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Floating Wind Turbines
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Jul 08, 2007 06:51 PM
from the out-of-sight-out-of-bird-migration-paths dept.
from the out-of-sight-out-of-bird-migration-paths dept.
The Great Pulgoso sends us word that Norwegian energy group Norsk Hydro has signed an agreement with Siemens to develop floating wind turbines. The companies agreed on a schedule that would see a prototype in the North Sea by 2009 and a working wind farm using 5-megawatt generators by 2013. (Norsk Hydro unveiled the design in 2005.) Inhabitat.com has taken the giant illustrations from the Norsk Hydro site and reproduced them at a reasonable size. The design features a steel tube 200 meters long. It extends 80 meters above the sea surface and has three 60-meter blades. The whole thing is anchored to the sea floor by three tethers. The developers expect to be able to install the turbines in waters up to 700 meters deep.
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The Potential of Geothermal Power 397 comments
EskimoJoe wrote with a link to an AP article about progress in the development of geothermal energy. A Swiss company is competing with another in Australia to be the first to commercially develop a geothermal power plant. The concept is simple to understand: earth's core heat transforms water into steam, which in turn causes a turbine to revolve. The potential, though, is enormous. "Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment. A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S."
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700 meters? (Score:3, Informative)
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Protection from Sabotage forgotten? (Score:3, Interesting)
Defense of power generation facilities is a low priority on land because your country's armed forces protect it and everything else that is within the borders. Outside of the country's landmass, it becomes difficult to protect major power installations. If your region's power requirements are substant
Re:Protection from Sabotage forgotten? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You are expecting the bozo to have a clue. Terrorists, especially the allahhead variety do not. Even 9/11 was clueless. Despite supposedly being a construction engineer Bin Laden did not see the folding effect which a major fire will do to the skyscraper design. The ones to come later were equally clueless. 7/7 managed to reach their targets without blowing themselves on the way due to sheer luck. Madrid ones managed to get that far only because they found a corrupt local Spaniard to supply them with explosives and a Bulgarian muslim trained by CIA to rig them. If it was not for a major power training their "explosive expert" they would have not gotten anywhere. And 21/7 and the last slot in London and Glasgow were a total laughing stock. And that were terrorists lead by a mastermind with an engineering and design degree from a "respectable" British university. IMO all people who had the same chemistry course with this bozo in Anglia Polytechnics (nowdays East Anglia Ruskin) should have their degree revoked and resit their exams. To ensure good standards of teaching in the future. Religious fanaticism and real modern military and engineering capability do not go well together.
2. In order to get to an installation offshore the bozo will need to use a plane or a boat. All it takes to protect an offshore installation is to have an exclusion zone around it (which are set around many of the current windfarms for health and safety reasons). Any approaching vessel will be picked up on radar tens of miles away and can be stopped trivially. Just put any bog-standard naval close quarters defence system on the more important rigs. While attacking a power station based on land can be done by any bozo with a bag of dynamite (hint - how do you get the electiricty out of it), attacking a defended sea installation requires the resources of a major naval power. If it is defended, even minimally. It cannot be done by a lone allahhead idiot on a boat with a gun. That is besides the fact that Norwegian and UK air force have any point within the north sea within 15-20 min scramble time. There is very little an allahhead bozo with a gun can do against an incoming Harpoon missile.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the most vulnerable parts of the power distribution at sea can be protected by putting them on the seabed. The technology for doing this is already there and the Norwegians have mastered it when doing the pipelines between their gas fields, UK and rest of Europe. In fact, the infrastructure at sea is easier to defend and protect than the one on the ground.
My dad participated in doing the "survival" analysis for
Re:Protection from Sabotage forgotten? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it isn't.
Err... First, there have been numerous and vast efforts to protect nuclear power plants inside this country's borders.
And inside this country, basically every wind-farm is completely open... One large one, a few miles from my location, is completely unguarded by even the most basic of fences, practically abandoned, etc. You could drive a huge tanker truck between the turbines in the middle of the day, and nobody would even notice.
The thing about power generation is redundancy. Sure, if we have 50% of our generation capabilities out in the distant ocean, security might begin to be a problem... But with ~1% being provided by wind power, the price for a KWH of electricity wouldn't even rise a cent if somebody destroyed them all... Wind and solar power are inherently distributed electricity generation, which makes it, on the whole, more secure from attack than any single central facility could be, no matter where.
I don't think you understand much about the oceans. The US Navy is ALREADY patrolling all of the world's seas, and has been doing so for much of the last century. They are already meticulously tracking all the submarines, from every country, around the world's oceans.
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Re:Read what isn't being said here (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wildlife? (Score:4, Insightful)
Destroying habitats on the ocean floor and having birds fly into it won't go over well for the environmentalists I imagine.
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Environmentalists: Do they make sense anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Now it seems like each environmentalist has some different idea of what is good for the environment. These ideas go from tame, to extreme. Many environmentalists would value animals over people. This is where I differ from hardcore environmentalists.
I think man still has to live, and if man is forced to live in impoverished conditions that he has a bigger impact on the environment than a man who is well off. Poor people are the ones driven to poach and over fish. Large businesses may all seem bad to an environmentalist, but at least they have to listen to regulations or the punishment is worse for their bottom line if they get caught doing illegal things. Poor people are more inclined to strip away their entire rain forest for a cheap buck than someone who has enough.
I can't blame a person who is just out for survival doing their thing. So to me, the environmental situation is at an impass with environmentalists all having the same motive: to save nature, but all having differing opinions on how or what to stand up against. It seems like they're almost wack jobs as they stand against everything and everything they see as a perceived threat to the environment.
To me: If you empower men with an average impact to the environment, then you are really doing the environment justice. Completely stripping down a forest is awful. Replanting baby trees is still bad because the animals that lived under the trees can't survive anymore unless your goal is just to make the land a tree farm. Yet if you want to strip out trees without hurting the environment, you can always take some trees out of each forest without leaving a noticible impact on the environment.
Now the whole reason I bring this up is that I want to consider myself an environmentalist, but they don't have a unified voice. Each one has a differing opinion, and most of them are too passionate to have a meaningful discussion as to why other people's views may be right.
For example, I support the idea of supercharging the nation's energy infrastructure. I think that if we provide much more energy to the power grid it would be an environmental boon. My reasoning is that you can switch from expensive gasoline to inexpensive hydrogen in your cars, and basically drive wherever you want, lowering the prices on everything(exactly in the opposite way that inflation is hitting us because gasoline is going up). Basically if we supercharge the nation's powergrid, we would have necessity on other things lessened.
How do we super charge the power grid? To begin with, we open a load of nuclear reactors to begin with. A lot of people knee jerk at the idea of nuclear reactors! So to have a meaningful discussion, they would have to not be an environmental zealot that doesn't have a closed idea. Nuclear reactors have come a way since the first ones were created. They still have some of the same problems such as needing a place to dump the waste. I'm not suggesting something radically new in the ways of solving nuclear generator problems, but what I am proposing is that the solution for environmental empowerment comes with some other problems that can be solved.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I know how to weigh in the human factor. Most environmentalists will balk if they see *any* problem with a plan. I'm sorry, but I consider these people unreasonable when they go so far as to say that solar and wind farms hurt the environment. I'm not lying when I say that many have hidden political agendas that they use environmentalist FUD as a tool, but don't give a damn about the environment themselves. Not all environmentalist
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Many/most environmentalists are environmentalists _because_ they want to preserve humanity, and human civilisation. David Suzuki is a good example.
Your comment is as stupid as saying that uranium miners drink the blood of African children.
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Re:Wildlife? (Score:4, Informative)
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Unless they use that rotational power of the wind to pump oil!
Re:Wildlife? (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole "floating" thing is trying to solve that. By floating they can be located farther offshore, outside of migation patterns and coastal wildlife habitats. Sure they might need to make some sort of passive sonar reflectors to keep whales from hitting them, but being able to be in 500m water will also put them well out of sight of land, another NIMBY adoption problem.
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Re:Wildlife? (Score:5, Interesting)
On birds, the very large wind turbines turn quite slowly and this has proved much better for birds since thy fly faster than the blades move.
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Solar, the source of renewable: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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Destroying habitats on the ocean floor and having birds fly into it won't go over well for the environmentalists I imagine.
I don't know about habitats on the ocean floor although I suppose that they can't cover the entire ocean even if they wanted it.
About the birds though... Well you know what evolution is about: adapting to constantly changing environment. Nat
Re:Wildlife? (Score:4, Interesting)
And environmentalists that oppose everything cannot speak for everyone. Opposing greener energy sources just hurts everyone, nature included. If we can't build greener sources, we're going to burn more coal. When comparing a few dead birds vs. a coal plant, I'll take the few dead birds any day, and so should any reasonable environmentalist.
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Property values (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't comment about other parts of the world, but in New Zealand the main resistance to wind farms is that nobody wants them in their back yard. They're big, ugly, and noisy, they tend to restrict public access to the surrounding land, and they cause the all-important property values of private individuals to plummet. Lately we've seen several local large wind farm projects either heavily toned down, or completely scuttled. Each has been worth between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, but small groups of locals have put a lot of effort into blocking them.
Even though I have mixed feelings, I do actually sympathise with many of the complaints. Society (here at least) has been built to encourage people to value personal property and what they own, and property ownership is a very traditional and encouraged way for people to invest for their future. People here have their retirement funds in their property, and suddenly seeing that value plummet by 50% or more because the local council or government decides that it might allow a wind farm nearby can be quite devestating. 20 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be an incentive to build giant noisy ugly structures all over the countryside, and there's only so much forward thinking that can be done.
Even if it's kind of silly and inefficient, putting wind farms out at sea conveniently places them in a location which isn't the back yard of anyone likely to complain.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Birds? What about flying fish? Won't someone think of the flying fish?
And can whales get these banned because they ruin the view?
North sea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Supressing Strong Hurricanes (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, weather modification seems a dicey thing to try on our sample-size-of-one planet.
Save the Hurricanes! (Score:4, Funny)
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Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
A) Wind power is expensive
B) The power output is uncontrollable and unpredictable
Wind power is not being held back by environmental concerns. On the contrary it receives huge subsidies based on its renewable nature. The reason it haven't caught on is simply that it is 3-4 times as expensive per kwh as compared to a fossil fuel plant or nuclear power station. The unpredictable output would be a show stopper if you want any large fraction of your energy from wind, but in most countries today the amount of wind power used is not even close to when this starts becoming a major problem. For wind power to catch on costs must come down by a factor of 2 at the very least, and I don't see that happening by making them significantly more difficult to deploy and maintain.
Way off base. (Score:4, Informative)
- That is so off. From here, wind is 7.5 vs's subsidized coal's 4.5. [zfacts.com] But if coal is required to clean up its' act (i.e. clean coal, bury the CO2, etc), then the costs will be about 15.Points out that all of the power is subsidized [utah.edu]
- Yeah, this is true. Most of these plants are located in places where the winds blow 70-90%. Sadly, when they are needed most (high temps), is when they are likely to be at their worse. That is why I keep saying that our research dollars should go into energy storage (heat, capacitors, etc).
As to wind not catching on, that is absolutely false. Just about every state (excluding the south east) has major programs going on. Step out of the USA, and you see LOADS of wind catching on. Many of these are private Enterprise, rather than the large monopolies. Heck, even with that, Xcell in Colorado is starting to build plants as well as resells others electricity. In fact, they are counting on these to save them loads of money.Now the trick is to get Xcell to use nukes for their base plants, rather than the gas or coal that they want.
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With respect to expense, there are fixed and marginal costs to consider. Making it economical is a matter of achieving sufficient scale to amortize the lifetime production of the generators adequately. The marginal costs are practically nil, so at some point the cost curves cross each other. Thus the tax incentive bootstraps the early investment needed to get the technology
wind turbines aren't ugly (Score:4, Interesting)
Floating Currents Turbines? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, why choose? Why not water turbines submerged beneath platforms with windmills mounted on top?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But I'm more interested in river currents. Which we've already messed with all over the place, including damming hundreds of thousands of rivers, many for hydroelectric. I'd like to see turbines in those ri
Big Oil and Big Wind (Score:4, Informative)
I had this concept going through my mind over two years ago. I've got a stack of papers and specs accumulated looking at the details of the technolgy. I was intending (dreaming) of starting a company to develop a proposal to place a wind turbine field in Bass Strait [wikipedia.org]. Such a venture might be useful in offsetting the impact of Steve Brack's [wikipedia.org] enormous desalination project.
I think all the technology is well developed and in place. The problem is that it is distributed amongst several disparate industry groups, and just needs to be successfuly combined, which is more of a human resource problem than anything technical.
Good on these Norwegians for pursuing this. I hope they are successful.
Ted Kennedy (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously..all these people complain about wind turbines blocking the view of their million-dollar ocean cottages get no sympathy from me. They ought to think about the value their oceanfront property will have when the oceans rise thirty feet because the polar ice caps melt due to global warming. Oh wait, NIMBY! I forgot! Make it someone else's problem!
Stability may be a big problem here. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is both a huge bending moment and dragging force.
To keep the mill from leaning more than 45 degrees backwards, it will need hundreds of tonnes of ballast,
With the windmill leaning backwards, the blade on one side will see a higher load than the blade on the other side, and the whole windmill will see a torque of maybe 10 MNm along the vertical axis.
How they plan to keep this stable is a mystery to me, and TFA does nothing to suggest a solution.
Anybody working for Hydro here on
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this is an old idea. If it's *finally* going into production I'd be willing to bet
they've given some serious thought to adressing such basic things as Newton's Third law.
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"For the concept to work, it is crucial that the wind turbines be light, requiring further technological development to realize the goal of establishing offshore
You know you've played too much Total Annihilation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:bad idea (Score:4, Funny)
And as an extra benefit, should the rubber coating crack, sea food will literally come cooked straight from the ocean!
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Rubber ducks (Score:5, Funny)
Here's an idea. We can mass produce floating rubber ducks. Each duck has leg appendages for traction in the water, a portable generator and nickel metal hydride battery in its base, and a propeller sticking up from a little hat on its head. Every year, we'll dump massive quantities of ducks- billions of ducks- into the North Pacific from cargo ships. They'll wash into the pack ice in Alaska, and then they'll move a mile a day, frozen in the ice, with their propellers whirring. This is ideal since the wind there is intense and the ice anchors the duck from blowing around too much. Eventually in 15 years they make it down into the north Atlantic where they can be collected by British people who relieve them of their fully recharged NiMH cells, swapping them for exhausted cells harvested from last year's ducks, and then the little guys continue their trek around the oceans delivering cheap renewable energy to people all around the world. And it really is renewable since 50 years later when the ducks wear out and arrive back in the north Pacific, the nickel can be melted back out of the cells.
Or instead of NiMH energy storage, we can have the rubber ducks shoot little lasers from their eyes at a satellite in geosynchronous orbit which would gather the energy and emit an intense maser beam at a giant microwave antenna somewhere in the southwest. That would be much more convenient.
While we're at it, we can have the ducks do wireless packet routing for us across the surface of the water. They can also have little spy cameras mounted in their heads in case the British need a little convincing. There just has to be something cool you could do with a billion rubber ducks spread across the ocean.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The design reminds me of FLIP [ucsd.edu] -- the Floating Inertial Platform -- of Scripps Oceanographic.
It's basically a huge buoy consisting of a ship like prow on a long steel cylinder. It is towed into place and the end of the cylinder is flooded, causing the prow to be jackknifed into the air above the ocean surface, providing a quiet, highly stable platform from which to perform oceanographic research. The vessel is so stable that when a large wave hits, it doesn't tilt at all, although resear
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
Ocean Wave Motion [navy.mil]
As depth increases, their effects slowly decrease until completely disappearing about half a wavelength below the surface.
And since it's anchored to the sea-bed, there's no danger if it being moved by tidal currents either.
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Re:bad idea (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, yes, those rare massive waves of red makeup will do a job on any man-made things!
(Hey, I'm sensitive to it because when I was in junior high I wrote a story in which the protagonist, a thief, did some horrible things. And I wondered why my teacher kept laughing at the story.)
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Re:bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
There's only one solution: cover the entire ocean with generators absorbing wind's energy, so there are NO WAVES AT ALL.
Pure genius...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry, I always manage to hit that lucky 0.0001%. The outlook for you not that good though
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first question an engineer assigned to the project would ask. Then they would think about all the stuff you've mentioned. Then they would think about heaps of other things you haven't thought of. Then they would design things to deal with each of the issues they came up with. Then they would make the things a lot stronger they would ever need to be in theory.
That's what engineers do for a living. And quite frankly none of the those problems sound overly complex. As someone else has mentioned most of them have been solved for oil rigs for many years. The others have been solved since 1866 when the first intercontinental copper wires for telegraph transmission were laid.
I was thinking you could do something really cool by having the whole things submerge when there was a storm and hide under the level of the waves until it was calmer, but that might be a bit too sci-fi for them.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is particularly the case with wind turbines, since the quantity and extent of distribution of the structures would be much more significant than offshore oil & gas installations.
Re:bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Salt Water (Score:5, Funny)
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