Slashdot Mirror
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.