Giant Floating Windmills To Launch Next Year 162
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."
Re:Transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Are the masts designed to fold under extreme wi (Score:5, Informative)
Steady winds (Score:5, Informative)
* 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:Birds? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Birds
Re:Transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bats seem to have a real problem with them (Score:5, Informative)
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:Transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks.
I found a better article [azom.com] that explains the concept with better pictures.
Re:Steady winds (Score:3, Informative)
Not debunked. Solved. Early wind turbines were small and very fast. Too fast for birds.
Re:Transmission? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Birds? (Score:2, Informative)
It's complete bullshit.
Note the following facts:
The original "wind turbines kill birds" campaign used several outlets to say the same thing, using the same four dead birds picture with no evidence.
Glass buildings in cities, radio towers (lights at night), cars all kill way more birds than wind power ever could.
"Fluffy" the house-cat let out at night, and feral cats kill 10,000 times the estimated bird kill from 100% of the US power needs from wind.
In other words, it's hippy bullshit created by folks with (now) lots of money and a bad case of NIMBY-ism. Ex-hippies lie just as much as any other baby boomer does.
Re:Just out of interest (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
Re:Birds? (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Video (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the last minute of the above to see their mock-ups.
Re:Transmission? (Score:3, Informative)
So its not really that much of a stretch to see 80% or 90% of the power in the country being generated by offshore wind platforms over the coming two decades, although there are no concrete plans to do so, unfortunately.
Small wind battery chargers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Birds? (Score:2, Informative)