Wind Turbine As Tall As a 70-Story Building Announced In China (newatlas.com) 17
Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. New Atlas reports: [T]he new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents."
Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against. So both MingYang and CSSC sell these mammoth mega-turbines primarily as cost-cutting measures that'll help bring down the capital cost of wind farm setup, and eventually the cost of the energy they produce. "Compared to the installation of 13MW models," reads a statement by MingYang on LinkedIn, "the higher output of the MySE18.X-28X would save 18 units required for a 1GW wind farm, shaving off construction costs by 120,000 - 150,000 USD/MW." New Atlas calculated this to "represent a CAPEX saving of $120-150 million on a gigawatt-scale project."
"For reference, the 1.2-GW Hornsea One Project, built using 7-MW turbines, is estimated to have cost "at least $5.153 billion, so while $150 million can't be considered chump change, it might represent a couple of percent on a project this big."
Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against. So both MingYang and CSSC sell these mammoth mega-turbines primarily as cost-cutting measures that'll help bring down the capital cost of wind farm setup, and eventually the cost of the energy they produce. "Compared to the installation of 13MW models," reads a statement by MingYang on LinkedIn, "the higher output of the MySE18.X-28X would save 18 units required for a 1GW wind farm, shaving off construction costs by 120,000 - 150,000 USD/MW." New Atlas calculated this to "represent a CAPEX saving of $120-150 million on a gigawatt-scale project."
"For reference, the 1.2-GW Hornsea One Project, built using 7-MW turbines, is estimated to have cost "at least $5.153 billion, so while $150 million can't be considered chump change, it might represent a couple of percent on a project this big."
Another one !?! (Score:4, Insightful)
They're springing up twice a day now.
Editors, EDIT !
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they're joining the CNET model and just automating story selection and posting. Some of the "editors" do it more frequently than others.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wish there was a way to downmod the editors. -1 Dupe.
Re: (Score:2)
They're springing up twice a day now.
Well how else do you think we're going to transition to renewables??
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe we can keep our houses warm this winter by filling or furnaces with any(*) incompetent Slushdit Oditurs.
Again? (Score:2)
Wut? (Score:1)
Using our advanced math skills
Re: (Score:1)
Wow that's cringy
He got a ton of publicity and she said yes and buddy got laid in 2002 when computers were uncool which makes him cooler than like 75% of Slashdot posters.
Wow! (Score:2)
The Chinese are really breaking new records with announcing things
SlashGPT (Score:2)
Like the blades of a windmill keep returning, so do the stories on slashdot.
The bigger they are... (Score:2)
the harder they fall. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify.
We had such a project in Germany (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It was a giant leap in building wind turbines... which obviously didn't work as you need to scale up such things in smaller steps.
People claimed that it was made to show that wind energy couldn't be harnessed.
Now we actually have wind turbines of that size.
Trump warned us of this! (Score:2)