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."

Floating...

[Llywelyn]

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

Re:Birds?

[MichaelSmith]

Taking out an albatross could be bad luck.

Re:Floating...

[fmarkham]

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

Power cable to sweden

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:Birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

considering the bird thing was never really a problem on land either, lower bird activity might even push it into the negative range; i.e. new birds would occasionally pop into existence around it or become healthier by flying near it.

Re:Birds?

[maxwell demon]

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

Re:Birds?

[maxwell demon]

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?

[LordLucless]

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".

Windmills

[Dr. Cody]

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:to launch?

[maxwell demon]

Never heard about the solar wind? :-)

Re:Floating...

[deniable]

Use horses trained for water polo.

Re:Steady winds

[Digestromath]

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:Since it is alway out among the waves . .

[nfk]

"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:Floating...

[cmacb]

...or seahorses.

Re:Power cable to sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be pier-to-pier?

Re:Windmills

[Adriax]

That pun was rather half baked.

Re:Windmills

[Zoolander]

Bread between the lines, and you'll get it.

Spin 'Em Up!

[toddhisattva]

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."