3 ms·

Catastrophic energy release doesn't care if you're a spring, a flywheel, a lithium battery, or a chemical bomb - in fact all those things start to look pretty s

• seanp2k2 11y ago
  But you must admit that an 80m (~262ft or ~24 stories) wind turbine blasting off like a giant pogo stick into the sky is by far the most comical. Maybe gravitational doesn't make sense, but compressed air might. Big compressor directly driven by the turbine (so as not to waste energy converting to electricity to turn an electric compressor motor) being used to compress normal air into large tanks inside the wind turbine tower which can later be used to spin another turbine-based generator using the same air. Not a physics major, but this seems feasible. Not sure of the potential energy storage, but I feel like the direct conversion of rotational energy to spin the pump has to be much more efficient than converting it to electricity first, then using that [many miles away] to compress air or drive a train up a mountain.
  • WiseWeasel 11y ago
    Bonus points if you can spin the wind turbine with the discharge of the compressed air, on the lag edge of the propellers.
  • usrusr 11y ago
    Dispatchable wind via compressed air storage seems to be quite a thing in the scientific community. Unfortunately, big subsidy schemes like the german one fail to acknowledge the importance of dispatchability, so they utterly disincentivize any development in that direction.