Floating Wind Turbine Platform

Sterling D. Allan writes "Inventor Tom Lee is nearly ready to strike a deal to install a flotilla of offshore wind turbines, combined with hydrogen-generating capability and battery storage, which he says will enable them to have the consistency needed to be a primary grid energy provider, and not just supplemental to the gird. The floating platform enables them to take the turbines to where the wind blows and birds are few, and people even fewer. His objective in commencing this project 12 years ago was to come up with a power solution for developing nations."

What about the cost

[Barkley44]

How much will it cost to build though? And would it have any impact on the environment under the water, when placed in lower water levels? Perhaps it's not a major concern? I could just see the great lakes covered by hundreds of these ;)

Large areas required

[Cave_Monster]

I'm all for alternatives for energy production but would it be logistically feasible to conduct such a venture? Wind farms on the land take up massive amounts of landspace, I just don't know how you could acceptably occupy a similar amount area on water. That is unless the technology has advanced somewhat and not as many windmills are required to produce the same amount of energy.

Developing Nations

[rsborg]

His objective in commencing this project 12 years ago was to come up with a power solution for developing nations

Jeebus, is that what the US is now? With all the bass-ackwards energy policy combined with a very aging grid control system, and nuclear paranoia (why the hell don't we reprocess [pbs.org] like France/Japan?)... perhaps we're ready for some serious diversity to increase the power stability of this country.

Re:What about the cost

[lheal]

How much will it cost to build though?

Amortized over the life of a power plant, the startup cost is negligeable.

The real gotcha will be maintenance. What happens when one of God's happy sea creatures swims afoul of the power plant, taking it offline on Super Bowl Sunday? Or more pointedly, foul weather at sea is not like foul weather on land. There's no place to get away from it, except perhaps underwater.

I guess they'll have to have a fleet of submarines for maintenance. Maintenance is where the real costs will be, too.

Re:What about the cost

[rsborg]

I was wondering this too, so I googled "cost of off shore wind farm" and came up with Cape Wind [capewind.org]. Pretty interesting. Still haven't managed to price it out though. It only mentions that this farm is privately funded... which may just work.

Read article 15min. ago--BS detector still blaring

[Tsar]

Has anyone with knowledge of actual power generation systems looked at this article?

• The submitter is apparently the owner of the site where the article is posted--also of other "Free Energy" and survivalist supply sites.
• The article gives no details about a technology which seems sketchy at best and pure BS at worst. This gap is covered by the ever-popular "U.S. companies had better hurry up, the Europeans and Asians are about to pay me BIG MONEY for my wonderful ideas!" Come on.
• The only Dr. Thomas L. Lee [healthgrades.com] I could find is an MD in Texas, and the only Stanbury Resources [1800-homes-for-sale.com] I found sells real estate in Montana.
• In the final analysis the idea sounds like a 7th-grade science fair project. Does he really think Slashdot readers will think that venture capitalists are lining up around the block to pay for this "idea?"

Sorry if I sound sarcastic, I must have gotten up on the non-gullible side of the bed this morning.

Re:This is not feasible today

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you are going out to sea, why limit yourself to wind? Why not use the currents as well?

They have the platform, deversify!

[transami]

There's more they can do to increase to cost ratio. First, You're out in the middle of the ocean, plenty of sunlight out there, so cover the thing in Solar Cells. Secondly, you're out in the middle of the ocean, plenty of waves out there, why not pick up the wave energy. Third, you're out in the middle of the ocean, thers's a significant surface to deep ocean temperture differnential out there, pick that up with a sterling engine. And number four, if you produce the hydrogen/oxygen under water rather then on the surface you can allow it too rise to the surface and harvest bubble energy! ;)

Aside, I'm not so sure about the battery thing, unless they've improved battery technology there is low return on high cost. Hydrogen seems the better storage mechanism. And, uhm, how are they getting the electrcity to the grid if it's out in the middle of the ocean? Do they sail in and out to unload?

This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane..

[kevlar]

This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane, then the whole system goes to hell. The problem with floating platforms is that if they are connected directly to the grid, then they are connected via a cable. You can't just drive something that tethered out of the way of a hurricane.

On the other hand, if you do not have them connected directly to the grid and generating power that way, then they'd need massive batteries to store energy until they can be shipped elsewhere.

I suppose if they are devoting all their energy towards electrolysis to make hydrogen, that that could be a solution, but I'm not entirely buying the idea.

Re:Large areas required

[ToasterofDOOM]

Yeah ... And less would be needed in some cases as the winds over open water dont have to deal with the land getting in the way and dissipating its force. (sounds silly but it happens) But sometimes land features can cause wind to bottleneck and concentrate in a certain area. This doesnt increase the energy, actually it decreases it as much is dissipated by the land but the energy left can be harnessed much more efficiently by a fewer number of turbines

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we sure that aerosolizing infected birds high in the air is a good idea?

Re:This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane

Oh! Thanks! On the behalf of wind power advocates, thank you for pointing out this potential risk. Somehow we missed this and had not planned for WIND in our wind turbine plants. Cheese, no we must start all over again. Any place where it would never blow? Moon, perhaps? Safe wind power, straight from Moon. Would you like to join our research team?

Real Advantage - Law of the Sea

[Doug Dante]

The real advantage of this system is that it's governed by the law of the sea. These vessels can fly flags of convenience and simply import Hydrogen. You want to complain that they're killing birds? Too bad They're bothering your politically-connected and oh so expensive Cape Cod view? Thanks for playing "We don't care".

And if one of our friendly, small, and oh so bribable CAFTA partners such as Costa Rica offers the flag of convenience, guess what? That hydrogen is entering the USA duty free! Don't try to stop it, or you'll end up in a corporate friendly and politically insulated CAFTA court.

The sad part is that just like Sea Launch, it's getting so that you have to move out of the country to avoid all of the hassles and get 'er done. Thus the biggest joke of the recent energy bill. A $500 million grant to pay for people to deal with the nuclear power bureaucrats in Washington so that we might ~think~ about making another nuclear power plant.
(Well, perhaps second biggest after that Alaskan bridge fiasco)

Which brings up a good idea. You might as well cut out all of this hippie wind power BS and build a nuclear power plant out at sea to generate electricity to distill water, split it, and make hydrogen. We must have a spare nuclear aircraft carrier around here somewhere. Sell it to Costa Rica and they can rent it out to "Clean Hydrogen At Sea Corp"

Business method patent pending. Send $100,000 and you can have it.

Re:As long as its out there...

[Yartrebo]

- solar panels. Pricey even in land based use. Marine use would be even more expensive. Still the least ludicrous of your ideas. Might only cost $10B per GW of capacity, not counting platform cost, which is about 10x the cost of a coal plant and 30x the cost of a gas plant considering a generous 33% use factor. At least this option is low maintainance, and since you're using battery storage, you don't even need to spring for a pricey inverter and the control equipment is simpler than directly driving an electrolysis machine or the grid.

  - solar thermal. A 1 acre platform can produce about 100-500 kW of power, but you will need a steam engine or steam turbine (at this power range and using steam around 300 degrees centigrade, both steam engines and steam turbines are worthy of investigation and have similar efficiencies once you take into account the ability of steam engines to accept saturated steam efficiently and work at less than full throttle efficiently). Small steam machines require tending and maintainance just like their larger cousins in coal plants (or land based solar thermal plants), but they don't get any economy of scale. Setup cost could be reasonable, so long as you avoid expensive or unfit technology (avoid using an organic rankine cycle turbine, and don't use any glass [no mirrors or vacuum tubes around the collectors], as I guarantee that the sea will break them). Cost is probably around $3-5B per GW, but maintainance will be quite steep, probably on the order of 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.

  - energy from ocean heat content. Maintainance, as determined from trial land-based installations, is prohibitive. You will also need a massive steam turbine, as the pressure differential is just a few dozen millibars. Efficiencies are on the order of 1-2%, and massive amounts of water must be moved. Maintainance is at least 1 order of magnitude larger than solar thermal for the same power output, and space constraints will limit the effective power to a few MW (for hundreds of millions sunk into the plant - particularly the turbine, no less the platform). Storms also have a tendancy to destroy the pipes used to get the cold water from below. For costs, take the numbers for solar thermal, and multiply them by 10x for both capital and maintainance. That's $30-50B per GW of capacity and about $5 per kilowatt-hour in maintainance and operational expenses.

  - aquaculture platform. Now we're getting silly. It's much easier to raise your shrimp and salmon in land-based ponds or in next-to-shore enclosures. That way you can get the food to your animals by truck instead of by supply ship, and operations are much easier than on a cramped platform deck (which wouldn't support a very large pool anyway). As far as farming algea goes, first develop a method to use the algea, and then I'm sure it'll be a whole load cheaper to use fresh water ponds than try growing them in tanks on a platform.

Based on my extensive research, land based solar thermal and conventional wind are the most promising of the renewables (nuclear isn't renewable, though it sure beats organic fossil fuels). Wind is nearly as cheap as conventional power (less than 2x pricier in the USA, and we have no carbon tax). Solar thermal is pricier than wind currently, but I believe that it has more promise because there is far more suitable land for solar than wind, and improved material science (particularly if the stirling engine could ever be perfected, but just better heat transfer liquids, structural materials, and turbines would be a big help). Also, there is more room for cost reduction through more efficient engineering in solar thermal than in wind power, and solar thermal could theoretically scale to the 200MW per turbine range (where the efficiency of scale seems to peter out).

Equations of wind energy storage.

[fluffy666]

The problem with making Wind energy into a baseload power source is it's intermittancy. To overcome this without using a fossil fueled backup system (which completely defeats the purpose of having wind power in the first place, you need a storage and backup system). Probably the most energy efficient backup system we can have is a reversable fuel cell system (H2Electricity), with 70% efficiency. A good wind turbine installation will generate electricity around 33% of the time. Hence the installed capacity required becomes: N = 1 + ((1-C).(1/(E.R)))/C Where N = Capacity multiplier, C= Capacity Factor, E=H2 generation energy efficiency, R=Electricity generation from hydrogen efficiency. Putting in our numbers above, we get: N= 1+(((1-0.33).(1/0.7x0.7))/0.33) =1+((1.33)/0.33) =5 This means that you need to install 5MW of wind turbines to get 1MW baseload power. So you can take wind power cost estimates, and assuming that your fuel cells and hydrogen storage systems are free, multiply the cost by 5 to get a realistic cost. The above also assumes that hydrogen storage is lossless, which is generally not the case. If, as may well be the case, hydrogen needs to be stored on a season to season basis (i.e more wind in winter), this may make the system physically impossible. Furthermore, the above uses lab fuel cell efficiencies; reducing to 'real world' 40% efficiencies means that N=13, i.e. no less than 13Mw of wind generators are required for 1MW baseload. In short, wind power shows no sign of ever being able to economically fulfill our energy requirements.

Re:Large areas required

[Anonymous Coward]

If we produced 50% of our power with nuclear power we'd be hip deep in radioactive waste.

Actually, only the US will have that big of a problem. What america sees as nuclear 'waste' after ONE TIME USE, other countries see it as 'still hot, still dangerous, still full of power, and re-use that "waste" over and over and over resulting in probably 1/8th the amount of true 'waste'.

All that nuclear crap the US government wants to bury under mountains and 'has' already 'stored' in the deeper waters of countries like The Bahamas, coulde have been used maybe 6 more times before it was useless.