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The Highest-Flying Wind Turbine
Daniel_Stuckey writes: "In far-flung rural Alaska, where electricity can cost as much as $1 per kilowatt hour — more than 10 times the national average, according to the New York Times — a wind turbine encased in a giant helium balloon is about to break a world record. The Bouyant Air Turbine (BAT) is about to be floated 1,000 feet into the air in the name of cleaner, cheaper, and mobile energy. That single airborne grouper—it's sort of a hybrid of a blimp, a kite, and a turbine—will power over a dozen homes. The BAT is the brainchild of Altaeros, a company founded by MIT alumni, and, if everything goes according to plan, it's going to be the highest-flying power generator in history. Since winds blow stronger and more consistently the higher above the ground you go, and the hovering BAT harnesses that gale and sends electricity down to earth through the high-strength tethers that also hold the machine steady. "
This can never scale due to helium scarcity. While even low-quality helium would undoubtedly work for this application, the quantities required to build these at scale would drive the price through the roof.
Ummmm.... What world record? Surely you don't expect that I'll read TFA?
Has anybody given any thought about the weight of the electrical cable needed to connect the balloon to the base station?
And when lightning strikes one of these babies, you get a nice surge of 1.21 Jigawatts.
Being more serious, I think this is a really good idea, but I would think big storms would be the biggest problems for these things. Of course, FTA:
"The largest barrier to implementation right now is the need for a product that is reliable in all weather conditions for long periods of time,"
So helium is free in Alaska? Last I checked, helium is so expensive that $1 a Kwh is going to be cheaper than keeping that thing filled.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why not hot air? Surely they can mount an electric heat generator if it's going to be producing the stuff anyway. Then they can also regulate the balloons altitude on the fly.
This was posted to Soylent News (a /. fork after the Beta announcement) a couple days go. Some very interesting conversation has already been had over there.
"Not in my backyard!" squealeth the rich in Hollywood and Martha's Vinypard.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
about the lunacy of flying turbines has been discussed in several articles by John Brignell over the course of many years. Here is one of them. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/c...
"Since winds blow stronger and more consistently the higher above the ground you go"
Not true. Eventually you'll hit space.
Let's see if we can net a few planes also.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
All this means is that it takes four seconds (5 GJ / 1.21 GW) to travel through time.
And after LexCorp has killed birds and planes, this means Mr. Luthor can finally get rid of Cal Elwood, Clark Kent, or whatever that "superman" is calling himself today.
I understand it's for remote use, but with multiple tethers, like a flak balloon, it looks like an aviation disaster waiting to happen. Getting to "remote" locations, especially in Alaska, happens almost exclusively by airplane.
yeah sure... let's just bash it before it gets anywhere.... so many planes and birds in the fucking frozen deserts of Alaska.... let's go oil mmurica!!
You can even get higher if you use staged balloons. At some point, the cable gets too heavy to support its own weight. If you use multiple stages in the cable, you can make it much longer and therefore catch more wind. I don't know what the optimum altitude for such a balloon is (at some point the reduced air density would make the efficiency decrease with altitude). This principle was already demonstrated with staged sailplanes.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
...but does it come in black ?
All I hear are 'breaking' and 'wind' in the same sentence
Many commercial jet aircraft have pop-out wind turbines to generate power in the event of multiple-engine failure. That makes them the "highest flying."
The record claimed (highest altitude turbine) has nothing to do with efficiency, cost or practicality. And no, I didn't RTFA.
Based on nutritional value, they are actually quite comparable.
The technology of blimps is fraught with challenges not least of which are helium's availability, ground interaction (including launch, landing, and tethering/shelter on ground) and a sensitivity to weather. I've worked with a stream-lined tethered blimp 20' long with a camera and radar payload. In 20 knots of wind, the bugger had to be brought down ... not trivial. The whole operation worked best, and safest, in NO WIND. So, the idea of using a tethered high air resistance blimp to supply very little power (~ a dozen homes?!) is ... intellectually challenged. Awesome engineering challenge ... but just dumb.
Plus, what is the BS about 'clean air'. A common wind turbine, on the ground, is just as efficient ... more so, if you account for the demanding infrastructure to support a blimp.
Afterthought: This has to be a military project and the whole Alaska thing is just to give it palatable civilian visibility. You could maybe make a use case for disaster relief or remote military ops ... no you can't even do that 'cause if you could get this dumbass set up in to a location then you could get a generator and fuel in as well, that any idiot could operate and run with minimal supervision. Oh and any enemy wanting to take out your power or know where you are would just find and shoot down the flippin' blimp and then you ... crap! ... who the hell came up with such a seriously flawed concept???? Not MIT, it must be TIM as in a couple of yahoos at TIM Horton's doughnut shop. Is this an early April 1st post?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...
A journalist interviewed the wind turbine. His funniest comment was "I'm so high right now!".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
why don't they use their stupid fucking nanotubez to build a pole to put this on? a rope that stretches into outer space? fine. a 1,000-foot tower? TIME THE FUCK OUT, THAT'S CRAZY.
What about scaling these things up to around 10 or 100 times the size, fill them with hydrogen, and put them up into the jetstream?
Highest flying? The sun is an "energy generator", and it is quite a bit higher than any blimp/kite/turbine will be.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
It's an interesting idea by itself, but it occurs to me you could also combine the platform's capabilities with other needs: e.g. cell towers.
Imagine if every ugly tower was instead a floating power plant...
Google bought Makani, which endeavors to produce a kite generator which provides a far larger 'effective' surface to capture wind energy. It is also entirely safe (glider), and doesn't use our precious helium up. Google will get it done... http://www.google.com/makani/
#1: The tether wires are what's passing down the juice. That presents two dangers... a live electric line just dangling, and a heavy tether line that should break lose and plummet to the ground. In both cases, I hope there is no houses, people, etc near by.
#2: As with the concern over houses, people, etc... that's also one HELL of a huge lightning rod...
What happens with airplanes and thousands of these baloons?
And thus, technology continues to uglify the world.
Then maybe it could just burn some of it to generate electricity?
If you're going to stick these in the air, why not join them with something like solar energy as well? I believe there are some decently efficient lightweight modern solar panels, so you could have a combined fan/solar source. Since it's floating, it should be above most sources of shadow etc.
Yeah, that'll never work.
Fine, you found them out. This is actually just a stalking horse for materials testing for MIT's secret space elemavator protect. All the nerds are going to rapture to outer space to get away from the rest of us dangerously crazy motherfuckers.
Slashdot sure does seem to have a lot of New York Times Editorial writers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This one time, an unalert pilot managed to hit the lottery and fly into the tether line of an aerostat. Darwin ensued (better formatted for easier reading here). One time. Ever. I'm not too concerned about those odds. Don't drink & fly. Alaska has enough bush pilots go missing already, who's going to notice one more?
What do we do now sir?
We die.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
probably limited lifetime - so don't diesel generators, especially if you're using them for prime power.
Big - not a problem in remote areas
Fragile - Remember Bigalow? The guy designing/building Inflatable space stations? A ballon doesn't have to be fragile if you build it out of the right materials.
Expense - part of the reason for the $1/kwh electricity is the cost of moving diesel into the area. Often it has to be flown in! If the turbine system can avoid fuel having to be brought in that way, it's a massive saved expense.
Supports aren't trivial: Agreed; but do they cost more than the pad & structure you'd want for the diesel generators?
Wind x tether pushing down - could be by design, designed around, - if the wind is strong enough to push the generator down into less windy conditions, obviously the unit is getting enough wind to produce maximum power.
Multiple close balloons - engineering issue for the specific site.
Reeling in system - not too hard today.
Dropping cable across a city - You do realize that these are intended for remote sites, right? If the need is big enough or the development dense enough, you go with other means of power production, such as more traditional wind turbines.
I don't read AC A human right
Why not using the Biefeld–Brown effect instead of helium ?
Oh and any enemy wanting to take out your power or know where you are would just find and shoot down the flippin' blimp and then you ...
... fire up your diesel generator?
The military is already flying blimps in combat zones, typically sensor platforms to give good 'eye in the sky' intel for a base and it's surrounding area. Also, it's more difficult than you think to target something that's pretty far up in the sky, and if insurgents/terrorists have that capability I'm more worried about them targetting manned aircraft with that capability than trying to take out a floating generator.
Meanwhile getting diesel fuel to bases located within combat zones is expensive and dangerous. To the point that something like this would be justified at the point it's avoided it's mass in diesel fuel burned, which shouldn't take all that long, really.
Back on the civilian side, same concept with remote Alaska needs - some areas the diesel fuel needs to be flown in, and that's rather expensive.
I don't read AC A human right
It won't be an eagle-shredder, like your typical wind turbine. It can be set to fly well above the maximum altitude of any bird. Normal towers shred birds unmercifully, but this goes unremarked since wind power is "politically correct" -- even though the exact same law is used to harass coal and oil plants. I despise differential enforcement like that.
Someone else pointed out that the helium is a long-term issue. Perhaps so, but it seems to me that operating it purely as an airfoil-born kite could be possible and cheaper, too.
what do they plan to do when the ice starts building up on it?
This discussion prompted me to finally investigate what is involved to accomplish the logical conclusion to lighter-than-air flight: vacuum airships (spoiler alert: materials science state of the art means it's currently science fiction).
However, this made me wonder about the possibility of using a reduced pressure airship filled with helium or hydrogen. Not a vacuum, but with the lift gas pressure such that the propensity to leak was in equilibrium with the atmosphere. This would require material support similar to a vacuum airship, but the lift gas pressure would mean that the stress/strain on the lift gas containment would be reduced compared to a true vacuum airship. Perhaps still presently unfeasible, but it would represent an intermediate step.
No doubt others have explored this rather thoroughly before. Anyway, fun thought experiment.
Is that a Pam Anderson reference?
1. Every poster saying they could use some kind of hot air generator... its called a heater and it would use all the energy produced!
2. Do you really think they didn't think about that already?
3. The main problem here is $1.3 million to power 12 HOMES. And that is the claim to get their taxpayer funded grant. You know there projects are always less efficient than they predicted.
Palin can see Russia from the balloon.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.