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Floating Wind Turbines
The Great Pulgoso sends us word that Norwegian energy group Norsk Hydro has signed an agreement with Siemens to develop floating wind turbines. The companies agreed on a schedule that would see a prototype in the North Sea by 2009 and a working wind farm using 5-megawatt generators by 2013. (Norsk Hydro unveiled the design in 2005.) Inhabitat.com has taken the giant illustrations from the Norsk Hydro site and reproduced them at a reasonable size. The design features a steel tube 200 meters long. It extends 80 meters above the sea surface and has three 60-meter blades. The whole thing is anchored to the sea floor by three tethers. The developers expect to be able to install the turbines in waters up to 700 meters deep.
I haven't RTFA yet, but I thought the reason they didn't have many wind turbines in the ocean was because of the wildlife issues associated with it.
Destroying habitats on the ocean floor and having birds fly into it won't go over well for the environmentalists I imagine.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the blades or shaft icing be an issue in such high latitudes? They did not have specs posted, so perhaps there's some sort of built in electrical heater, but that would reduce efficiency and create more parts to break. I'm doubting they want to send maintenance teams out there too often.
lol: You see no door there!
When I was young, I was all for conserving ecosystems and saving animals. I was also smart enough to know that man needs to live too. Sure, we may need wood, but we need to replenish the forest. We may want fish, but we can't over fish or we collapse the ecosystem. So to me I thought you had to strike a balance. As I got older, I never lost the care for the balance of the environment.
Now it seems like each environmentalist has some different idea of what is good for the environment. These ideas go from tame, to extreme. Many environmentalists would value animals over people. This is where I differ from hardcore environmentalists.
I think man still has to live, and if man is forced to live in impoverished conditions that he has a bigger impact on the environment than a man who is well off. Poor people are the ones driven to poach and over fish. Large businesses may all seem bad to an environmentalist, but at least they have to listen to regulations or the punishment is worse for their bottom line if they get caught doing illegal things. Poor people are more inclined to strip away their entire rain forest for a cheap buck than someone who has enough.
I can't blame a person who is just out for survival doing their thing. So to me, the environmental situation is at an impass with environmentalists all having the same motive: to save nature, but all having differing opinions on how or what to stand up against. It seems like they're almost wack jobs as they stand against everything and everything they see as a perceived threat to the environment.
To me: If you empower men with an average impact to the environment, then you are really doing the environment justice. Completely stripping down a forest is awful. Replanting baby trees is still bad because the animals that lived under the trees can't survive anymore unless your goal is just to make the land a tree farm. Yet if you want to strip out trees without hurting the environment, you can always take some trees out of each forest without leaving a noticible impact on the environment.
Now the whole reason I bring this up is that I want to consider myself an environmentalist, but they don't have a unified voice. Each one has a differing opinion, and most of them are too passionate to have a meaningful discussion as to why other people's views may be right.
For example, I support the idea of supercharging the nation's energy infrastructure. I think that if we provide much more energy to the power grid it would be an environmental boon. My reasoning is that you can switch from expensive gasoline to inexpensive hydrogen in your cars, and basically drive wherever you want, lowering the prices on everything(exactly in the opposite way that inflation is hitting us because gasoline is going up). Basically if we supercharge the nation's powergrid, we would have necessity on other things lessened.
How do we super charge the power grid? To begin with, we open a load of nuclear reactors to begin with. A lot of people knee jerk at the idea of nuclear reactors! So to have a meaningful discussion, they would have to not be an environmental zealot that doesn't have a closed idea. Nuclear reactors have come a way since the first ones were created. They still have some of the same problems such as needing a place to dump the waste. I'm not suggesting something radically new in the ways of solving nuclear generator problems, but what I am proposing is that the solution for environmental empowerment comes with some other problems that can be solved.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I know how to weigh in the human factor. Most environmentalists will balk if they see *any* problem with a plan. I'm sorry, but I consider these people unreasonable when they go so far as to say that solar and wind farms hurt the environment. I'm not lying when I say that many have hidden political agendas that they use environmentalist FUD as a tool, but don't give a damn about the environment themselves. Not all environmentalist
God spoke to me.
This is the first question an engineer assigned to the project would ask. Then they would think about all the stuff you've mentioned. Then they would think about heaps of other things you haven't thought of. Then they would design things to deal with each of the issues they came up with. Then they would make the things a lot stronger they would ever need to be in theory.
That's what engineers do for a living. And quite frankly none of the those problems sound overly complex. As someone else has mentioned most of them have been solved for oil rigs for many years. The others have been solved since 1866 when the first intercontinental copper wires for telegraph transmission were laid.
I was thinking you could do something really cool by having the whole things submerge when there was a storm and hide under the level of the waves until it was calmer, but that might be a bit too sci-fi for them.
Every single point you have made is moot.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Gee, really? And they couldn't possibly have thought of that could they? Seriously man,
this is an old idea. If it's *finally* going into production I'd be willing to bet
they've given some serious thought to adressing such basic things as Newton's Third law.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I just read their pdf based documentation http://www.hydro.com/library/attachments/en/press_ room/floating_windmills2_en.pdf but it appears they will use a 120 meter long concrete submerged cylinder. This thing will weigh the hundreds of tons you are talking about. But you are right, there is an issue they have not solved yet because they say Quote
"For the concept to work, it is crucial that the wind turbines be light, requiring further technological development to realize the goal of establishing offshore wind farms at greater sea depths."
So it seems they too are concerned about the weight at the top. I reckon that might be fixable by placing the generator in the base of the concrete tube or tower and run a shaft or transmission belt up to the rotor.
I suppose lowering the rotor is out of the question because the blades might hit ships.
Er... Minor problems in your argument:
1. You are expecting the bozo to have a clue. Terrorists, especially the allahhead variety do not. Even 9/11 was clueless. Despite supposedly being a construction engineer Bin Laden did not see the folding effect which a major fire will do to the skyscraper design. The ones to come later were equally clueless. 7/7 managed to reach their targets without blowing themselves on the way due to sheer luck. Madrid ones managed to get that far only because they found a corrupt local Spaniard to supply them with explosives and a Bulgarian muslim trained by CIA to rig them. If it was not for a major power training their "explosive expert" they would have not gotten anywhere. And 21/7 and the last slot in London and Glasgow were a total laughing stock. And that were terrorists lead by a mastermind with an engineering and design degree from a "respectable" British university. IMO all people who had the same chemistry course with this bozo in Anglia Polytechnics (nowdays East Anglia Ruskin) should have their degree revoked and resit their exams. To ensure good standards of teaching in the future. Religious fanaticism and real modern military and engineering capability do not go well together.
2. In order to get to an installation offshore the bozo will need to use a plane or a boat. All it takes to protect an offshore installation is to have an exclusion zone around it (which are set around many of the current windfarms for health and safety reasons). Any approaching vessel will be picked up on radar tens of miles away and can be stopped trivially. Just put any bog-standard naval close quarters defence system on the more important rigs. While attacking a power station based on land can be done by any bozo with a bag of dynamite (hint - how do you get the electiricty out of it), attacking a defended sea installation requires the resources of a major naval power. If it is defended, even minimally. It cannot be done by a lone allahhead idiot on a boat with a gun. That is besides the fact that Norwegian and UK air force have any point within the north sea within 15-20 min scramble time. There is very little an allahhead bozo with a gun can do against an incoming Harpoon missile.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
No, it isn't.
Err... First, there have been numerous and vast efforts to protect nuclear power plants inside this country's borders.
And inside this country, basically every wind-farm is completely open... One large one, a few miles from my location, is completely unguarded by even the most basic of fences, practically abandoned, etc. You could drive a huge tanker truck between the turbines in the middle of the day, and nobody would even notice.
The thing about power generation is redundancy. Sure, if we have 50% of our generation capabilities out in the distant ocean, security might begin to be a problem... But with ~1% being provided by wind power, the price for a KWH of electricity wouldn't even rise a cent if somebody destroyed them all... Wind and solar power are inherently distributed electricity generation, which makes it, on the whole, more secure from attack than any single central facility could be, no matter where.
I don't think you understand much about the oceans. The US Navy is ALREADY patrolling all of the world's seas, and has been doing so for much of the last century. They are already meticulously tracking all the submarines, from every country, around the world's oceans.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Regarding B: wind power is very easy to store, at least in a mixed source electricity grid: you store it as unburned fossil fuels.
With respect to expense, there are fixed and marginal costs to consider. Making it economical is a matter of achieving sufficient scale to amortize the lifetime production of the generators adequately. The marginal costs are practically nil, so at some point the cost curves cross each other. Thus the tax incentive bootstraps the early investment needed to get the technology off the scale of the individual experimenter.
This doesn't even account for the hidden subsidies for petroleum. For example US military involvement in protecting petroleum production; it isn't as simple as the US military becoming a petroleum protection force as some have suggested. Petroleum is vital to global and regional stability, and to US economic stability. Which is why the US spends more than the rest of the world together on its military: we are vulnerable because of our energy insecurity.
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