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."

Comments

Birds?

[jamesh]

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?

Re:Birds?

[Tracy Reed]

I don't get this bird killing thing. I've spent lots of time walking amongst the giant wind turbines around Tehachapi, CA where I grew up. I never saw a dead bird out there nor had I ever heard of these things killing birds until just a few years ago. Does anyone actually have any data on this? So far it sounds like an urban legend.

Re:Birds?

[StormyWeather]

Just environmentalists looking for a reason to hate the technology. We have tons of the power windmills here, and even when the wind is howling those things move slow as a glacier. The old water pump windmills of the plains would have been a bigger threat, but I'll bet the birds loved the water from the horse troughs.

Re:Birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not pure urban myth. One of the early wind farms--at Altamont Pass, I think--was "built along a major raptor migration corridor in an area with high wintering concentrations of raptors and in the heart of the highest concentration of golden eagles in North America" (http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PROGRAMS/bdes/altamont/factsheet.pdf). Oops.

Altamont did kill a lot of eagles, and since it was one of the first, the reputation stuck. The reality is that Altamont has "has the highest numbers and rates of raptor kills of any wind facility in the world." (same source). Since then, the wind industry has learned a lot about siting (don't put them in the endangered species nesting area, duh) and construction (shape the nacelle so it's not an attractive place for birds to land/nest). Probably most important, the infrastructure industry in general takes the stakeholder process a lot more seriously now--when you start talking with biologists, the Audbon society, whoever early on, you can avoid things like this rather than having to fight them in courts.

These days, bird kills are pretty negligable. The last factoid I heard is that a typical housecat kills as many birds as two wind turbines.

(Oh yeah, to those posters who said the turbines turn slowly: I think that's an optical illusion because they're so big. A 70m diameter rotor spinning at 15-20 rpm may look slow, but the blade tips are going over 100mph).

Re:Birds?

[vlm]

Studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the number that die as a result of other human activities such as traffic, hunting, power lines and high-rise buildings...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Birds What about human activities like ... eating? The most obvious problems are often overlooked. Given a highrise with 10K people inside, it really doesn't matter if one or two birds crash into it, if they are renting the ground floor to KFC.

Re:Birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a project of mine and I have researched it too. The number of bird deaths is about the same as the number of birds killed by a house cat allowed outside. So one cat = one windmill. The further important information here is that the already sick or injured bird is really the only likely bird to be caught by a house cat.

Just out of interest

[CrackedButter]

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.

Re:Just out of interest

[FooAtWFU]

It appears they are suitable for small things along the roadside where the cost of installation of electrical service far outweighs the cost of electricity - signs along the highway, and such - and moreover things which aren't exactly the most critical infrastructure (like, oh, stoplights).

When it comes to things that chew lots of power, though, I'm sure there's no contest.

It reminds me of those solar garden-lights that they sell that you can just stick in the ground instead of digging trenches and running out conduits and getting the services of an electrician and such. They're not quite as bright as the wired kind, and they don't last the whole night (so you can't have them running in the early morning), but they're good enough for the job of glowing for a few hours in the evening after it gets dark and before you head indoors. They wouldn't exactly work to light up the inside of your house.

Re:Just out of interest

[Graymalkin]

Wind turbines can be manufactured "green" since most of their construction materials are recyclable. They are also fairly easy to construct since they don't require any sort of exotic manufacturing processes. The DOE's website has a nice diagram of a modern wind turbines components. Modern turbines are highly efficient and when situated correctly pay for themselves very quickly. As you've seen turbines have gotten cheap enough that individual units have become suitable for people to buy themselves. Small scale turbines can generate enough power for a single household for a day. They're often set up in grid-tied setups where the turbine complements grid power to a home. You can also use them for entirely off-grid usage where they charge a battery bank which is used when the wind isn't blowing.

Re:Transmission?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Indeed, Denmark already has extensive offshore windfarm resources, and they produce a good percentage of their power from wind as well. A small country like Ireland could well produce most or all of its power with this technology.

This also solves the issue with noise from wind generators anchored in deep water, which the Danes have estimated could cause problems for whales - sound travels much farther in deep water.

And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well.

Since it is alway out among the waves . .

[Insanity Defense]

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.

Re:Since it is alway out among the waves . .

[Insanity Defense]

Probably because they can get more power for their money out of building another few windmills than they could by strapping on a few wave generators.

Possible but the earlier poster above was probably right that it is a bad idea to combine two immature technologies.

These things are probably not optimized for wave-generation anyway. You'd be more concerned that your windmills can stay in one spot despite waves, and storms, and such. Otherwise, you're liable to lose windmills.

Wave generators extract energy from the vertical movements of the waves, they are still anchored in one spot. Likely the Windmill parts would need some adjustment for the motion but perhaps not as much as you would think as I doubt that they are solidly anchored to the sea floor, I suspect like a tethered buoy they will do at least some bobbing around. One thing about wave generators is (I believe) that their output will be steadier and more predictable than a windmills will be.

British Solar Water Heating

[StCredZero]

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.

Re:Transmission?

[Hojima]

Or you can use the windmills to electrolyze water and compress the hydrogen so that we wont be dependent on foreign oil to run our cars. Hell, it would be good to have individual generators running on it so you don't face the power loss from the cables.

anecdotal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.