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US Offering $45M For Huge Wind Energy Test Bed
coondoggie writes "On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million grant to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. The DOE says such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production. According to the DOE, the average size of wind turbines installed in the United States in 2007 increased to roughly 1.65 MW. Additionally, turbines already developed range in the 2.5 MW to 3.5 MW capacity sizes; with plans being developed for even greater power ratings. The larger wind turbines have outpaced the availability of US-based testing facilities, the DOE stated."
Build it, I say. That'll teach those birds to crap on my car!
IANAA (Adult, yes) Nuclear is much more efficient when compared to wind farms, but nuclear energy hasn't been developed enough for it to be used as a main energy source.
Someone should tell that to the French. Nuclear reactors provide more than 75% of France's power requirements..
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Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?
a) To catch obvious design flaws early, ... Or to pull a page from our own industry, what's wrong with the following statement: "It compiles, ship it!"
b) To test the device over the entire range of possible operation,
c) To provide a benchmark that remains static from one test to the next,
d) To control all external variables so as to create a consistent frame of reference,
e) To save a few bucks because it's really f----ing expensive to test every design as a full-scale prototype.
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Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?
A static environment is required to observe the effects of different designs. Tests in a real environment are also important - but they do not negate the need for a static test environment.
And Brazil gets only 3% from nuclear, has only slightly less power requirements than France, and yet is largely independent of foreign oil, while France is not.
E pluribus unum
So a gigantic blade doesn't go flying in to someone's house.
When you are talking machines as big and as heavy as this, you want to test outside conditions in a safe environment to make sure it won't fail. You do not want to discover later that oh, maybe it WASN'T as strong as we thought.
Same reason why the bend wings on an airplane. No, they will never face stresses that high in the real world. However, we don't want to just fly it around and say "ok, that's probably good" only to find out later that no, it really isn't. You test an outside case, and you do it somewhere that nobody gets hurt.
it WILL be tested in real life.. AFTER it's been tested in a smaller controlled environment. Half-assing stuff is building expensive systems and full-scale deploying them as a test phase. Guess what, if they work but have some problems.. that company won't be addressing those problems because they aren't worth the redeployment costs.
Also, a real-life environment won't go through the full range of capable scenarios during the limited test phase. You need to try out all kinds of odd-ball stuff that happens in real-life but just not very often (ie: hurricane).
Being able to install a prototype drive-train and go through the motions of testing without lengthy installation/setup times is important!
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There's a great video of a wind turbine exploding which you can probably find if you look. Once it went past a certain speed, the tensile strength of one of the blades was exceeded and it split. The turbine then became unbalanced and quickly pulled itself apart.
This turbine, if I remember correctly, had been in use for two year when it happened. It only broke because the winds were much higher than average for the area. If you're testing in a wind tunnel, you can keep turning up the wind speed until the turbine explodes and get an accurate measure of how much energy it produces at each wind speed and how much it can take so, when you deploy it, you can shut it down when the wind speed approaches the maximum. If you test it in the real world and 'skip the artificial step', you may need to wait several years to get wind speeds that high.
From your post, it seems like you've never designed anything for real-world deployment. You always want to control the test conditions so you can see exactly which variable is causing failures in your prototype.
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