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]

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:Just out of interest

[polar red]

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

[phreeza]

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.

Re:Just out of interest

[ImaLamer]

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:Steady winds

[nadaou]

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 big they are pretty hard to miss. (har har)

But none the less the problem is still very much debunked vs. popular ideas on the matter.

Another big problem with the first big farms in California is that they put them in the middle of a mountain pass well known as a thoroughfare for migratory birds. So particularly bad placement. Of course some birds will fly into anything you stick up into the air. The idea is to understand how many will, and how to minimize the strikes.

Re:Birds?

[maxwell demon]

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).

Re:Since it is alway out among the waves . .

[andersa]

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.

Re:Birds?

[zippthorne]

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. Is the problem birds hitting the blades (bird velocity causes the actual damage to bird) or blades slicing through the birds.