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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.
Godless heathens, everyone knows Jesus only wants coal fired power plants.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The next one will catch fire, fall over and sink.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
then sinks
Well, we'll see how it works, right? We absolutely need these sorts of large-scale tests to definitively prove or disprove the viability of alternative energy projects such as these. Although some people still try, it's hard to argue with raw data gathered over five or ten years. Based on a relatively short history, we'll be able to see how much economic sense it makes to move ahead with larger projects. Note that you do have to account for economy of scale and a maturation of technology, of course.
I was initially somewhat doubtful about the economic viability of some of these projects. I'd like nothing more than to be proven absolutely wrong on this.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If this is true, these things a gigantic...
There are indeed gigantic. There are several big advantages to hugeness:
1. The winds are steadier and stronger the higher you go. Since power production goes up as the cube of the wind speed, this makes a big difference.
2. There is a lot less salt up high. It drops off nearly exponentially.
3. Much of the maintenance scales less than linearly with turbine size, so it is more cost effective with big turbines.
Some environmentalists will oppose this because of presumed bird mortality,
Not if they're rational.
and many slash dotters who are definitely not environmentalists will oppose this because it is an energy source they hate.
Hating an energy source isn't rational.
Reality Check. Environmentalist & non-environmentalist don't hate wind turbines in significant numbers.The anti-turbine mob are all nimbys worried about spoiling their views, and old-energy shills and their useful idiots.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Build it like an oil drilling platform.
They are. This wind farm is being built by Statoil, the Norwegian state oil company. Their expertise in building floating oil platforms, and their existing construction infrastructure, made them the obvious choice. The platforms are being built in a Norwegian fiord and then towed across the North Sea to Scotland.
yeah, the scale of these things is becoming increasingly ridiculous.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Is there a solution to repel birds?
The solution is better education, especially in math, science, and critical thinking. Once we have done that, people will no longer be stupid enough to believe that the "bird problem" is a real issue.
The best estimate for bird deaths from wind turbines is between 140,000 to 328,000 in North America
... and 3.7B birds are killed annually by domestic and feral cats in America. That is at least 10,000 times more.
The blades can be turned side on, known as feathering, to prevent overspeed.
Used in aviation for the last 60 years.
Wind is allowed to be abandoned, with rusted towers left in place. Sometimes they are required to tear down to a "grey-field" standard, where the towers and above ground structures must be removed but the buried concrete anchors can remain.
You must live in a weird and unusually slack judiciary.
In other words, this part of your worries/opposition to wind power has nothing to do with a shortcoming in the industry but everything with a shortcoming in your legal system.
Additionally, land must be extremely cheap when the owners just let it lay fallow.
Where I live the ~25 y/o turbines, in the day the largest on shore wind farm in Europe, were removed after new rows of nearly 200 meter giants were put alongside them.
http://www.windparknoordoostpo...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I oppose them because plans for and the cost of decommissioning them is not part of the budget planning.
Get your legal system fixed!
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. 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!
Underwater power cables exists for many years, probably for over a century, and the technology plus environmental impact is well understood.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I oppose it because all of the things we're putting into the ocean is causing water levels to rise. At 11,500 tons, what poor island is going to be flooded due to our greed? Don't believe me? Just look at the historical data. The more tonnage we put into the oceans the more floods occur. Remember when Noah built his massive boat, a boat big enough to fit a pair of every living create on it as well as food and supplies? He flooded the whole world with his floating zoo obsession. Lets not repeat the same mistake with massive floating fans designed to cool the coasts. Aren't beaches windy enough?
If you have evidence that turbines disproportionately affect certain species, please cite it.
Otherwise, this chart shows that windows, communication towers, and even high-tension wires each kill thousands of times more birds annually, and those things are everywhere.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
you'd be lucky if you could find a spot in the North Sea that isn't windy
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
https://www.nature.com/article...
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.
The anti-turbine mob are all nimbys worried about spoiling their views
What's so bad about not wanting your views spoiled?
Nothing at all. It doesn't mean your want will trump everyone's need however. If you really need pristine natural views that look like they have not been touched by humans, you need to go to places that are pretty close to pristine, with very few humans.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.