World's Biggest Wind Turbine Shows the Disproportionate Power of Scale (newatlas.com) 201
China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. From a report: The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life. The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields. Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity. That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter. No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity.
The big problem with large propellers (Score:3)
is that the tips will be exceeding the speed of sound at any decent speed
Re:The big problem with large propellers (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The big problem with large propellers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The big problem with large propellers (Score:5, Insightful)
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But in the US, with private property, property values and well, just people enjoying the scenery of many places they build dwellings....where realistically would we put such behemoth wind turbines if we were to do them here?
I mean I have to guess there is a LOT of NIMBY factor to be overcome with these.
Re: The big problem with large propellers (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there are lots of farms in the country where the land prices are rather low, and zoning requirements are rather minimal. I doubt they'd want to rent the land this was built on, but lots of farmers would be willing to sell a chunk of land, or perhaps give a 99 year lease. It might make the difference between being able to continue and going bankrupt.
Now along the shoreline is a different matter. In that case it might need to be far enough off-shore to be out of sight, and THAT would make power transmission expensive.
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Singapore is a good example, but the oil pipelines aren't. Singapore definitely must be getting power shipped across the ocean. It's my guess that what's being shipped is DC, and they probably pay a hefty surcharge to get the power shipped in, but that proves that it's possible and not break-the-bank expensive. The reports I read of offshore turbines in Britain (a few years ago) suggested that it was a real problem, though, especially when storms walked through.
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Re: The big problem with large propellers (Score:5, Informative)
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Power is proportional to area swept (Score:5, Informative)
the area swept is proportional to the square of the length of the blades - see the Wind energy formula [byjus.com]
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Re: Power is proportional to area swept (Score:2)
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I think you're assuming that the shape of the blades remains constant, but that can't quite be true. As you scale up you need stronger blades, and you probably don't want to replace them as often either, so that means stronger yet. It's also likely to mean heavier, which will change the way it responds to quick changes in wind velocity and direction.
IIRC, there are good reasons why extremely large wind turbines weren't built in the past, having to do with engineering problems. And that implies that desig
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Area varies quadratically with diameter (Score:5, Funny)
Wait till the hear about increase in the amount of hot air in a sphere for a mere 19% increase in diameter!
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Funny, but to be fair it does not look like the radius equals the blade length. So there is an undefined length from the centre (of the plane over which the blades travel) to the inside edge of the blade. Presumably this is where the blade connects to the rotor. And as one would expect, it only has a minor impact on the numbers (41% vs 45%).
It's called a "hub" (Score:2)
The "blades" are connected at the "hub" and form the so called "rotor".
So you are correct that the rotor diameter is not equal to 2*l_blade.
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a = pi * r^2 is apparently an advanced concept.
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Imagine if you could harvest a constant fraction of the sun's energy in the "swept area" of a rotating strip of solar panels, instead of having t
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I'm not an expert and I suspect the actual situation is pretty complicated when you get into the details; I think the swept area rule is a pretty good approximation rather than a fundamental law.
Decreasing the chord of a wing decreases the lift it generates, but decreasing the aspect ratio (increasing the chord, decreasing the span) also increases drag, so long skinny wings are more efficient. As you increase the span of the blades you either keep the aspect ratio the same, increasing the area, or you incre
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Power scaling proportional to area doesn't mean you get all the power from the swept area, just that, everything else (like blade count) being equal, the power goes up as the square of the radius.
There's a graph I remember but unfortunately can't find, showing the turbine capacity versus number of blades. A single-bladed turbine gives the most power per blade because the single blade sweeps out 360 degrees before it enters it's own wake. From there, adding more blades increases total power, but sub-linearly
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The power of A = PI * r^2 - Pro Tipp: (Score:2)
.. when one of your input value is squared, increasing this variable to achieve higher results from the associated calculation is a very very good point to start optimizing. .. Damn you were faster ;)
80,000 homes over 25 years? (Score:2)
What they really mean is, when it is running at full speed, it can power 80,000 homes. And the structure has an estimated life of 25 years.
Re:80,000 homes over 25 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: 80,000 homes over 25 years? (Score:3)
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when it is running at full speed, it can power 80,000 homes.
80k American homes. Or 200k European homes.
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Really now? Do tell me how that math works for Central US vs Northern Sweden.
It's almost like it's not about "what continent it's on" but "what latitude and climate it's in".
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Math doesn't work in Central US; unless your an immigrant. Americans think a 1/4 burger is a better deal than a 1/3 burger. Not joking!
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How many we need? (Score:4, Interesting)
Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity.
USA energy consumption is 5000 TWh per year. We need 62500 of these to power the country with these windmills alone. And also long term storage to make energy when the wind blows and then dribble it out as the demand arises.
Promising technologies like compressed air energy storage, pumped hydro, hydrogen stored in the form of ammonia etc are on the horizon.
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People said the same thing when the push to get everyone on the grid was made. Think how many pylons (transmission towers) would be needed! So much steel!
Same with the phone network, imagine all the copper and telegraph poles! You would have to cut down several large forests to supply all those.
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We need 62500 of these to power the country with these windmills alone.
And you have 400 million cars on the road. What actually is your problem with numbers?
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Just some numbers:
In 2020 - 122 GW of electrical wind turbine power were already installed in the U.S.A.
and contributed roughly 300 TWh (5,5%)
hydro contributed 273 TWh
solar contributed 107 TWh
bio methane 58 TWh
geo-thermal 16 TWh
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You fogot something (Re:How many we need?) (Score:2)
In the USA nuclear power produced 9% of all energy consumed, not just electricity but all energy, and we effectively stopped adding new nuclear power capacity in 1980.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We closed plants, built some new ones, upgraded some, derated others, but for the most part nuclear power in the USA ran rather steady at about 100 GW of generating capacity and about 90% capacity factor for the last 20 years or so. In spite of so few new power plants built in the last 40 years output increase
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USA energy consumption is 5000 TWh per year. We need 62500 of these to power the country with these windmills alone.
Gosh. That's a surprisingly low number. The US currently has 23,000 electric generators at 10,000 utility-scale power plants https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... [eia.gov], so the numbers for say 30% wind are the same order of magnitude.
The cost per MW of generating capacity is currently about twice that for wind as it is for natural gas https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... [eia.gov], although I assume these mega-turbines will make them closer in cost. Once they're constructed, natural gas and wind will have about the same expected
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62,500 sounds like a scary, big unachievable number until you realize that the US already has 57,000 wind turbines.
In the not too distant future, a significant percentage of Americans will own an 80 kWh battery parked 23 hours a day and capable of storing almost 3 days of their home electrical needs. I'm being conservative here since multi vehicle households are common.
Re:How many we need? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't find a cost for this, but an average price for utility scale wind is about $1.75 million per MW. At that price, this would cost about $28 million, but it might very well be considerably less (economy of scale again). So, $28 million times 62500 would be work out to about $1.75 trillion. Amortized over 25 years, that would be $70 billion per year and works out to about $213.29 per year per person in the US. Man that's cheap!
Of course, you seem to be off on US energy consumption. I think maybe you're only counting electrical power. Total consumption appears to be more like 29,000 TWh. So about 6 times more than you say. So that would be more like $1,280 per person. Unless I've made a mistake somewhere, that's still pretty cheap, even if people had to pay it directly. Since a good portion of it is paid simply as part of the price of products and services, it stays pretty low. Obviously there's storage costs too, but numbers like this make it all seem pretty manageable.
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Oh sure, absolutely. I was really just replying to the GP who seemed to be implying that the number of wind turbines they were suggesting was somehow extreme when it actually seems pretty mild compared to existing energy exploitation infrastructure.
Re: How many we need? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me know when these plants can operate without any government subsidies. At this point it has zero advantages over renewables, especially cost wise.
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Price in externalities and you've got yourself a deal.
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How about we make the power plants pay for the right to spew toxic fumes into our atmosphere, and then we let the market decide.
Don't forget to include the cost of radioactive effluents.
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Already been operating with subsidies for a few years now. In the UK on-shore wind went subsidy free in 2017 IIRC, and offshore wind is not far behind.
Re: How many we need? (Score:4, Informative)
When nuclear power promised power too cheap to meter, it scared the wits out of the coal industry back in 1960s. They saw the phenomenal success of the moon landings and they really believed science is capable of delivering it. They ran an astro turf operation, whipped up fear uncertainty and doubt to raise the regulatory costs astronomically to make it unviable. This was the time tobacco companies regularly funded "research" papers minimizing the dangers of smoking. Standard Oil, Firestone and GM (or Ford) formed secret cartels to buy public bus/tram companies and shut them down. Naive hippies were so easily manipulated.
The incredible levels of corporate thuggery in the 1960s and 70s laid the foundation of long term decline of America. The achievements of America was due to fair competition between corporations and the free market. But capitalism claimed the trophy and cronyism stole it from the conservatives. We are still paying the price.
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You left out short-sighted penny-pinching management.
Most of the fission plants operating today are past their designed service life. It's true the political climate made it hard to replace them, but that's not the only thing.
Also, there isn't yet a plan for what to do with the spent fuel. (Personally I favor melting it into glass bricks sheathing those bricks in something appropriate, and using them as process heat.)
Then there's idiotic plant siting. Fukushima isn't the only example.
But, yeah, if the ind
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I'm no expert on molten salt reactors but my understanding is that the materials are extremely corrosive and the problem hasn't been solved. I'm skeptical that any nuclear power can be cheap and safe. Reprocessing is hideously expensive but is often touted as a solution to some of nuclear's problems.
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Safety = not blowing up and costing half a trillion dollars, not leaking into rivers etc. Building a dangerous nuclear plant is no doubt cheap, building a safe one isn't.
And you have to compare nuclear to coal with external costs to claim it's cheap but solar and wind are then a lot cheaper than both.
The nuclear arguments are circular, nuclear is cheap-ish but if you want to power the world with it then the fuel doesn't last long so nuclear proponents propose reprocessing fuel but that is extremely expensiv
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When nuclear power promised power too cheap to meter, it scared the wits out of the coal industry back in 1960s. They saw the phenomenal success of the moon landings and they really believed science is capable of delivering it. They ran an astro turf operation, whipped up fear uncertainty and doubt to raise the regulatory costs astronomically to make it unviable....
Naive hippies were so easily manipulated.
I don't see how hippies have anything to do with nuclear regulatory conditions. Are you saying hippies ran the astro turf operation or that they drafted the legislation - your comment is difficult to understand.
As I've mentioned here before the Integral Fast Reactor facility included a fuel reprocessing system with a Burner type reactor and was the technology that threatened the Coal and Oil industry. Producing electricity and hydrogen it was set up as an exportable technology to end the arms race as it c
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Nice try, but it was groups like Greenpeace filing lawsuits that drove up the cost.
Citation please. If you have case law to share then send a link to it.
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1.) ". It jas none of the geographic constraints of hydroelectric power"
Double L.O.L.
It basically has the same - for cooling, in France many nuclear power stations are regularly powered down or shut off during summer - when the rivers either dry out, or are so hot that they don't provide enough cooling capacity
2.) Estimate the amount of energy that you can get from the available nuclear fuel, and calculate how long you can sustain a society with this amount of energy - and btw. please also calculate the pi
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or are so hot that they don't provide enough cooling capacity
That is a misconception.
The exhaust water would be to hot and heat up the rivers and kill the fish.
Even 80 degrees C water has enough cooling capacity to cool a nuclear plant.
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IIUC there is plenty of fissionable nuclear fuel, if you don't count the cost of extracting it from the ore. Raise the price and the amount expands dramatically. Raise it just a little bit more and you can extract it from sea water.
And if the Thorium reactors work, even that limit is surpassed.
But the current designs of nuclear fission reactors aren't safe. They don't handle catastrophes very well. And they're overly complex.
(OTOH, your point about cooling is very well taken. I *think* improved designs
Re: How many we need? (Score:2)
Don't forget the add the accident and proliferation risks. Sure maybe a western country can safely run a nuclear reactor and safely deal with mishaps. But for the world to go net zero Haiti also would need a nuclear reactor, at least 1. All the nations of central America. South America. Every country in Africa.
And you are relying on everyone doing a good job handling the waste and maintaining the building and not shoving in a few extra rods to be transmuted into plutonium.
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Look at Palo Verde, it's a nuclear power plant built in a desert and they figured out how to stay cool in a permanent heatwave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The shortage of cooling for French nuclear power plants was an engineering decision made decades ago. They knew that in extreme heat they'd have to lower output or shutdown. I have to wonder if they didn't plan for these times for regular maintenance, "We have to shutdown anyway, why put it up on the lift to change the oil, pump up the tires, top u
Re: How many we need? (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have such a promising technology. It's called nuclear fission. [...] Too bad the greennies who follow the science think it turns potatoes into mutant creatures that sneak into little childrens' heads and feast on their brains.
If "the greennies" had half as much power as you suggest, we'd already have renewable energy coming out of our ears, and we'd have had it decades ago.
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Re: How many we need? (Score:2)
Re: How many we need? (Score:2)
Curious (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how much more material is needed to support those blades? A 19% increase in size would probably require a much stronger support tower. It will be interesting to see how it does once installed.
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It does seem to me installation and maintenance would overpower any scaling-based collection efficiency advantage. If you have just a few big units, what if you need to take 2 down after a big storm or what-not? Smaller ones would spread the risk out more, and be quicker to fix.
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When you take down part of your power generating system you buy from the rest of the grid to make up the difference. It helps to plan these out so that demand doesn't spike due to some pathological case where everybody wants to do their maintenance on the first day of the quarter.
When dealing with weather, you can't make it 100% reliable. Stuff is going to get flooded, winds are going to be too high in a region, or whatever. During an emergency, prioritize power and repairs to those with the most need.
For t
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It's true that smaller ones allow you to spread the risk but they're also less efficient.
Overall, it's actually very similar to most power generation. Smaller plants are better for overall reliability of the grid, because any of them going offline takes less capacity with them. But at the same time, they're less economical to run, resulting in worse economies of scale.
Overall, healthy grids usually consist of both big and small in a careful balance, regardless of generators being nuclear, natural gas, hydro
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Smaller ones simply fly away in a big storm.
Big ones can weather a big storm.
Or do your sky scrapers in the US fly away after each storm?
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You might need to secure the blades during the storm. And tornadoes can be incredibly damaging to even large building. They may not fly away, but this doesn't mean they're usable afterwards.
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That is true. But a typical -big- wind turbine will survive a tornado and not fly away.
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That has been one of the key technological breakthroughs. We're getting a lot better at making those tower structures stronger with novel materials and shaping them correctly to take the loads.
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Hurricane Buffer? (Score:2)
I wonder if these could soak up enough energy out of storms to weaken them in sufficient quantities?
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Probably, but the places that you'd need to site them are largely open ocean. You need to extract the energy from the hurricane before it hits land.
Single point of failure (Score:2)
You still need multiple turbines to have a reliable power.
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Wow, you better tell them. I'm sure they're only planning on 1 big fan to power the whole planet, and that won't work at night or something.
Fighting climate change (Score:2)
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I Wonder ... (Score:2, Funny)
at what point will all these windmills start impeding the rotation of the Earth?
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Actually, I don't think it's that simple. IIUC a lot of the basic wind energy comes from the Coriolis force. Still, conservation of momentum says that the momentum in the system should remain constant. Perhaps it would slow down the rotation of the moon via an interaction with the tides. There are so many layers of indirection here that I can't figure it out, but I can't imagine a noticeable effect within the lifetimes of the human species. (The moon's pretty heavy, and it's at the end of a long lever
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Being a "fictitious force" doesn't mean it describes a real effect, it means the main model describes it differently. And I'm not at all sure that tidal action isn't involved in powering the winds. Yeah, you've got the spinning earth, and this means that rising/sinking air tends to flow in a different path than straight up/down, but the tidal bulge is also involved there. Perhaps it cancels out in the equations, but I'm not sure.
OTOH, it sure couldn't be a very large effect. Air isn't that massive compa
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At None? ...
Wow that was so easy
Apparently, technology finally allows such things. (Score:2)
At the time, Growian was a failure due to insuperable structural load and material problems. On the other hand, Growian had a two blade rotor, which is much more prone to them as even a small aberration from a straight line causes mounting second-order forces.
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However GROWIAN was the key stone for the world wide wind revolution.
Everything but the price? (Score:2)
Wow! Look at all the additional energy the larger size turbine delivers. Energy, per turbine, goes up with size.
But they offer no news of the relative cost, per kilowatt hour, of the larger size?
Hmmm. Maybe the energy cost doesn't go down with the larger size? Maybe "economy of scale" isn't applicable here? (If the cost was lower, I'd expect that to be a near-the-top point in a puff piece like that. The absence of disclosure of relative cost looks telling to me.)
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Basically with such turbines and the mentioned 57% usage
(80 GWh -=> constant power production of 9,1 MW and 0,57 = 9,1/16)
Side note: even for offshore and such a big rotor 57% is a really really good site.
Your cost per kWh will be below 0,045 USD because the 0,045 was reached for an offshore tender in the UK in 2019, and the cost reduction in wind power and especially for offshore wind power over the last 10 yrs. was dramatic in 2013 it was around 0,12,8 â/kWh - 0,142 â/kWh - so basically it h
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I'd be really surprised if the first one had a lower cost/KWh. The second one might. And the third one likely would. The fourth one would only be built if it produced power more cheaply.
You've got huge development costs embedded in the first one. For the second one you have the costs of developing the needed improvements you detected. For the third one you have the costs of developing the desirable improvements you detected. The fourth one should be able to just copy the third.
So tell us ... (Score:2)
But will they win the World Cup?
Arithmetic (Score:2)
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I think you divided that backwards, 800w average per home.
That's just enough to power my 1500ft^2 townhouse (monthly average draw). But definitely not a more typical American single family home.
11 acres (Score:2)
For those of us who have no idea how big a soccer field is (i.e., Americans), that sweep is 11.3 acres. Which is fucking crazy.
Additional concern (Score:2)
20000 homes on 16MW hmm (Score:2)
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800W times 24 hours a day times 30 days a month = 576kWh per month.
The average US home is 877kWh, so yes, it is a low estimate for the US. For everywhere ELSE in the world, it's not a bad benchmark.
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Yes, but less than fossil fuel plants.
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The same way it was set up, you have a vessel with a crane (and a crew) and some really big power wrenches (hydraulic)
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