There's a Wind Turbine On the Horizon With Blades the Size of Trump Tower

merbs writes: Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades, whipping into the gusts like enormous palm trees. The vision is partly terrifying, partly inspiring, and being taken entirely seriously by the federal government and one of our top research laboratories. [Sandia National Labs, in an effort led by the University of Virginia] has unveiled the preliminary design for a new offshore wind turbine with 650-foot turbine blades. That, as its announcement points out, is twice the size of an American football field. It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York.

Comments

Oblig XKCD

[rsborg]

Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/

Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.

Re:Oblig XKCD

[MillionthMonkey]

Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.

His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.

Bad Unit

[110010001000]

I need to know how big it is in terms of Libraries of Congresses. Use standard units! That is approximately 12 LoC. Or 15 in Canadian LoC.

Re:The new rulers of this site...

[alvinrod]

If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they were making that comparison in order to take a jab at Trump:

It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York, maybe a more relevant reference point here, since we're talking scale and bluster.

Re:Pity the birds

[Anonymous Coward]

Large turbines spin slower, and hence will not do any chopping. Birds can fly around it, although some won't and it will be on par with a stationary skyscrapers that kill plenty of birds too.

Depends on where you build it, not on size.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how quickly can these blades be secured and protected if wind storms approach? In many areas wind spouts (tornados over the water) are common events. So can these blades survive a 200 mph. wind?

Generally, bigger is better in wind turbines. Power generated is proportional to swept area, more mass means cleaner power which leads to more efficiency, and yes, larger, heavier turbine blades are more survivable in weather events. Modern turbines automatically self-furl as required, in much the same way that modern helicopter blades will auto-gyro in the event of an engine failure, and the mechanisms that do this work better if they are bigger.

All that being said, weather can destroy literally anything less than planet-sized. But if weather brings down a modern windmill, the damage done by the weather event itself is likely to dwarf the damage done by the failure of the turbine and tower - unlike the failure of a large hydro dam, for example. And afterwards you can rebuild it with very few worries about the kind of large-scale, long-lasting contamination that other forms of power production (such as coal or fission) create during a weather event failure.

Really only solar has a comparably benign failure mode in weather events - basically if you get hit by a flying chunk of solar panel or wind turbine blade, that's how you can get hurt, which is why some people prefer such things to be set up well offshore or in deserts.

Foot, Trump-Towers...

[zAPPzAPP]

Can we use sane measuring units please?
How many stacked bananas is that?

Remember the NASA Wind Turbines?

[Bruce Perens]

NASA Wind Turbines approached this scale in the '80's. Unfortunately, this was a previously-unexplored area of aerodynamics for NASA, and they had mechanical stress and noise problems (including subsonics) and were all demolished. I think there was one near Vallejo, CA being taken down when I got to Pixar in '87, and one in Boone, NC, which famously rattled windows and doors.

The art has since improved. I took a ride to the top of the turbine at Grouse Mountain, that was fun! That's the only one I have heard of where you can actually get to see it from the top.

Re:Remember the NASA Wind Turbines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being an electrical engineer educated in Denmark, wind turbines was mandatory even though I specialized in digital electronics. This includes the history of wind turbines. During the oil crisis they became a hot topic worldwide and what I was told at the lectures about the US experimental wind turbines is that without prior knowledge, the engineers came up with the concept of borrowing knowledge from helicopter rotors. While it was planned to give them a head start compared to other countries, it showed the world that helicopters is a rotation to wind force converter and wind farms are wind force to rotation converter and they are two completely different topics with completely different issues. As I'm informed, they managed to completely rip a wind turbine apart in the first storm it encountered. That's not very promising for major investment.

Danish wind turbine research started by a group of hippie professors (or something) who decided on green energy. They were viewed as loons at the time, but when the oil crisis hit, they had 10 years of experience, which gave Denmark the technological edge. In the 1990s, Denmark had 6 of the 10 biggest wind turbine companies (the country had 5.5 million people at the time) and while it isn't the supreme ruler in wind energy anymore, it is still the leading edge of the technology as well as home to the biggest manufacture. There is also wind turbines everywhere. There is a total of 13 existing offshore windfarms, but only 2 of those are in the North Sea despite the article mentioning "That's why there are so few offshore wind turbines in the oceans—they're mostly Denmark's, in the North Sea". The combined power output of wind turbines exceeds the demand, but since the wind isn't at peak capacity all the time, it "only" supplied 42% of the demand last year (42.1% but 42 is likely preferred here. Easier to remember... or something).

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[ClickOnThis]

Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades

Now imagine those wind turbines getting hit by a hurricane.

And now imagine them self-stowing into a "secure" configuration, until the hurricane passes.

Re:Pity the birds

[dwywit]

I'm sure that coming into contact with the tip of a wind turbine would kill or seriously damage you, but there's evidence that some animals aren't actually colliding with the blades. Some post-mortem studies (of bats IIRC) showed evidence of ruptured lungs (but no blunt-force trauma), implying that the animals were killed by entering the zone of low pressure behind the leading edge.