Slashdot Mirror
World's First Floating Wind Farm Emerges Off Coast of Scotland (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes: The world's first full-scale floating wind farm has started to take shape off the north-east coast of Scotland. The revolutionary technology will allow wind power to be harvested in waters too deep for the current conventional bottom-standing turbines. The manufacturer hopes to cash in on a boom in the technology, especially in Japan and the west coast of the U.S., where waters are deep. The tower, including the blades, stretches to 175m and weighs 11,500 tons. The price of energy from bottom-standing offshore wind farms has plummeted 32% since 2012, and is now four years ahead of the government's expected target. Another big price drop is expected, taking offshore wind to a much lower price than new nuclear power.
Perpetual motion turns out to be Scottish.
then sinks
Godless heathens, everyone knows Jesus only wants coal fired power plants.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Some environmentalists will oppose this because of presumed bird mortality, and many slash dotters who are definitely not environmentalists will oppose this because it is an energy source they hate.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The next one will catch fire, fall over and sink.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
FTA:
The bird charity RSPB Scotland opposed the project - not because it dislikes the technology but because it believes too many offshore turbines in the area have already been approved. It fears thousands of sea birds may be killed by the offshore wind farms, although it admits that estimates are hugely uncertain because it is impossible to count bird corpses at sea.
Note that there's no mentioned of a time frame. I mean, "thousands" of birds a day? We should move them. "thousands" of birds a year? I'm a bit less concerned. "thousands" of birds a decade? C'mon. Not to mention the whole "thousands"...2000? 10,000? 100,000?
I'm just curious--is there a simple way to detect when a bird strikes one of these? Maybe have a microphone that listens for some kind of "thud" when one hits?
I mean, one of the advantages of this is that you can move it somewhere else. So it's worth checking to see if it's an issue (and I could see the RSPB not necessarily wanting to trust the word of the energy company).
or U-Boats or the Spanish Armada. There is always something out to do harm to things off the British Isles.
Trump hates wind farms.
Is there a version where this is actually the world's First wind-farm, emerged after countless millenia lurking at the bottom of the ocean to spread madness to the folk of Scotland?
It is not floating as it is tied to the bottom.
The box behind the blades - the nacelle - could hold two double-decker buses
If this is true, these things a gigantic...I need to pay a visit if they will allow me.
Can any "Slashdotter" collaborate the nacelle's size metric? Hard to believe.
Just make sure no US Navy destroyers sail near.
Ted Kennedy was famous for opposing a wind farm near his beach house because he thought it ruined the view. I'm guessing he's not the only one. Sea side wind needs to not piss off the wealthy who own that beach front property.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Good night!
Yeah China we know it's you, stop expanding into other nations' waters damnit.
I can only assume that cables run to the bottom with massive anchors to hold the turbine in place and upright. But wave and wind storms can be powerful enough to destroy such a system in my unworthy opinion. The stresses must be well beyond imagination on such a system. I can't even understand what kind of brake can be on the blades to keep them from run away speeds during storms.
That's just a....strange thing to toss in there. It's meaningless. You need a full scale comparison, cost of maintenance, performance (still have to store that power somewhere) etc, etc, etc if you want to start talking numbers. It being cheaper to build...that's really a minor factor in the scheme of cost on a power plant.
I oppose them because plans for and the cost of decommissioning them is not part of the budget planning.
Translation: You don't have a real evidence based objection so you are trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Coal plants don't have decommissioning costs as a part of their budget planning either. I can't decide if you are a troll or an idiot so I'm going to go with both.
Also, there are environmental concerns not well researched and understood yet, like underseas power cables and their impact on oceanic marine life with electrical sensory organs
So we should keep pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere instead since we already know that impact on marine (and non-marine) life? Here's a little top tip for you. We've had underseas cable including power cables for over a century. Your assertion that we don't understand much about their impact is unsupported by evidence and what we do know is CLEARLY not a significant threat to marine life.
Sharks have displayed problems from low voltage underseas cables, even when quite thickly insulated. It may well be ok, but I still want a bit more research before jumping on something because ooh windcraft!
If you care so much about sharks maybe you should concentrate first on the 100 million sharks we kill every year to put in soup and for bogus "remedies" and as bycatch and for other stupid reasons. A few undersea cables are quite simply not significant in the face of that.
I'm just a little bit skeptical about the price and.. ..well. in the blurb it uses sneaky word tactics. see how it says that a price drop is expected. and that would make it cheaper than nuclear.
It's not that hard to be cheaper than nuclear when you consider ALL the costs and the amount of regulation needed to ensure safety. The full cost of insuring nuclear tends to get overlooked. I'm not aware of any fission plant that does not require a nation state to provide insurance guarantees in order to get built. While they are relatively safe in general, no private insurance company is going to write a policy against something like Chernobyl. Nuclear is cost competitive with subsidies (insurance and otherwise) but it's not so cheap that you cannot imagine solar or wind being cheaper in the right circumstances. Not to mention that the cost of solar and wind generation are falling MUCH faster than the cost of nuclear fission generation. I don't have any principled objections to fission generation (and I prefer it to fossil fuels) but let's not pretend it's "too cheap to meter".
(presumably nuclear with nuclear plant profits though calculated in, making it kinda like "cheaper than oil" when oil has plenty of profit built into it, making the price flexible downwards as soon as someone has a better energy source)
Well, oil and other fossil fuels get subsidies amounting to about $5 Trillion globally every year (that's about 6% of global GDP in case you wondered) and I'm not even counting the cost of the environmental problems they cause. And yes, the profits are part of the equation too but if a new energy source (say solar) gets cheap enough to eat into the profit margins of oil then it is by definition competitive and that's a good thing. And frankly if I have my choice between a relatively clean renewable energy source and fossil fuels for about the same cost then it is a no brainer.
What happens if you combine this with harvesting wave energy? There are wave energy electric stations that are also based on platforms.
If it is windy, it is wavy.
Just saying...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Will it disappear for another 100 years too?
But the giga batteries Musk et al. are planning do. And you need lots of those big batteries to store the energy captured from solar and wind for time when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That may be fine, but don't just pretend it's not part of the system requirements.
Here are some nerdy details (comeon slashdot):
http://www.4coffshore.com/wind...
Turbine model:
http://www.4coffshore.com/wind...
Gaia exhibiting her fine grasp of emergent behavior ...
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Musk will build lithium batteries because he is going to build them anyway for his cars, using the cells that fail QA for power grid installations. Musk is, in this way, an exception, not a rule because for grid installation the weight and the size of the battery is not important - even classic lead acid would be fine. Besides, with enough solar and wind capacity you would not need storage whatsoever - nights are more windy than days anyway and good old hydro can do the rest - use the water stored in the dam during the night, let it fill up again during the day.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Ugh, I hate the continued comparison of nuclear and "green" energy. It is *not* an apples to apples comparison.
Nuclear is "green" in the sense that it doesn't have the emissions problems of fossil fuels. It's definitely not without pollution however - the stuff it generates is quite nasty. Furthermore when there is a serious catastrophe with a nuclear plant it can render a large are effectively uninhabitable. So whether or not fission is green kind of depends on the context. Nuclear fission is also not a renewable source of energy.
That leaves nuclear as really still the best option for base load generation. Which is what frustrates me in regards to so many "environmentalists" condemning them and stagnating development.
If you buy the argument that base load can only be met by generation that works in a manner similar to fossil fuels or nuclear then your argument is correct. But I don't agree with the premise of that argument because it isn't true. Base load is simply a way of saying the minimum demand. You can meet this in many cases even with power systems that are not constant sources of production. You are correct that for the next several decades at minimum it's not reasonable to think we will get rid of nuclear or fossil fuels until we can get a distributed solar/wind+batteries system to sufficient scale. But the notion that base load power could not be supplied at least in part today by wind and/or solar simply isn't true provided you have a connected grid - which we do. The sun and/or wind is always on somewhere - we just have to have a sophisticated enough grid to take advantage of it.
If you move them to sea, then the flying penguins will get killed. Their numbers are extremely low already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4&list=FLeB83qpzoHc_KCwDEfnRCaA
Here in SW Ontario .. the wind bubble has finally broken, The wind farms have been guaranteed 8x the normal rate for hydro generation, meanwhile .. the "free hydro generators at Niagara Falls are being turned off. No more free energy. Now Siemens is closing all their wind generator factories in SW Ontario .. they've literally taken the $$ and ran. The Wind Farm boondoggle made Siemens Billion$, (with a guaranteed 8x the rate for hydro) .. local farmers who have to put up with all of the negatives of windmills, are left high and dry.
Many of the wind turbines are no longer even turning .. it is a travesty what this windmill policy has done to Ontario!
Floating would imply that the wind can blow it away