sure one part of your country/continent always gets enough electricity from the other side of your country/continent, if the need appears.
Also, the only really solution to it (using windturbines as a stable energy source) is in your last part: energy storage. However, as I said in my original post, you would need systems that
windbags are not the solution (Score:2)
I see you've gotten a 'Troll' for your seasoned GP remark. Around here that means you're on the right track. There's a lot of delusion around here.
The 'smart grid' argument is a 21st century phenomenon where smart takes on the meaning that robust used to have. And the term robust has slipped too --- it used to mean engineered well enough to be truly resilient to failure, now it is often used to describe a mere excess of something, usually taken to absurd limits.
Advocates of 'smart' things center their argum
Re: (Score:2)
If I had mod-points left, I would give some to this post. ;-) Do you mind I I take parts of it in any following post(s) in regard to the same matter? (You can do the same with anything worthwhile you might see in mine, of course). It's just that, I think the few remaining rational voices in here should do more to make the obvious flaws apparent to all. Even if a lot don't get it because of their ideologically coloured glasses, it might reach *some* people whom didn't fall in the nonsense of it completely, y
AND NOW for something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT (Score:2)
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI
Updated for 2016! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot [slashdot.org]... A brief history of nuclear energy fear in these United States [slashdot.org]... You should fear everything besides nuclear energy [slashdot.org]... Solar drives California towards cannibalism, or your money back [slashdot.org]... There's a fire, and people pushing intermittent sources are blocking the exits [slashdot.org]... Hiding wonders of the modern world from the kids [slashdot.org]...Some energy priorities [slashdot.org]..
Re: (Score:2)
Some little know facts: when the power of a windturbine is mentioned, it does NOT mean that it actually delivers that power. For instance, if it says "This is a 8MW windmill that can support 100000 households...that is simply a lie, in a de facto way. The vast majority only deliver ONE THIRD of their pretended maximum power (a lot even less).
That is a matter of math, or not? Either you fix the wrong name plate, or you fix the place where you place them. I mean: if a wind turbine is rated to yield 8MW powe
Re: (Score:2)
"That is a matter of math, or not? Either you fix the wrong name plate, or you fix the place where you place them. I mean: if a wind turbine is rated to yield 8MW power at a wind speed of 30feet/sec but you put it on a place where that speed is rarely reached or exceeded, it can't be the wind mills fault."
Apparently, it happens often enough. One can put the blame on everyone else, the fact remains that the actual energy most windmills deliver are de facto a lot less than promised. http://www.telegraph.co.uk [telegraph.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
No, they do not, if you mean the average windmill being able to provide there vaunted maximum energy-output. Look it up: with most it's 30%.
If you mean total demand can 'mostly' be provided, than that's only true if you take the averages. And also: being stochastic means you'll never be sure of that. Even if you can say there is a 90% chance it will always be enough, you can't go to a factory or company and say: "sorry, today no electricity, it's one of those 10% days."
And a smart grid has inherent economic
Re: (Score:2)
I primarily blame the education-system, though. No where in the world are there countries that oblige schools to teach and train critical and rational thought. "Historical criticism" is the closest thing I ever saw, and it was in a university. They should expand and make similar courses compulsory, starting from the lower grades. It would make people more than gullible sheep, willing to believe any politician or nonsensical emotionally driven claim.
There is a great shortage of ratio and logic being promoted
Re: (Score:2)
Why not trying millions of 2-meter tall mini-turbines? Sure, wind speed at ground level isn't great, but it exists, multiply by millions... And ruin the scenery less, easier to maintain? What happens when a giant turbine breaks?
You want to maintain millions of small, electrical things in the middle of the ocean? Either you are looking to start an off shore maintenance company or you're just bat shit insane.