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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?"
How much wind does that thing require to spin?
It slices! It dices! It makes julienne fries!
...they could create a politician and run for public office. The amount of hot air produced would give it an insurmountable advantage.
Does this sort of über-large wind power machine generate more energy than it takes to create, install, and maintain it? I remember reading that the smaller machines required more energy over their lifetimes than they were able to generate.
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.
It should get plenty of hot air to spin it,
A while ago (with a previous generation of wind turbine technology, for sure) someone built a particularly large wind turbine on one of the windier islands of Scotland's west coast, hoping to replace (or lessen) expensive shipments of fuel oil. Power production was fine, but the locals were driven to distraction by the noise the thing produced, particularly when the windspeed was high. I believe it produced a very loud "whump" every second or so, loud enough that no-one could sleep. I believe the conclusion to which the developers came was that very large turbines were prone to this problem.
Still, that was a while ago (maybe a decade) so I'd imagine the developers of this new megaturbine will have engineered out the "whump" issue.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
http://www.biggleszx.com/slashdot/5m_01.jpg
http://www.biggleszx.com/slashdot/5m_02.jpg
http://www.biggleszx.com/slashdot/5m_03.jpg
Regards.
$ mv *.sig >/dev/null
With 3 18-ton rotor blades pumping out 5 MW I wonder if my neighbours would mind one in my backyard?
This is Joe from down the street.
Please.. just please, stay in your mother's basement, you creep.
How big would a Wind Turbine have to be to power a house? Some people already have solar panels on their roofs, why not a small Wind Turbine?
The Coral links of "The pictures are quite impressive"
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Some nerd is thinking, "where can I get THAT kind of power for my beanie....."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is a great idea. Why aren't we fully exploiting the power of the wind?
This is an example of the obstacles that American power generating windmills are facing. If ever there was a NIMBY group it's these people. Someone wants to build an offshore set of windmills to power about 3/4 of Cape Cod and surrounding areas in Massachusetts. Since Massachusetts is heavily dependent on important electricity and oil, this seems like a great solution.
Undoubtedly there are some ecological implications, but the NIMBY group clearly is magnifying these issues in order to shoot down the whole idea; they're fishing for excuses. They don't want to have to look at windmills. This is where some federal leadership may be required in order to get the U.S. off its foreign energy dependency.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Wow. That's enough to power a small town. How much noise would a thing like that make?
I know that for smaller windmills, say the 1-5kw models you can buy online would pay for themselves in saved electrical bill cost in about 5 years.
And thats the cost to buy the thing. Meaning materials, employees, as well as power in production. I don't see how you can say the power required to make it would be more then the power generated. I mean, unless the manufacturer were getting power for free, which is pretty unlikely.
Windmills are simpler then most other kinds of power plants too.
Now, i've heard that solar cells have this problem, though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hm. But it doesnt matter... For every bird that is killed by a windmill, 100.000 are killed you flying against houses, power-lines, radio-towers, ect.
The speed of the blades isnt what kills the birds, its their own speed they have while smashing into a steel tower.
If you want to save birds, ban cats....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Wind in the southwestern deserts and midwest plains away from most everything else. Solar would work in the south in general. Hydro in the north. If you take NYC (niagria falls), SoCal (solar and wind), Boston (from QuebecHydro)Texas (solar and wind), Flordia (solar) you are 25% of the way there. That is a big cut. Should drop existing energy prices and reduce greenhouse emissions as well. Add in some good insulation and, while you dont have the problem licked it is a big step in the right direction.
Birds shouldn't be hitting this since they can see it from miles away. Plus the fact that it's moving should scare them away. It's not like glass where they often can't see it and try to fly through it.
Unfortunately, birds tend to save weight on brain. B-( They don't seem to connect the passage of one blade with the next. When blades are big, and moving an an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound at right angles to the bird's flight path, they sometimes don't notice that there's another one coming until it's too late to dodge it.
Google for "windmills birds dead". Lots of info out there.
One estimate is 70,000/year in the US alone. Another is 44,000 for just Altamont pass. Another (in 1992, when there were fewer mills) put the Altamont Pass golden eagle kill rate at 39/year, and the total breeding population at 500 pair. More recent numbers put the kill rate for goldens at 60/year.
Golden Eagles, Red-tail Hawks, and Kestrels are at particular risk. They focus on their prey on the ground and ignore the blades. And there's a positive feedback loop: The shelter from raptors leads to a denser population of rodents near the mill, which baits in more raptors.
But other birds are not immune: Large wind farms tend to be set up in mountain passes, where the mountains concentrate the winds. But they also concentrate bird migrations, one of the factors focusing bird migrations into a few narrow "flyways". Birds tend to fly in flocks (to save energy by riding the vortices from the bird in front) and depend on their numbers to protect them from peredation. So even if the blades are noticed they may be ignored, and a flock may fly right through a windmill's swept disk.
The problem is mainly the large mills, whose blades turn at a slow rate (though still at a phenomenal speed) and which are too large to be perceived as a single unit. (I've never heard of any issues with birds related to the small, fast-spinning mills used for wind power on a home or farm level.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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...
When wind power started to come back after the 1973 energy crisis, useful sizes were much smaller. There were a few big machines, but they were one of a kind prototypes. Most of the turbines of the 1970s and 1980s were in the 100KW range. That's a convenient size, because all the components can be shipped easily. The entire hub/generator unit can be shipped assembled.
But all those little turbines are a maintenance headache. Farms of big mills generate more power per acre than little ones, because the blades are higher and catch more wind. So size has been creeping up. As the 1970s units wear out, they're being replaced with fewer, but larger, machines. New wind farm machines are running around 1.5MW. That's a commercial technology. General Electric alone has 2300 units of its 1.5MW turbine installed.
Offshore, much bigger machines are the norm. Setting a pylon in the ocean is a big job, so the fewer the better. Big components can be moved in by ship, so the truck size limit goes away. So offshore machines are running around 5MW. But there aren't many of them. Most of the really big machines are still experimental.
Wind power is like hydroelectric power. There are a limited number of good sites. Most of the ones in California, the major passes through the coastal mountain range, are already taken. The East Coast doesn't have a long coastal mountain range, so installing wind farms in passes is out. So the East Coast systems tend to be offshore.
Total installed wind turbine capacity worldwide is about 40 gigawatts, although that's peak, not average, output. This is up by a factor of 10 in the last decade. Much of this is due to better power conversion technology. Early wind turbines synchronized the blade itself to the power grid. Newer ones have inverters and better controls, so they interface much better to each other and the power grid. Many of the early turbines were only tolerable on grid because they were such a minor portion of generation. They were a destabilizing influence, forced into synch by bigger generators elsewhere. With improved controls, wind generators can contribute to frequency stability, rather than stressing it. As wind power becomes a larger fraction of generation, that's essential.
The Stateline Wind Energy Center in SW Washington and NW Oregon has the capacity to produce 300MW of energy, one of the largest installations in the world to date.
Granted, each turbine is only 660kW -- far short of the 5MW of the turbine mentioned above -- but all put together, with 454 turbines, it makes for a sizeable facility. Plus with lease payments of $1500-2000US per turbine, it provides farmers with their biggest cash crop since marijuana.
Yes, there's photos.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
If I can figure out a way to blow it over the mobo - my cooling problems are OVER !!!
*for now*
21045.09663 to 78167.5018 furlongs/fortnight
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
..but it depends where you are (local average wind speed, depends heavily on topography) and how much power you need.
If you can find a way of levelling the load (e.g. batteries) with only moderate conservation you'd need the equivalent of a constant 1kW output, about 1.4 Hp. Power abstracted from a windmill follows the formula k*0.5*A*V^3, where A is the area of the blade disc, V the windspeed, and K is the fudge factor. There's a theoretical limit of about 59% efficiency, due principally to retaining enough momentum to carry the air on the downwind side away from an axial turbine.
Anyway... say you have a mean wind speed locally of 10mph, which is constant, because you have the device up a tower. That equates to 4.45ms^-1, so working backwards, and assuming 50% efficiency for the 'k' factor - hey, we're geeks, we'll buy th every best - you'd need a blade disc, um, 5.4 metre diameter. Of course the conversion to electricity incurs losses, sy 80% overall... so a (*very* efficient) wind genny rated for1Kwh output at 10mph would imply a 5.9m diameter swept area. Pretty small!
In fact, in the interests of minimising noise and improving part-speed efficiency, you'll find 1kW rated wind generators are slightly bigger, and rely on rather higher mean windspeeds. Beware the windspeed measurement though, that V^3 term will kill ya. If the mean windspeed locally turns out to be just half what you measure, you'll get, at best, only 1/8th the output expected. The actual design considerations for wind turbines (disc solidity, operating range windspeed etc) are wonderfully technical and pretty interesting in their own right.
As to why not...well small wind gens are rather expensive , and Planning control (local ordinances, US) tend to restrict the possibility to rural areas.
Those are called vertical axis rotors, a variant of the savonius rotor. I've seen a few, they work well enough for a project any back yard handy dude can build. Usually they used truck differentials and axles, then some more pulleys, for the gearing to the alternator to get the speed up enough from the pretty slow turning oil drum halves.
There are some large commercial examples of them now also. I remember seeing a link to one company in wyoming that makes and sells them, but I have forgotten the name or I would provide a link to their page. IIRC, they look like big towers with wind openings, totally different from the airplane propeller blade looking projects.
Personally, I'd love to see a lot more R & D work on using atmospheric static electricty potential, I think it would be a serious contender in the alternative energy market. I like the idea of no moving parts whatsoever. I've read some on hobbiest experiments with them, some guys are getting useful amounts of juice from it, using wrapped bundles of stock fencing to act as the static accumulators in effect, and automotive coils as capacitors, then going to an opened up severely (large electrode gap) spark plug, then to a storage battery. Wind blowing over the fencing induces a slight charge, when it reaches potential to work the coil and spark, it jumps, gets into the battery in a series of very high voltage but low amperage pulses. Interesting concept. I'm not an EE, but that is my understanding about how it works.
A local guy filmed it in action, and you can hear just how audible these things really are:7 83.avi>
<http://www.wigleyandassociates.com/uploads/MVI_6
they work very well as long as you can deal with the corrosive nature of the acids that get produced along with the methane gas. there's a very large example at a poultry farm near me that was running one for awhile and it worked well, but it corroded too quickly. Different materials and processes are needed for very long term operation.
I built a very small test digester one time, worked well, got useable gas. Just used junk parts I had kicking around, a washtub, a cut off oil drum, some milking machine parts, and some manure and water. all I ever did with the gas was accumulate it in plastic bags and set it off for people to see that that it worked. took me well under 1/2 hour to build it, too. Kinda a fun project, I'd like to build another one sometime, just at a useable scale for something..
Another time I built a really good hot water maker. Basiucally a variant on leaving a hose out in the yard on a sunny day, but I got the heat source from aerobic decomposition. The concept was simple, we had a big storm locally and woodchips were free for the asking from the power line crews because they had so much of the stuff, so we got some. I buried a few hundred feet of garden hose in the pile (all my spare sections on hand, this was just an experiment). As the stuff started to compost out, it got pretty hot inside, you could get a small stream of 160 degree water from it, pumping in cold at the entrance end, as long as you kept the pressure low enough. this was in the *winter*, too, BTW. Seems like you could build a closed system with something like that, using an antifreeze solution, high temp hoses, and radiators, put the whole thing downhill from you, let thermosiphoning pump it to where you needed the heat, radiate it out, the antifreeze cools down, falls back downhill to get reheated in the pile, where it gets reheated, starts working it's way back uphill, and etc,so you would have free heat 24/7 for as long as the chips held out, then use them for mulch someplace and replace them with fresh chips (or other compostable matter).
I LOVE this whole energy subject, too much fun, too many places joe backyard tinkerer can have fun and do useful projects!
Everything else aside, nuclear power is ludicrously expensive. In Kansas, part of our power comes from the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant. First, the power company had to raise rates to build the bloody thing. Now, they've raised rates several more times to try and pay off the rest of the construction expense and they're still losing money operating it. Anytime you let an "energy" company near a large, expensive, project like nuclear power, it seems to turn into a money pit.
What I'd really like to see is a functional fusion reactor. Until fusion reactors are a reality, nuclear power will never get past the combined burden of phenominal expense + the "now we've got to find someplace to safely store the waste, who wants to volunteer" factor.
LM Glasfibre production of these wings are quite impressive. Allthough its been over a year since I was involved in the project, let me tell tou this:
When I first started out walking among the moulds for these wings its mind-boggeling how big the become. At first I thought 39mester was big, but the 61m meter turbineblade is incredible.
And think about the amount of engergy that a wing is loaded with, when you do a DESTRUCTIVE load-test (I dont think they actually do it on the 61m - but its normally how you test a blade) - KAPOW.
Windturbines really is an impressive industry - something we danes can rightly be proud of.
And the future ramifications of their use makes it even more interesting to be working in the field.