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.
Destroying habitats on the ocean floor and having birds fly into it won't go over well for the environmentalists I imagine.
The whole "floating" thing is trying to solve that. By floating they can be located farther offshore, outside of migation patterns and coastal wildlife habitats. Sure they might need to make some sort of passive sonar reflectors to keep whales from hitting them, but being able to be in 500m water will also put them well out of sight of land, another NIMBY adoption problem.
We are all just people.
Much like other interaction with the sea floor, the tethers could actually create habitats. The tether points would probably provide a little shelter for smaller wildlife. You could attach small platforms along the submerged tube to encourage small plants, fish, etc to attach themselves.
And environmentalists that oppose everything cannot speak for everyone. Opposing greener energy sources just hurts everyone, nature included. If we can't build greener sources, we're going to burn more coal. When comparing a few dead birds vs. a coal plant, I'll take the few dead birds any day, and so should any reasonable environmentalist.
I wonder if these things will reduce the number of hurricanes. It seems that strong hurricanes don't form in the presence of wind shear between surface and higher altitude winds. With enough of these things scattered across the ocean, the drag on low-level air masses should set up a shear condition that helps reduce the formation of intense hurricanes.
On the other hand, weather modification seems a dicey thing to try on our sample-size-of-one planet.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I can't comment about other parts of the world, but in New Zealand the main resistance to wind farms is that nobody wants them in their back yard. They're big, ugly, and noisy, they tend to restrict public access to the surrounding land, and they cause the all-important property values of private individuals to plummet. Lately we've seen several local large wind farm projects either heavily toned down, or completely scuttled. Each has been worth between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, but small groups of locals have put a lot of effort into blocking them.
Even though I have mixed feelings, I do actually sympathise with many of the complaints. Society (here at least) has been built to encourage people to value personal property and what they own, and property ownership is a very traditional and encouraged way for people to invest for their future. People here have their retirement funds in their property, and suddenly seeing that value plummet by 50% or more because the local council or government decides that it might allow a wind farm nearby can be quite devestating. 20 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be an incentive to build giant noisy ugly structures all over the countryside, and there's only so much forward thinking that can be done.
Even if it's kind of silly and inefficient, putting wind farms out at sea conveniently places them in a location which isn't the back yard of anyone likely to complain.
It solves a couple of problems with wind power, but doesn't really address the main ones.
A) Wind power is expensive
B) The power output is uncontrollable and unpredictable
Wind power is not being held back by environmental concerns. On the contrary it receives huge subsidies based on its renewable nature. The reason it haven't caught on is simply that it is 3-4 times as expensive per kwh as compared to a fossil fuel plant or nuclear power station. The unpredictable output would be a show stopper if you want any large fraction of your energy from wind, but in most countries today the amount of wind power used is not even close to when this starts becoming a major problem. For wind power to catch on costs must come down by a factor of 2 at the very least, and I don't see that happening by making them significantly more difficult to deploy and maintain.
not compared to coal fire plants. I'd much rather see a wind farm than a coal fire plant.
How about floating, or submerged, platforms anchored to the bottom, with turbines pushed by the water currents flowing past them? The energy to move less viscous, less dense air in the volumes past windmills is much less than the viscous, dense water flowing beneath these platforms. And those currents are more predictable than the winds. While the weather (eg typhoons and lightning) probably makes air turbines more subject to damage than submerged ones.
Anyway, why choose? Why not water turbines submerged beneath platforms with windmills mounted on top?
--
make install -not war
I was gillnetting for salmon in Puget Sound years ago. The net was monofilament and meshed for sockeye. At night, a grey whale swam up then down the whole half mile length of net. They know what is in the water.
s -selling-solar.html
On birds, the very large wind turbines turn quite slowly and this has proved much better for birds since thy fly faster than the blades move.
--
Solar, the source of renewable: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I always figured some kind of power generation on a floating platform at sea could be a spiffy way to generate hydrogen (and oxygen) using electrolysis. Just come by every now and then to collect the hydrogen and replace the anodes (which would probably corrode really really fast in salt water) and you are set.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
But....these will block Ted Kennedy's view of Norway!
Seriously..all these people complain about wind turbines blocking the view of their million-dollar ocean cottages get no sympathy from me. They ought to think about the value their oceanfront property will have when the oceans rise thirty feet because the polar ice caps melt due to global warming. Oh wait, NIMBY! I forgot! Make it someone else's problem!
It's not an "unspoken truth" - it is a well acknowledged and open fact that the north sea is running out of oil and gas. No-one is trying to hide this. This is why there is a major gas main into the UK from mainland Europe now. And Norsk Hydro is very forward thinking with its R&D efforts. This ends up costing the company I work for quite a lot in patent licence payments!