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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.
The article says "Norsk Hydro expects to be able to use this technology on sites located 50-100 miles off shore, and with a depth of up to 500 meters" Where does the summary get 700 meters from? Adding the 200m steel tube to this number isn't correct.
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.
The cables are there to keep generators stationary. The waves aren't much of a problem when you center of floatation is 60m below the waters surface. You don't see oil platforms bobbing up and down or blowing away for these reasons. Rubber coated copper is very good at getting the power to shore.
We are all just people.
Here's a simple explanation why ocean waves aren't a problem at deep levels:
Ocean Wave Motion
As depth increases, their effects slowly decrease until completely disappearing about half a wavelength below the surface.
And since it's anchored to the sea-bed, there's no danger if it being moved by tidal currents either.
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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!
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.
Rubber coated copper is very good at getting the power to shore.
And as an extra benefit, should the rubber coating crack, sea food will literally come cooked straight from the ocean!
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.
And aren't there massive waves when there's wind that would prevent the generator from functioning properly?
There's only one solution: cover the entire ocean with generators absorbing wind's energy, so there are NO WAVES AT ALL.
Pure genius...
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.
There's an interesting trend in the comments... of assuming the engineers who designed these are idiots. Yes, I am sure they haven't considered the twenty most obvious things that could go wrong with this device, and will be astonished that the noble readers of Slashdot could think of them. The project should be scrapped as soon as they learn to use the Internet and spot this discussion.
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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.
However rare rouge waves could potentially cause problems to floating structures.
Ah, yes, those rare massive waves of red makeup will do a job on any man-made things!
(Hey, I'm sensitive to it because when I was in junior high I wrote a story in which the protagonist, a thief, did some horrible things. And I wondered why my teacher kept laughing at the story.)
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.
The rubber ducks story makes me wonder if stationary platforms are really a necessity.
Here's an idea. We can mass produce floating rubber ducks. Each duck has leg appendages for traction in the water, a portable generator and nickel metal hydride battery in its base, and a propeller sticking up from a little hat on its head. Every year, we'll dump massive quantities of ducks- billions of ducks- into the North Pacific from cargo ships. They'll wash into the pack ice in Alaska, and then they'll move a mile a day, frozen in the ice, with their propellers whirring. This is ideal since the wind there is intense and the ice anchors the duck from blowing around too much. Eventually in 15 years they make it down into the north Atlantic where they can be collected by British people who relieve them of their fully recharged NiMH cells, swapping them for exhausted cells harvested from last year's ducks, and then the little guys continue their trek around the oceans delivering cheap renewable energy to people all around the world. And it really is renewable since 50 years later when the ducks wear out and arrive back in the north Pacific, the nickel can be melted back out of the cells.
Or instead of NiMH energy storage, we can have the rubber ducks shoot little lasers from their eyes at a satellite in geosynchronous orbit which would gather the energy and emit an intense maser beam at a giant microwave antenna somewhere in the southwest. That would be much more convenient.
While we're at it, we can have the ducks do wireless packet routing for us across the surface of the water. They can also have little spy cameras mounted in their heads in case the British need a little convincing. There just has to be something cool you could do with a billion rubber ducks spread across the ocean.
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?
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make install -not war
Imagine a big pile of dead hurricanes on the ocean floor beneath these things - Oh! The Horror!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This development is really a matter of combining existing offshore wind energy expertise and spar or tension leg platform (TLP) technology already well used by the oil & gas industry.
/*shudder*/
/*I'm a Mech Eng and closet greenie (actually more of an Olduvai doomer) and work in the O&G engineering and construction industry.*/
I had this concept going through my mind over two years ago. I've got a stack of papers and specs accumulated looking at the details of the technolgy. I was intending (dreaming) of starting a company to develop a proposal to place a wind turbine field in Bass Strait. Such a venture might be useful in offsetting the impact of Steve Brack's enormous desalination project.
I think all the technology is well developed and in place. The problem is that it is distributed amongst several disparate industry groups, and just needs to be successfuly combined, which is more of a human resource problem than anything technical.
Good on these Norwegians for pursuing this. I hope they are successful.
Actually, I think the biggest problem/risk is shipping. It would kinda ruin your day if something like Pasha Bulker decided to take out several of your wind turbines.
This is particularly the case with wind turbines, since the quantity and extent of distribution of the structures would be much more significant than offshore oil & gas installations.
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!
Every single point you have made is moot.
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At 5MW, the wind will push on the rotor with a force up to 500kN or 50 tonnes and 50MNm of torque
/. that care to comment?
This is both a huge bending moment and dragging force.
To keep the mill from leaning more than 45 degrees backwards, it will need hundreds of tonnes of ballast,
With the windmill leaning backwards, the blade on one side will see a higher load than the blade on the other side, and the whole windmill will see a torque of maybe 10 MNm along the vertical axis.
How they plan to keep this stable is a mystery to me, and TFA does nothing to suggest a solution.
Anybody working for Hydro here on
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
You know you've played too much Total Annihilation when your first thought upon reading the headline is "why not build underwater fusion reactors?"
99.9999% of the people who make assertions about 99.9999% of anything are wrong 99.9999% of the time.
:(
Don't worry, I always manage to hit that lucky 0.0001%. The outlook for you not that good though
the blades are composite...salt water no problemo
- That is so off. From here, wind is 7.5 vs's subsidized coal's 4.5. But if coal is required to clean up its' act (i.e. clean coal, bury the CO2, etc), then the costs will be about 15.Points out that all of the power is subsidized
- Yeah, this is true. Most of these plants are located in places where the winds blow 70-90%. Sadly, when they are needed most (high temps), is when they are likely to be at their worse. That is why I keep saying that our research dollars should go into energy storage (heat, capacitors, etc).
As to wind not catching on, that is absolutely false. Just about every state (excluding the south east) has major programs going on. Step out of the USA, and you see LOADS of wind catching on. Many of these are private Enterprise, rather than the large monopolies. Heck, even with that, Xcell in Colorado is starting to build plants as well as resells others electricity. In fact, they are counting on these to save them loads of money.Now the trick is to get Xcell to use nukes for their base plants, rather than the gas or coal that they want.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It seems that no one is addressing what seems to me to be a major concern about putting anything valuable far out in the ocean. It is very difficult to protect it from intentional destruction.
Defense of power generation facilities is a low priority on land because your country's armed forces protect it and everything else that is within the borders. Outside of the country's landmass, it becomes difficult to protect major power installations. If your region's power requirements are substantially provided by far off-shore generators, then any bozo with a big boat and a big gun on his big boat can shut down your region's power grid for months. In fact all it takes is one Allahhead with a Cessna loaded with TNT to shut down the grid, if he knows which ocean tower is the central command-and-control unit of the power cluster.
Granted the vast amount of ocean is going to mitigate the mischief, but it isn't going to stop submarine torpedos from psycho rogue governments or even agent-provocateurs from your 'friendly' neighbors. No, you have to get out there and patrol, patrol, patrol. Which costs a lot of money. And whose expense is never entered into the cost-benefit estimate reports before these types of projects are built.
So yeah, it's one thing to build this project in the middle of the God-forsaken North Sea and another to build it fifty miles off the West Coast of the USA.
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!
Regarding waves...
The design reminds me of FLIP -- the Floating Inertial Platform -- of Scripps Oceanographic.
It's basically a huge buoy consisting of a ship like prow on a long steel cylinder. It is towed into place and the end of the cylinder is flooded, causing the prow to be jackknifed into the air above the ocean surface, providing a quiet, highly stable platform from which to perform oceanographic research. The vessel is so stable that when a large wave hits, it doesn't tilt at all, although researchers are sometimes thrown from their seats by lateral motion.
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