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Giant Floating Windmills To Launch Next Year
pacroon writes "StatoilHydro is building the world's first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and testing it over a two-year period offshore of Karmøy, Norway. The company is investing approximately $80 million. Planned startup is in the fall of 2009. The project combines existing technology in innovative ways. A 2.3-MW wind turbine is attached to the top of a so-called Spar-buoy, a solution familiar from production platforms and offshore loading buoys. A model 3 meters tall has already been tested successfully in a wave simulator. The goal of the pilot is to qualify the technology and reduce costs to a level that will mean that floating wind turbines can compete with other energy sources."
TFA does not talk about transmission. How exactly they are going to manage a good reliable power transmission with the kind of floating power station, Any idea?
hilarious
Will make them a little hard to tilt against. A charge on horseback is nearly as dramatic when they are out at sea.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
One of the arguments against wind farms on land has been that they take out the odd bird now and then. Would bird activity be lower out to sea at the altitude that these things sit at?
I'm sure those windmills with keep them cool...
Why is it that wind turbines aren't augmented with solar panels on them? I'm talking either in the base stem or actually on the blades, seems like a no brainer in so much that you save space and it would be useful for the those areas which are windy and sunny. I don't mean to suggest that their power generating capabilities are linked either, just why can't they take up the same space and whatever energy either of the technologies generate can be fed into that country's electrical grid.
Jonathanjk.com
They've discovered that a relatively unorthodox technology, known as "peer to peer" is a good solution. Unfortunately big corporations have made it illegal in every country but sweden. The upshot is that, instead of using the natural infrastructure of a p2p network that already exists, the company will be based in sweden, and all of the floating windmills will be directly tied to their HQ, by long cables. From sweden, the company will then export it back to your house, beside the windmill, on trucks.
But don't worry, you will get a shiny plastic wrapper for your 1-ton battery, and an insert with lots of credits to the corporations who made it possible, and copyright notices.
...or are they designed to 'fight' them (i.e. stand strait at all costs)? Cthulu help them if it's the latter...
submerging them in a controlled manner would be a cool solution to that, not sure if its feasible though...
the latest generation of windmills produce electricity by wind speeds up to 30m/s, and at higher speeds, they just turn the blades out of the wind, so they won't get damaged.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Am I only one who read it as "Planned startup fail is in the 2009" ?
Critically offshore winds tend to be much more steady than winds on land, where topography, trees, and buildings combine to create turbulence and resulting gusts. At sea the winds have nothing to slow them down meaning higher output, and nothing to make them subject to sudden gusts meaning less wear and tear on the gears (a squall or frontal gust mainly has a single onset and slow relaxation) and more predictable output.
* Being able to go deeper means further offshore, which means less people on land looking for an easy pay off due to bogus eyesore / property value complaints.
* In a massive storm these ones lean over, spilling away the force of the wind and reducing exposed surface area as cos(tilt).
* The bird cuisinart effect is largely debunked. Many more are killed flying into windows (home or glass box buildings), stationary bridges and radio towers, and hit by cars while attending to roadkill. Many studies out there to back this up. "Homepower magazine" does a nice job of collecting peer reviewed studies (they had a great writeup on it, but I can't find that now). Also need to balance against the more dilute effect of wildlife killed by a coal plant's SO2 etc emissions. Granted most studies are not looking at sea birds.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
The blades can rotate to optimize the for the wind angle. If the wind is too strong, they can just position them in a very "unoptimized angle".
When the force on the blades is minimized I should think the rest of the mill is pretty aerodynamic.
Here is an old article I remembered about and fortunately google brought it up http://www.coxwashington.com/reporters/content/reporters/stories/2005/11/13/BC_WINDMILLS_BATS_ADV13_COX.html
From the article
" Towering up to 228 feet above the Appalachian Mountain ridge, far above the tree line, windmills are lined up like marching aliens from War of the Worlds.
Up close, they emit a high-pitched electrical hum. From a distance of a few hundred yards, their 115-foot blades make a steady whooshing sound as their tips cut through the air at up to 140 mph."
"A study conducted at FPL's Mountaineer Wind Energy Center here this year indicated that its 44 turbines may have caused between 1,300 and 2,000 bat deaths in a six-week period. That study was led by Edward B. Arnett, a scientist with Bat Conservation International, and financed largely by the American Wind Energy Association and its 700 member companies."
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Considering the number of Slashdotters who must have had experiences being in failed startups, I rather doubt you're the only one.
But if you still need to hang on to that feeling of uniqueness, don't worry --- I personally didn't read it that way!
what use will they be in space?
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Am I the only person who thought this meant floating in the sky?
Why not include a wave generator as part of the system?
For the rare individual who does not know. A wave generator in this context does not make waves but uses the motion of waves to generate electricity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0oN5G3WVf0
Check out the last minute of the above to see their mock-ups.
There are some great devices for solar water heating produced in Britain. If you treated this as a water preheat, you could use this with a Stirling engine and have your own solar-thermal unit with solar energy storage.
The big problem there is getting your hands on a Stirling engine.
Actually, just anti-environmentalists looking for ways to paint every environmentalist as a raving lunatic.
The world isn't made up of just environmentalists and anti-environmentalists. It also contains rational non-advocates, who look at a line of reasoning or evidence and analyze it logically and/or scientifically, regardless of its source.
And when such a non-advocate comes across an environmentalist who is gibbering a load of nonsense, it should come as no surprise when the wrath of the gods descends upon the guilty party.
You need to distinguish between the latter scenario and being attacked by gibbering anti-environmentalists.
I thought you were going to link to this video.
Good close-ups of an interesting floating windmill design at 1m21s and 2m36s. I'm not too sure how it works though...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Your troll is about as mind-numbingly senseless as bouncing your head off a Koran and chanting "kill all infidels".
This particular "envirofacist" once supported a young family in the early 80's by working/living at an old growth sawmill in Australia. The logs from the trees we were cutting were up to 14' in diameter, I left the job becuse the forestry lease was running out and the area was to become a national park. We had some problems with people up trees, chained to dozers, ect, but they pale in comparison to professional "hippie hunters" who went and busted up protester camps.
BTW: I was implying the media (and it's readers) are generally lazy, not evil.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Obviously they will be distributing powdered water. The main market is expected to be drought prone areas like Barcelona. Quite a concept really.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Small battery chargers are very easy to make. All you need is a 36V DC cooling fan for a large stationary motor and a diode. That will charge a 12V battery quite nicely and costs only about $100. This is a nice setup to power a cottage or a RV. We used one for many years, till the grid finally caught up with the cottage.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Now it's time to use their own bullshit against them. It is time to shut down every idiotic "green" project by any means necessary. Building a wind farm? Expect to hear every single lie told about conventional power thrown back in your face.
All those power lines leaking radiation into the environment!
Wind turbines have huge carbon footprints because of their refined metal content. The only carbon-neutral wind turbines are made of wood.
The iron used in wind turbines has a half-life of billions of years!
The quantum flux caused by their rotating magnets makes eggshells thinner.
The vanes mix the air and cause acid rain.
Electricity from wind turbines has been shown to cause moleculitis in kids.
Using dozens of tiny generators instead of one big generator puts tons more negative ions into the atmosphere. Or is it positive ions? It better not be neutral ions, because those are pure poison.
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Usually, I am against using lies to counter lies. The corrective for lies is truth. But in this case, I expect the creative use of lies to illustrate previous lies will be funny as hell, because it is so deserved.
Hoist by their own petard. Hehe, I said "petard."
Well as it stands just about every where in the world people are looking for more and more cost efficient ways of getting power. What I think we need to start asking our selves though is when do we draw the line and get everyone to work on a similar type of energy? How many ways are we trying to get energy now any ways? wind, solar, oil, nuclear, water, natural gas, what others are there?
When I got my small windcharger years ago it was around a dollar and 50 cents a watt full bloat retail price. I imagine it is cheaper now or sure should be. You need a small tower, guy wires, charge controller and then battery storage, (and inverter if you want to run normal appliances instead of dedicated energy friendlier DC appliances, think laptop and car cord instead of desktop energy hog) but for a small one that isn't all that much extra. I have both solar PV and wind, along with a variety of 12 VDC stuff and a small inverter for normal gadgets, and it is peace of mind to have some guaranteed amount of electricity bought and paid for. It doesn't replace all my power, but when the grid is totally down, having some charged batteries and the means to keep them charged more or less effortlessly is pretty nice. And that is one of the cool things about alternative energy, it never has to be either/or, you can still be grid mains tied and supplement what you need, say for a critical circuit or two in your home, your home office and computers on what is in essence a big nice UPS, or the refrigerator, or say you want something to run your furnace when the power is down or to have a fan during a summer heatwave,etc.
Also, if you want an interesting geek project, you can build your own windchargers for pretty cheap, several websites and plans on the net. Building the blades is actually the hardest part, and even then you can cheat and just buy the blades, and most everything else can be scrounged so it is still cheap.
Why has there only been one Gorillaz mention in this entire thread?
When I read the headline, for some reason I thought they were going to be floating in the air, like on big Zeppelins or something. Actually, that would be kind of cool.
This sorta reminds me of the floating windmill in feel good inc. That is soo cool. I suppose it would cause traffic in the air.....and problems and stuff...but its still cool
The only reason I can imagine that we use such UGLY! forms of power which now we're polluting the surface of the ocean with is that we're short on alternative options and we need to try everything we can. But, this much I promise you, windmills are temporary. Maybe they'll be around 10 years, 50 years or 100 years, but they will be replaced with more technologically advanced forms of power eventually.
Personally, I'm looking forward to reactor sized fuel cells. I like the tech since unlike wind power which I believe will negatively impace global wind currents if they become too popular, fuel cells will eventually (initial models, not likely) give back to the environment by helping to sustain fresh water supplies.
So point being, these massive windmill towers that are ugly as sin and should never have been put up need to be recyclable. Since they're only a temporary solution, they shouldn't later be landfill.
But the person here made a comment about environmentalists opposing windmills for the sake of birds. That's not a position most environmentalists take. Call it a strawman argument, call it a red herring, whatever.
I have no problems with rational non-advocates. The person who tried to paint every environmental advocate with the same brush is not one of those.