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.

Comments

Re:bad idea

[Original Replica]

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.

Re:bad idea

[suv4x4]

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...

Re:Salt Water

[njfuzzy]

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.

Rubber ducks

[MillionthMonkey]

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.