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World's Largest Wind Turbine
PeteJones writes "'Construction work on the REpower 5M was successfully completed last night with the installation of the rotor. Thus the main work on the prototype of the 5-megawatt, world's largest wind turbine has finally been completed.' The pictures are quite impressive. With 3 18-ton rotor blades pumping out 5 MW I wonder if my neighbours would mind one in my backyard?"
If that's becoming less true, I think this is a great thing. I worry a little about the environmental effects of "taking energy out of the wind", but I haven't read about anyone important who shares my worry, so it's probably unfounded.
The whole of Europe was once covered with forests. Now most of it is covered by farmland and urban areas, which offer less resistence to wind. If anything, those windmills will bring back more "natural" conditions.
Any wind? Not unless it's frictionless and massless, my friend - overcoming inertia is not a free lunch.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This site http://www.windpower.org/ which the danish wind generator producers have put up contains a lot of useful information about windpower and counters most of the FUD you'll hear.
Wind power is not perfect, but it is here now (as opposed to fusion energy) has no waste problem (as opposed to current atomics) has local and well understood failure modes (things break, fall down) Produce a lot of power when we need it most (wind is driven by energy from sunlight) and it is economically competitive.
The key to a sensible energy future is to not be fanatical for/against any one source, but to exploit them all where and how it makes sense.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
It usually takes longer for this unscientific, unfounded idiocy to pop up on a wind turbine story, but here you are. Congratulations. People like you make it clear you have never seen a wind turbine, have no concept of environmental conservation, and are just parroting anti-wind lies invented by people vehemently opposed to reducing dependence on oil.
BIG, SLOW MOVING BLADES DO NOT CHOP THINGS UP. PERIOD. The danger posed is extremely minimal. It's theoretically possible for a bird to run into one of the slim, slow-moving blades, and that would likely cause injury, just as if they had run into one of our fancy new all-glass-exterior skyscrapers. But more birds are killed every minute by deforestation and destruction of wetlands, than will be killed by this thing in its entire working lifetime.
Random and weird software I've written.
More surface area means more mass, which means a beefier joint on the axle, which means yet more mass, which means an even beefier joint.
After a certain point, the returns start diminishing. Each extra dollar spent gets you less benefit than the one before it. After a while, you get less performance with more surace area.
Or you use new materials, if they exist.
Air travel stagnated for a very long time, because the alloys available to make airplane engines were too heavy. An engine block powerful enough to generate the thrust necessary to move a large plane full of passengers and cargo was too heavy to lift its own mass into the air, let alone the airframe, the people, and their luggage. It wasn't until the development of stronger, lighter alloys that air flight moved beyond the wood-and-canvas ultralights of the early 1900s.
If it was simply a matter of adding more surface area, we'd be powering the entire world off of one 3-mile diameter fan in Death Valley, that generated 17 billion kilowatts (or whatever) off of the breeze generated by a butterfly in Japan.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.