Giant Floating Windmills To Launch Next Year

pacroon writes "StatoilHydro is building the world's first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and testing it over a two-year period offshore of Karmøy, Norway. The company is investing approximately $80 million. Planned startup is in the fall of 2009. The project combines existing technology in innovative ways. A 2.3-MW wind turbine is attached to the top of a so-called Spar-buoy, a solution familiar from production platforms and offshore loading buoys. A model 3 meters tall has already been tested successfully in a wave simulator. The goal of the pilot is to qualify the technology and reduce costs to a level that will mean that floating wind turbines can compete with other energy sources."

Transmission?

[William Robinson (875390)]

TFA does not talk about transmission. How exactly they are going to manage a good reliable power transmission with the kind of floating power station, Any idea?

Re:Transmission?

[a_n_d_e_r_s (136412)]

A power cable.

The raft wont be floating freely, it will be anchored to a specific spot where the conditions for wind is good. However its much cheaper to use than construction something from the sea bottom in deep water. Most sea wind power are close to shore wind power plants that is build where the water is shallow or on islands. With this techonolgy a wind farm can be set up in deep water where the wind conditions are good.

Re:Transmission?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude (707389)]

Indeed, Denmark already has extensive offshore windfarm resources, and they produce a good percentage of their power from wind as well. A small country like Ireland could well produce most or all of its power with this technology.

This also solves the issue with noise from wind generators anchored in deep water, which the Danes have estimated could cause problems for whales - sound travels much farther in deep water.

And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well.

Re:

[grizdog (1224414)]

And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well.

I don't object to windmills, but the tip speed of the large windmills is quite fast. The article said these would be 80 meters in diameter, so if they rotated at one revolution every three seconds, that would be almost 200 miles per hour at the tip. I think that one of the main reasons large turbines do rotate so slowly is the high tip speed is difficult to deal with - at the speed of sound (340 m/s) shock waves become a problem, and structural problems show up at slower speeds. And of course, there ar

Re:Transmission?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude (707389)]

And of course, there are the birds.

Borrowed from here [treehugger.com]:

To help our understanding of turbine hazards to birds we'd like to make an analogy, to your bicycle. Turn your bike upside down or put it in a work rack, set it to the highest gear...the one you use to go fast on a level slope.... and now move the wheel slowly with your hand. The chain moves rapidly with only a few degrees of wheel rotation. This symbolizes today's cutting edge 1.5 mW turbines, which have a very large surface area of blade exposed to the wind and a gearbox that turns the dynamo quickly while the blades move slowly. Birds dodge these slow moving blades relatively easily.

Now put the bike in the lowest gear...the one you use to climb hills...and move the wheel with your hand fast enough to turn the chain as fast as before. That symbolizes the 20-year-old "bird-o-matic" wind turbine design. Small blades with small surface areas have to turn rapidly to overcome the magnetic force of the dynamos, which generate electricity.

Recapping: small blades, low surface area, lots of dead birds possible; very big blades, with large surface area exposed to wind, very few dead birds.

Spin 'Em Up!

[toddhisattva (127032)]

can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds

Nope. The environmentalists buttered their bread and now they have to lie in it. For over a century they have whined about every overspecialized subspecies being "endangered."

Now it's time to use their own bullshit against them. It is time to shut down every idiotic "green" project by any means necessary. Building a wind farm? Expect to hear every single lie told about conventional power thrown back in your face.

All those power lines leaking radiation into the environment!

Wind turbines have huge carbon footprints because of their refined metal content. The only carbon-neutral wind turbines are made of wood.

The iron used in wind turbines has a half-life of billions of years!

The quantum flux caused by their rotating magnets makes eggshells thinner.

The vanes mix the air and cause acid rain.

Electricity from wind turbines has been shown to cause moleculitis in kids.

Using dozens of tiny generators instead of one big generator puts tons more negative ions into the atmosphere. Or is it positive ions? It better not be neutral ions, because those are pure poison.

--
Usually, I am against using lies to counter lies. The corrective for lies is truth. But in this case, I expect the creative use of lies to illustrate previous lies will be funny as hell, because it is so deserved.

Hoist by their own petard. Hehe, I said "petard."

Re:Transmission?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude (707389)]

i didn't know there was a "noise" problem but if there was; how is this going to solve it?

Apparently there is a problem [wikipedia.org] at greater depths...

Tests carried out in Denmark for shallow installations showed the levels were only significant up to a few hundred metres. However, sound injected into deeper water will travel much further and will be more likely to impact bigger creatures like whales which tend to use lower frequencies than porpoises and seals. A recent study found that wind farms add 80â"110 dB to the existing low-frequency ambient noise (under 400 Hz), which could impact baleen whales communication and stress levels, and possibly prey distribution.

As far as I understand it, towers will transmit the noise directly to the ocean floor, but a floating platform, even if anchored, distributes most of the noise at the surface, although I could be mistaken in that.

Re:

[Darkman, Walkin Dude (707389)]

Ireland is one of the best locations in Europe for wind power as it is situated on the Western edge of Europe and is exposed to high winds from the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea. Wind power utility factors tend to be higher in Ireland than anywhere else. By the end of 2006 the installed capacity of wind power in Ireland was over 745 MW, or around 6% of the total power production in the country (which climbed 50% in 2006).

So its not really that much of a stretch to see 80% or 90% of the power in the country

Re:Transmission?

[William Robinson (875390)]

The raft wont be floating freely, it will be anchored to a specific spot

Thanks.

I found a better article [azom.com] that explains the concept with better pictures.

Re:

[Hojima (1228978)]

Or you can use the windmills to electrolyze water and compress the hydrogen so that we wont be dependent on foreign oil to run our cars. Hell, it would be good to have individual generators running on it so you don't face the power loss from the cables.

Power cable to sweden

[CarpetShark (865376)]

How exactly they are going to manage a good reliable power transmission with the kind of floating power station, Any idea?

They've discovered that a relatively unorthodox technology, known as "peer to peer" is a good solution. Unfortunately big corporations have made it illegal in every country but sweden. The upshot is that, instead of using the natural infrastructure of a p2p network that already exists, the company will be based in sweden, and all of the floating windmills will be directly tied to their HQ, by long cables. From sweden, the company will then export it back to your house, beside the windmill, on trucks.

But don't worry, you will get a shiny plastic wrapper for your 1-ton battery, and an insert with lots of credits to the corporations who made it possible, and copyright notices.

Windmills

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

TFA does not talk about transmission. How exactly they are going to manage a good reliable power transmission with the kind of floating power station, Any idea?

Well, the summary says they're windmills, so I assume it will be transmitted in the form of flour.

Re:Windmills

[Adriax (746043)]

That pun was rather half baked.

Re:Transmission?

[by Anonymous Coward]

>How exactly they are going to manage a good reliable power transmission
>with the kind of floating power station, Any idea?

The subsurface structure:
Water depth: about 220 m (approx. 720 ft); buouy is a cylinder standing vertical in the water, the draft is about 100 m (305 ft);- buoy diameter, say 10 m.

Topside structure/turbine data:
Operating wind speed: 3-27 m/s; about 40 m long blades; rated capacity and speed: 2.3 MW; 5-15 rpm.

Mooring system:
Attached to buoy at about mid-point (say at depth 50 m); 3 mooring lines.

The power transmission system, the electrical cable:
The cable is attached to the buoy at either depth 50 m or at buoy bottom. The buoy will be subjected to both dynamic and static motion due to waves, currents and wind. The static motion is mainly horizontal offset caused by the static loads that are counteracted by the mooring system. The cable arrangement is able to adjust to these buoy motions without mechanical overload, this is achieved by the following methods:
1. Bend stiffener in the interface with the buoy (a 2-3 m long conical plastic thing which main purpose is to avoid overbending and associated fatigue damage in the interface with the buoy.
2. The cable is arranged in a compliant riser configuration between seabed and buoy, this allows the spar buoy to move without causing excessive tension and bending in the cable. This effect is achieved by "storing" over-lenght in a buoyant cable section. Hence - when the buoy moves - cable lenght is simply "paid" out (or in) from the buoyant section. Starting at the buoy there is a bend stiffener followed by say 150 m cable, then perhaps 60 m cable equipped with buoyancy until eventually there is cable to the seabed. There is of course an anchor somewhere at the seabed to keep the cable fixed.

The above technology is well known from the oil industry, the described riser configuration is a so called "pliant wave" or "lazy wave configuration". The main challenges with this concept is that it is new uncharted territory and that we do not yet know the actual parameters. Our experience is from the oil business, where such cables between platform and seabed are routinely used.

Greetings from a member of the engineering team within Nexans Norway AS, the Halden plant, which will design and manufacture the power transmission for the Hywind project.

Floating...

[Llywelyn (531070)]

Will make them a little hard to tilt against. A charge on horseback is nearly as dramatic when they are out at sea.

Re:

[fmarkham (1091529)]

Ploughing the ocean waves is always difficult when the horses keep sinking.

Re:Floating...

[deniable (76198)]

Use horses trained for water polo.

Re:Floating...

[cmacb (547347)]

...or seahorses.

Birds?

[jamesh (87723)]

One of the arguments against wind farms on land has been that they take out the odd bird now and then. Would bird activity be lower out to sea at the altitude that these things sit at?

Re:Birds?

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

Taking out an albatross could be bad luck.

Re:Birds?

[Tracy Reed (3563)]

I don't get this bird killing thing. I've spent lots of time walking amongst the giant wind turbines around Tehachapi, CA where I grew up. I never saw a dead bird out there nor had I ever heard of these things killing birds until just a few years ago. Does anyone actually have any data on this? So far it sounds like an urban legend.

Re:

[StormyWeather (543593)]

Just environmentalists looking for a reason to hate the technology. We have tons of the power windmills here, and even when the wind is howling those things move slow as a glacier. The old water pump windmills of the plains would have been a bigger threat, but I'll bet the birds loved the water from the horse troughs.

Re:Birds?

[TapeCutter (624760)]

"Just environmentalists looking for a reason to hate the technology."

People who shun technology are called Ludites.

The last time I heard of a windfarm cancelled because of birds was here in the state of Victoria in Australia, it was about 2yrs ago. It was a right-wing government minister that killed the project, obsetnsibly because of concerns by experts over "rare birds". This proffesional anti-environmentalist trawled the environmental impact statement and found a mention of (IIRC) the orange-bellied parrot. He was the one who chose to kill the project there were no prosteters, and the impact statement had given the project the thumbs-up.

The "environmentalists" have been ranting about wind farms since the 1970's, the vast majority of people (green or otherwise) knew the bird thing was bullshit and wanted the farm. However when the minister cancelled the project because "experts said rare parrots were found breeding in the area", mass-media dutifully blamed "environmentalists".

Re:Birds?

[LordLucless (582312)]

See? The electric windmills don't give the birds water. They are BAD! :-)

I think you missed one of the fundamentals when it comes to "floating windmills".

Re:Birds?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the number that die as a result of other human activities such as traffic, hunting, power lines and high-rise buildings...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Birds

Re:Birds?

[maxwell demon (590494)]

Of course the windmills will produce traffic (a service technician coming to control them every now and then), power lines (obvious) and high-rise buildings (for the companies who build and operate those windmills). Possibly they'll also produce hunting (I can't currently find any link, but I'm sure with enough creativity, you'll find one). So you have to add all those birds killed by those activities to the numbers of windmills. You'll see immediately that the resulting sum is larger than the effect of any activity you mentioned.

And don't tell me that this calculation is not serious. After all, the RIAA gets away with this type of calculation all the time!

Re:Birds?

[vlm (69642)]

Studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the number that die as a result of other human activities such as traffic, hunting, power lines and high-rise buildings...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Birds [wikipedia.org]

What about human activities like ... eating? The most obvious problems are often overlooked. Given a highrise with 10K people inside, it really doesn't matter if one or two birds crash into it, if they are renting the ground floor to KFC.

Bats seem to have a real problem with them

[Shivetya (243324)]

Here is an old article I remembered about and fortunately google brought it up http://www.coxwashington.com/reporters/content/reporters/stories/2005/11/13/BC_WINDMILLS_BATS_ADV13_COX.html [coxwashington.com]

From the article
" Towering up to 228 feet above the Appalachian Mountain ridge, far above the tree line, windmills are lined up like marching aliens from War of the Worlds.
Up close, they emit a high-pitched electrical hum. From a distance of a few hundred yards, their 115-foot blades make a steady whooshing sound as their tips cut through the air at up to 140 mph."

"A study conducted at FPL's Mountaineer Wind Energy Center here this year indicated that its 44 turbines may have caused between 1,300 and 2,000 bat deaths in a six-week period. That study was led by Edward B. Arnett, a scientist with Bat Conservation International, and financed largely by the American Wind Energy Association and its 700 member companies."

Re:

[zippthorne (748122)]

Yes, the tips are fast. But the issue is not the speed per se, but whether they can be avoided. Since the rotational speed is lower, they are simply not fast enough for persistence-of-vision to make them invisible (to humans. I suppose studies would need to be done as to bird persistence of vision...)

Also, the time in between blades to pass through the gap depends solely on rotational speed, not tip velocity. That's what people mean when they say they turn "slowly."

It depends on how you model the danger

Re:

[maxwell demon (590494)]

In this case Darwin says the bird must die

No, Darwin says the bird will die. The theory of evolution isn't a system of demands, but a scientific theory. It doesn't tell you how things should be, it tells you how things are, to the best of our knowledge. Just like the theory of gravitation doesn't tell you that things should fall down, it just tells you that they do fall down (under certain conditions).

Just out of interest

[CrackedButter (646746)]

Why is it that wind turbines aren't augmented with solar panels on them? I'm talking either in the base stem or actually on the blades, seems like a no brainer in so much that you save space and it would be useful for the those areas which are windy and sunny. I don't mean to suggest that their power generating capabilities are linked either, just why can't they take up the same space and whatever energy either of the technologies generate can be fed into that country's electrical grid.

Re:Just out of interest

[polar red (215081)]

because solar panels can easily be fitted onto roofs, and looking out of my window, i can still see hundreds that don't have 'em yet, so putting solar panels out into the sea sounds a waste of time.

Re:Just out of interest

[ImaLamer (260199)]

Look out of my window all I see are large apartment buildings and I can't help but to think they could be cutting their overall energy consumption with solar panels. The tops of these building are flat and wide and raise above the landscape, I look out and see an energy farm.

I think there should be a city ordinance that states that each apartment building with more than 10 subunits should be forced to either install a set of solar panels or allow the local utility to do so. The surface area in my city alone could help the resident imprint. Make the law at the city level so it can be chosen to be followed by the local residents and if the property owner installs the system themselves allow their panels energy to impact the residents bill. I think there are forces in this type of legislation that could drive the market for panels and attracting residents with energy savings.

Putting panels sky scrapers don't make sense because they simply use too much energy compared to their top surface area, their impact would be minimal - but look around, there are many places these things could go. In some buildings during the day there is absolutely no one too, they are off somewhere else using energy but the building where they live is just feeding into the grid (or paying off their evening's usage).

It would be costly and would need to be implemented over some time frame; but the market would drive for the cheapest - and eventually most efficient of hardware.

Re:Just out of interest

[Cally (10873)]

The costs of manufacturing p/v (electricity-generating) cells is still high enough that they're not yet a mass-market item. Solar water heating, however, is getting pretty mainstream here in the UK. Unsolicited testimonial: to my left I have a view out the window of a misty, grey, drizzly and damp prospect (a typical English summer, in other words.) To my right, a bathroom with gallons of free hot water. Result, happiness :)

On the other hand -- I've noticed very small p/v and wind turbine installations popping up on the roadsides in our area in the last few years - powering things like illumination lights for traffic signs, lights at bus-stops, speed-triggered LED speed warning signs and the like. The wind turbines are dinky things with rotor diameters of perhaps three or four feet. (Note, this is along the shore of the Severn Estuary, which is presumably more reliably windy than most places inland.) I'm curious if manufacturing economies of scale have brought such small devices down to the point that they're cost effective, as well as green, anyone know?

British Solar Water Heating

[StCredZero (169093)]

There are some great devices for solar water heating produced in Britain. If you treated this as a water preheat, you could use this with a Stirling engine and have your own solar-thermal unit with solar energy storage.

The big problem there is getting your hands on a Stirling engine.

Re:

[FooAtWFU (699187)]

It appears they are suitable for small things along the roadside where the cost of installation of electrical service far outweighs the cost of electricity - signs along the highway, and such - and moreover things which aren't exactly the most critical infrastructure (like, oh, stoplights).

When it comes to things that chew lots of power, though, I'm sure there's no contest.

It reminds me of those solar garden-lights that they sell that you can just stick in the ground instead of digging trenches and run

Small wind battery chargers

[flyingfsck (986395)]

Small battery chargers are very easy to make. All you need is a 36V DC cooling fan for a large stationary motor and a diode. That will charge a 12V battery quite nicely and costs only about $100. This is a nice setup to power a cottage or a RV. We used one for many years, till the grid finally caught up with the cottage.

Re:

[Graymalkin (13732)]

Wind turbines can be manufactured "green" since most of their construction materials are recyclable. They are also fairly easy to construct since they don't require any sort of exotic manufacturing processes. The DOE's website has a nice diagram [energy.gov] of a modern wind turbines components. Modern turbines are highly efficient and when situated correctly pay for themselves very quickly. As you've seen turbines have gotten cheap enough that individual units have become suitable for people to buy themselves. Small sc

Re:Just out of interest

[phreeza (1071714)]

the majority of the surface area on a wind turbine is tilted at an angle unsuitable for that. the only place that would make sense is probably the top of the cabin. The Blades are subject to a lot of stress/deformation, might also be that solar cells don't handle that well.

Are the masts designed to fold under extreme winds

[distantbody (852269)]

...or are they designed to 'fight' them (i.e. stand strait at all costs)? Cthulu help them if it's the latter...

Re:Are the masts designed to fold under extreme wi

[polar red (215081)]

the latest generation of windmills produce electricity by wind speeds up to 30m/s, and at higher speeds, they just turn the blades out of the wind, so they won't get damaged.

Steady winds

[nadaou (535365)]

Critically offshore winds tend to be much more steady than winds on land, where topography, trees, and buildings combine to create turbulence and resulting gusts. At sea the winds have nothing to slow them down meaning higher output, and nothing to make them subject to sudden gusts meaning less wear and tear on the gears (a squall or frontal gust mainly has a single onset and slow relaxation) and more predictable output.

* Being able to go deeper means further offshore, which means less people on land looking for an easy pay off due to bogus eyesore / property value complaints.

* In a massive storm these ones lean over, spilling away the force of the wind and reducing exposed surface area as cos(tilt).

* The bird cuisinart effect is largely debunked. Many more are killed flying into windows (home or glass box buildings), stationary bridges and radio towers, and hit by cars while attending to roadkill. Many studies out there to back this up. "Homepower magazine" does a nice job of collecting peer reviewed studies (they had a great writeup on it, but I can't find that now). Also need to balance against the more dilute effect of wildlife killed by a coal plant's SO2 etc emissions. Granted most studies are not looking at sea birds.

Re:

[zippthorne (748122)]

"The bird cuisinart effect is largely debunked."

Not debunked. Solved. Early wind turbines were small and very fast. Too fast for birds.

Re:Steady winds

[Digestromath (1190577)]

I vaguely remember reading about 'early' wind turbines... they were mostly made of wood and dotted the picturesque country side (I hear the Dutch ones were particularly pleasant). I imagine we would have noticed the wholesale avian depopulation in the interveining 800 years of vertical axis wind turbines.

Re:

[nadaou (535365)]

Not debunked. Solved. Early wind turbines were small and very fast. Too fast for birds.

While the newer ones turn at a much lower RPM, they are so much bigger that speed at the tips of each blade are easily moving in excess of 100 kph.

Math: Say 100m diameter turbine, takes 5 sec to turn once. circumference = PI*d = 314m which means the tip has to travel 314m/5sec or 62.8m/s = 226 km/hr. I just made up the 5 sec, I don't really know the standard RPM would be exactly.

Even so, the new monster turbines are so bi

Since it is alway out among the waves . .

[Insanity Defense (1232008)]

Why not include a wave generator as part of the system?

For the rare individual who does not know. A wave generator in this context does not make waves but uses the motion of waves to generate electricity.

Re:

[nfk (570056)]

"A wave generator in this context does not make waves but uses the motion of waves to generate electricity."

It's a good thing you clarified, otherwise the rare individual would imagine this company has the department of "Let's make this thing work", which tries to harvest energy, and the department of "No you won't", which sabotages their efforts.

Re:

[andersa (687550)]

Because wave generators are difficult to build. Much more difficult than windmills. Actually nobody has yet to build a succesfull full scale wave generator. There are just too many things that can go wrong. Seawater is very corrosive and its much more difficult to harness the wave energy in a way that doesn't destroy the mechanism of the turbine.

Video

[MrZaius (321037)]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0oN5G3WVf0 [youtube.com]

Check out the last minute of the above to see their mock-ups.

Re:

[maxwell demon (590494)]

Never heard about the solar wind? :-)