43 ms·
How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
- shaqbert 8y agoAs the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing. E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so much renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind and solar you can handle. [0]: https://blog.energybrainpool.com/bereits-103-mal-in-2017-negative-preise-am-stromspotmarkt/ https://blog.energybrainpool.com/bereits-103-mal-in-2017-neg...
- NullPrefix 8y agoThis sounds like an opportunity for collaboration between crypto miners and the wind people.
- mhb 8y agoAnd maybe it can be mediated by fungible electricity transmitted over a grid of conductive wires. Or an electricity market.
- NullPrefix 8y agoWhat I've meant was mining on the wind mills themselves. So there would be no need of passing through the grid.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoI heard that crypto mining hardware has to have decent-ish (80-90%) uptime to be profitable. That would make it infeasible to have it on standby waiting for excess energy on the grid.
- ccozan 8y agoAfter the windmill is paid off, the mining is then practically ( some maintenance will be needed ) for free.
- NullPrefix 8y agoIsn't the number 80-90% based on electricity price?
- emiliobumachar 8y agoI'm afraid I have no idea. I vaguely remember reading about it, do not remember where.
- imtringued 8y agoElectricity prices matter but lower prices give diminishing returns. Going from $0.20 per kWh $0.05 to per kWh only increases profits by 50% http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=27.9&p=115.0&fee=0.0&cost=0.05&hcost=300.0&commit=Calculate http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr... vs http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=27.9&p=115.0&fee=0.0&cost=0.05&hcost=300.0&commit=Calculate http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr... and going from 0.05 to -0.05 only increases it by 20% http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=27.9&p=115.0&fee=0.0&cost=-0.05&hcost=300.0&commit=Calculate http://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr... By the way, these mining calculators are very "optimistic" but for relative comparisons they are sufficient. In practice you will get significantly less because of increasing difficulty and hidden costs like motherboards, CPUs, etc.
- mhb 8y agoI know. And there's really no difference between colocating mining hardware on wind turbines and just mining using the lower cost electricity which will be on the grid thanks to the turbines. Except the inconvenience of the colocating.
- rplnt 8y agoAs for storage, shouldn't there be plenty of hydroelectric dams that could run "backwards"? Or is there an interconnection issue you mention?
- cesarb 8y agoFor a hydroelectric dam to be able to "run backwards", it needs a lower reservoir. Many dams have only an upper reservoir.
- mrfusion 8y agoSimply turning them off would be running backwards since water would build up behind them.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoIt’s not about building up capacity alone: you want to take power off the grid at negative energy price times.
- vidarh 8y agoYou are taking power off the grid: The power otherwise produced by the hydro plant. Of course with a lower reservoir, you can go into negative territory instead of "just" taking the plant down to 0.
- jimktrains2 8y agoNo, you need to consume what other methods, e.g. wind, are producing when there isn't the demand to use it.
- vidarh 8y agoThere is always demand. The issue is that sometimes demand exceeds supply. Taking away supply has the same net effect as increasing demand. EDIT: with the one caveat of transmission capacity, which certainly can be an issue.
- kylegordon 8y agoIsn't this where pumped storage and other forms of storage come into play? Here in Scotland we routinely pump water back up into our lochs in order to store it for future use. There's also various news articles reporting on German mines beginning to be used as pumped storage sites, with a reservoir on the surface, and water dropping into the mines below when there's sudden demand. This is a good problem to have, though.
- maxerickson 8y agoA lot of the best sites for pumped storage are already developed as pumped storage. It's kind of the opposite of other storage technologies. As sites get developed the economics of future sites get worse.
- nmeofthestate 8y agoAccording to Wikipedia we have 15 GWh of pumped storage capacity in Scotland. Per annum we use 27,000 GWh. So by my calculations we have a pumped storage battery that lasts about 5 hours. (NB: I didn't check whether the power output of this battery is enough to actually meet demand, but wikipedia says it can run at full capacity for 22 hours, so no)
- mattmanser 8y agoIt can be reused more than once a year. You could use it every day, charge at night when there's no demand, discharge it during the peak. Really depends on how fast it can charge and discharge.
- bluGill 8y agoDepends more on how variable your supply is. If you have to meet a two week window with below average wind it isn't enough. If you have to just meet day to day variation in wind it is probably enough. Unfortunately two weeks without much wind are common in general weather patterns. Thus my gut reaction is it isn't enough. However we are now talking weather where local patterns are the important thing which means each situation needs to be considered separately.
- Brakenshire 8y agoAs turbines get larger, not only do the costs go down, but the reliability of supply goes up. It becomes more economical to place them out at sea, where winds are more reliable, and the size allows them to run more effectively off low speed winds. These turbines are claiming 60%+ capacity factor, compared to 20-30% for smaller, onshore turbines. The UK is already up to about 15% of its electricity from wind right now, these developments will open that up significantly more. Obviously at high levels of penetration there are going to be issues, we'll just have to see how far we can go, but even 25-40% of electricity would be a huge contribution. Combine that with the new and existing nuclear, another 15%, some biomass and tidal lagoons, with the rest from gas (which produces half as much CO2 as coal) and it will go a long way towards meeting the UK's 80% CO2 reduction target from 1990 to 2050.
- vidarh 8y agoGermany has at least one example of an aluminium producer testing dialing the power use of their melter up/down by 25% in response to input from the grid [1]: > Trimet says that implementing its technology across Germany’s four aluminum smelters, three of which it owns, could provide a demand response capacity equal to a third of Germany’s 40 gigawatt-hours of pumped hydro storage. There was a lot of confusion about this one when it was published, but as the article points out, they're not using their molten aluminium pools as a liquid battery - they're merely dynamically adjusting the electricity usage of their hydrolysis cells, which also requires some other adjustments to keep the process going, but it's still a lot of power and more responsive than what they do today (which involves taking the smelters entirely offline for short periods). It helps that their test plant is near Hamburg in the North, "close" to most of Germany's wind turbine capacity which helps alleviate transmission/interconnection problems to the South. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-turns-aluminum-smelter-into-huge-battery#gs.aOAMAos https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur...
- ZeroGravitas 8y agoCan you explain why you think these negative prices are a bad thing? I think they're an efficient use of market based tools to ensure that the group who can reduce the input to the grid does so, and to incentivize electricity production that can meet the flexible demands of the grid (e.g. slow ramping coal would be penalised over fast ramping gas without any regulation needing to specifically target the coal and the coal plant can do anything it wants to improve this, e.g. fit batteries, since no technology is mandated.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNegative price signals that cause solar or wind production curtailment is essentially throwing clean energy away. Negative prices are a helpful market signal, but must be combined with battery storage requirements.
- ZeroGravitas 8y agoNegative price signals encourage people to use that excess energy as they are paid to do so at exactly the times that solar or wind are overproducing. They are the solution to that problem, not part of the problem. As for batteries, there needs to be an economic incentive for people to invest in deploying batteries (or any other type of storage). Negative prices are that incentive. Negative prices don't need batteries, batteries need negative pricing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- graycat 8y agoIMHO: (1) Cheap, large scale storage of electric energy might be a big game changer. (2) Without such storage, basically a country has to notice what their peak load is and assume that they have installed capacity that is reliable, e.g., independent of the weather, and meets this peak load. (3) So, net, intermittent sources such as wind and solar don't much lower the capital expense needed. That is, the country still needs the same capacity to meet peak loads without the intermittent sources. So for this capacity they can use nuclear fission, coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, geo-thermal, and that's about it. So, net, when power from intermittent sources is available, then get to save on the fuel cost of fission, coal, oil, and natural gas and accumulate some water behind hydro. So, e.g., a big fission or coal plant is still there, still with its capital expense and operating expense but is running at reduced power and, thus, saving on direct fuel costs. At that point, I'm wondering if, really, just for the money part, if the intermittent sources are wanted on the grid even for free. There is an issue about the intermittent sources: They are not very predictable and, thus, can cause some grid stability problems. E.g., IIRC, can't just change the power level of a fission or coal plant minute by minute to match the minute by minute fluctuation in the intermittent sources; so, can get some grid instability, and that is bad stuff for the whole grid and country.
- bluGill 8y agoWorse, the big power plants get much less fuel efficient at lower loads. In some cases you will actually burn more fuel at 50% than 80%!
- EADGBE 8y ago> frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days This is one reason why I'm skeptical for home production of solar and wind for the ability to "feed back" into the grid while getting a credit on your account. If the power company is also doing this, at scale, I find it really hard to believe that there's no reason the power company won't discredit/discount my rates being returned to the grid. In which case, I'd rather have a battery installation and not rely on the power company at all. Most service reps for solar disagree with me. Maybe because battery storage isn't super common/in their inventory?
- maxerickson 8y agoIt's more that batteries are expensive. Especially in places where there is a law saying that the power company has to pay a nice rate for power fed back to the grid.
- EADGBE 8y agoUnderstandable, the legislation isn't brought up (but maybe this concern isn't, either) that often. It could certain be a non-issue. Though I rarely experience power outages, knowing almost all instances would be non-existent is really nice (for a battery backup program), especially as more and more heating solutions are using electricity as the main component (heat pumps; winter power failures are most of the power failures for me).
- lscharen 8y agoI think is a totally reasonable point of view and comes down to a classic cost-benefit analysis. Are you OK with using the grid as a highly-reliable, ~infinite capacity power source to smooth over your uneven solar generation at a cost of selling your excess back at a discounted rate, or do you want to try and capture that discount yourself at the cost of having to buy, install and maintain your own integrated battery backup system? Maybe the calculus works out in your favor for you, specifically. Maybe not. But it's good to have options.
- _ph_ 8y agoIt is important to note, that here in Germany, wind and solar does not quite reach 100% of our energy consumption yet - I think it has done so only once on a public holiday. The more frequent overproduction comes from high wind/solar output combined with the output of power plants which can't be shout down quickly enough, that is coal/nuclear. If those would be replaced by gas plants with faster reaction times, a much higher amount of reneweable energy could be used without requiring storage. But indeed, as the amount of renewal energy production increases, more storage is needed. Perhaps less so for wind which has a more smooth output over days, but for solar, which has a strong peak over noon and of course shuts down alltogether in the evening. Distributing the solar curve over more time of the day would be very useful.
- Reason077 8y agoCoal power plants can ramp up and down pretty quickly in response to demand. Not quite as quickly as gas, but generally quick enough to respond to changes in renewables supply when operated as "spinning reserve". Nuclear plants, of course, can not.
- jhayward 8y agoThere are plenty of coal plants that absolutely can not ramp up and down in less than many hours, and will lose money as they do so. There are also many nuclear plants perfectly capable of "load following", responding in the time frame of minutes to 10's of minutes to load changes.
- Reason077 8y agoMy understanding is that while load following is possible in nuclear plants, there are significant design, efficiency, and cost compromises involved. For these reasons, load-following nuclear is fairly rare. In the UK, all of our nuclear power plants operate at their design capacity all the time. Their output only changes during scheduled periods when they are shut down for maintenance, refuelling, etc. In contrast, all of the remaining coal-fired power plants in the UK effectively operate as load-following reserve. They ramp up only on cold winter days when demand is high and when wind generation is low. There are now many "coal free" days in the warmer months where there is no coal-fired power generation in the UK at all (it looks like today will be one of them!)
- Pxtl 8y agoI think the dream is just to make wind power so ludicrously plentiful that the fact that it's kind of mediocre during daytime is overwhelmed by sheer quantity of generators.
- indescions_2018 8y agoRelated story on Bloomberg this morning: How to Buy a Wind Farm https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/the-puerto-rico-family-office-that-bought-a-wind-farm https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/the-puert...
- macmac 8y agoWind turbines, they are not milling anything. One would have hoped that a paper like NYT would something as basic as that right.
- na85 8y agoReferring to HAWTs by the name "windmill" is part of the common vernacular in North America
- amarant 8y agoagreed! my first thought was someone had rigged electric generators in the old actual windmills of the Netherlands. My second thought was, last I checked, they're not remotely as big as jumbo's....
- OscarCunningham 8y agoThey're milling electricity.
- Brakenshire 8y agoMilling electromagnetic fields, and producing electricity.
- coryfklein 8y agoOh god what have you guys done to my native tongue.
- shawabawa3 8y agoWindmill is a defacto synonym for wind turbines in most english speaking countries
- whamlastxmas 8y agoIn the same way irregardless is a synonym for regardless, yeah I guess so.
- mack1001 8y agoI think storage should be decentralized with towns/cities working to store locally and forward as required.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cesarb 8y ago> Lower costs, though, have also made wind power more appealing elsewhere. Once mostly concentrated in northern Europe, Mr. Nauen is optimistic that new markets will emerge in Asia and the United States. South America too. In just the last 12 months, installed capacity in Brazil went from 10.4 GW to 12.5 GW (source: Boletim Mensal de Geração Eólica - ONS).
- adventured 8y agoWhat kind of cost per kwh is Brazil seeing? When the US finally got consistently below ~$0.10 in the late 1990s, it began to ramp. https://i.imgur.com/ehK8jQS.png https://i.imgur.com/ehK8jQS.png
- cesarb 8y agoAccording to http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2017/12/1944853-energia-eolica-e-solar-atingem-patamar-mais-baixo-de-precos-no-brasil.shtml http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2017/12/1944853-energia... in the auctions at the end of 2017 (for new generators to be built) it was around R$ 145/MWh for solar and R$ 98/MWh for wind. I don't know where to find the cost for all currently operating generators.
- nabla9 8y agoThe interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy. The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down. The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year after year. http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCP2017/PNG/s09_FossilFuel_and_Cement_emissions_1990.png http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCP2017/PNG/s09_FossilFuel_an... Economic downturn was the only thing causing temporary decline. It looks like clean energy reduces the demand in developed countries, thus reducing the prices of hydrocarbons. It will not reduce the CO2 emissions globally, it just moves them from the developed world to the developing world. Maybe it slows down CO2 emission growth rate? http://folk.uio.no/roberan/learnmore/more_warning_signs.shtml http://folk.uio.no/roberan/learnmore/more_warning_signs.shtm... --- EDIT: Just to point out how complex the dynamics between clean energy, hydrocarbons and policy are, here is nice recent research paper from Acemoglu and Rafey: Mirage on the Horizon: Geoengineering and Carbon Taxation Without Commitment https://economics.mit.edu/files/14855 https://economics.mit.edu/files/14855 >Abstract: We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and may decide to switch to cleaner technology. A benevolent social planner sets carbon taxes without commitment. Higher future carbon taxes both reduce emissions given technology and encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner technology. Geoengineering advances, which reduce the negative environmental effects of the existing stock of carbon, decrease future carbon taxes and thus discourage private investments in conventional clean technology. We characterize the conditions under which these advances diminish—rather than improve—environmental quality and welfare.
- Scarblac 8y agoThis is why the only way to deal with climate change is countries with carbon reserves deciding to leave it in the ground. If they don't, there is so much demand for the stuff (burning it is so incredibly useful) that it'll all be burned.
- ThomPete 8y agoProblem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese seems to have realized that.
- swebs 8y agoYou know Europe is developing a fusion reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
- ThomPete 8y agoSure but good luck getting a country to install it in this current political climate. The US is even worse of when it comes to getting Nuclear back in vouge.
- strictnein 8y agoCountries have been "developing" fusion power for decades. It'll arrive shortly after quantum powered personal computers.
- kuschku 8y agoGood that you put "developing" into air quotes. If I pay one single developer for 50 years to build me all technology Google has, I still won’t get anywhere. If you want to actually develop nuclear, you need to increase investment. By a factor of ten or more.
- Brakenshire 8y agoThe biggest rollout of these turbines is in the UK, which is in the middle of commissioning and building new nuclear. Also, the latest turbine installations are being built without subsidy. And, the capacity factor has gone way up.
- eddieschod 8y agoDoes anyone have a datasheet so we can calculate the Energy ROI?
- alphydan 8y agoHere you go: https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/about/sustainability/pdfs/lcav11020mw181215.pdf https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/about/sustainability/p... Money-shot on p66. About 8 months for EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested). I worked on some of these Life Cycle Analyses and can attest that they were quite rigorous.
- baud147258 8y agoI wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where half of them are not turning.
- Tade0 8y agoThe carbon footprint of all these items is still miniscule comparing to the amount of clean energy generated over a turbine's lifetime. Overall wind trubines have a gross carbon footprint of 14g/kWh. That's even slightly less than nuclear (15g/kWh).
- ocschwar 8y ago> I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack Depending on the source of thermal power, the amount consumed on standby can go to 0. If you have a decent transmission grid, the amount of standby power you need goes down. And if you have hydro, your emissions go down to 0. > the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. One time expenses, which apply to other power sources too. As opposed to fuel, which is 0 in the case of wind. Batteries, by the way, are not needed at all for a wind farm. > And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where half of them are not turning. You'll usually see that when the wind is strong but demand for electricity is weak, so the farm operators use the time to do maintenance.
- baud147258 8y agoThe problem with wind farm is that they are often built in area with little or no human presence, which is whey I consider this a problem, especially since the grid would be further away.
- 8y ago
- baybal2 8y agoThe future of mankind lies with nuclear power. I'm distressed by it not receiving as much attention as windmills.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justatdotin 8y agoclean, safe, and too cheap to meter, amirite? three words, last one's shima. oh, look at the time, it's 2018 already..
- Pxtl 8y agoThe cost of nuclear power seems to go up while every other zero-emissions energy source goes down. Even ignoring the fears about accidents and waste, it seems like nuclear may end up a transitional source.
- cschmidt 8y agoI happened to be driving through Indiana this week and saw the biggest wind farm I'd ever seen. It just went on for ages as we drove. I think it is this 600MW farm: http://meadowlakewindfarm.com/ http://meadowlakewindfarm.com/
- adventured 8y agoI was pretty amazed to recently read that Iowa is getting ~35-40% of its electricity from wind energy. They're up over 7,000 MW of capacity (4,000 turbines) now for just three million people. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Iowa may have among the highest wind energy capacity per capita on earth, at 2.2 MW per thousand people. Denmark, which is perhaps the highest for a nation, is at half that rate (5,476 MW capacity for 5.7m people).
- w_t_payne 8y agoAutonomous utility boats will have a significant role to play in monitoring and supplying the offshore wind industry. https://www.asvglobal.com/ https://www.asvglobal.com/ These little boats can continuously monitor the foundations of offshore wind turbines for scour, and their larger brethren can quickly deliver supplies in a wide range of weather conditions -- without putting human engineers at risk.
- DanCarvajal 8y agoAlso killing birds and bats though....
- cavanasm 8y agoMy dad worked as a general counsel for a power company for a long time, and he told me they basically had a budget for how much they'd pay in violations of the Endangered Species Act related to bird deaths around their wind turbines.
- IAmEveryone 8y agoYou dad (or, more likely: you) is full of shit. Penalties don’t work like a tax on misbehavior. If you are constantly being fined, you would face the loss of your license to operate.
- cavanasm 8y agohttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/duke-energy-bird-fine_n_4326596.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/duke-energy-bird-f... There was foreknowledge on the company's side that it would be an issue, but not expedience in trying to resolve it (hence the notion of it being budgeted as a potential expense). It still took years for anything to happen over the issue. My dad wasn't directly involved in this case (they have many many lawyers), but it was something he was aware of enough to mention at the dinner table, especially after it started getting press coverage. Sort of an "Ugh, the company is in trouble again, why can't they just do the right thing" type of gripe.
- dredmorbius 8y agoAn issue that seems very suspiciously motivated and decontextualised. One such source I've seen comes from "ABC": First: ABC take funding from an oil company, Conoco-Philips. That's not an indictment of itself, but it does smell funny. They're also touted by the Heritage Institute, a notorious right-wingnut / Libertarian disinformation mill. Source: SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Bird_Conservancy http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Bird_Conservan... ABC claims that as of 2012 there are 573,000 birds killed from U.S. wind power installations. That compares against: * 100-120 million birds killed by hunters. * 174-175 million birds killed by transmission lines. * 365-988 million birds killed by buildings and windows * 0.2 - 3.7 billion (with a 'b') birds killed by domestic and feral cats. This seems exceedingly agenda-driven. Earlier: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/298s4kv2Ud2 https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/298s4kv2...
- torpfactory 8y agoThe future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)
- konceptz 8y agoI’ve always been told that transmission of electricity is hard or inefficient. What is HVDC and why is it better?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNat Geo article that explains it. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/12/121206-high-voltage-dc-breakthrough/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/12/1212...
- konceptz 8y agoThanks to both of you for the details.
- Robotbeat 8y agoHigh voltage DC. High voltage means it’s more efficient (power dissipation depends on current, not voltage, so for the same power, higher voltage means much less dissipation). DC (direct current instead of alternating) makes it easier to connect disparate grids as you don’t have to worry about phasing.
- everyone 8y agoI like this article. I like that is has nice big pictures and videos, but they dont do that stupid big 'screenspace' image thing that seems to be popular in these sorts of articles now. Also their control centre looks horrible. Wheres all the crap on their desks? I hope they only just had to tidy it away for the sake of a press photo.
- dmd 8y agoThe guy on the left appears hard at work looking at an empty Windows desktop.
- loco5niner 8y agoWell... at least on one of his 3 screens.
- roncohen 8y agoAs an aside, one of them burned last year: http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/08/new-vestas-turbine-destroyed-by-fire.html http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/08/new-vest... By the way, you can walk right up to them. They are very impressive up close.
- jacquesm 8y agoThat's a 9.5MW unit that burned up. I don't like Vestas, they still use a gearbox which is a huge amount of extra complexity.
- Gravityloss 8y agoThe title is wrong. One blade is the length of the wingspan of the A380, 80 meters. The rotor diameter is 154 meters.
- reacharavindh 8y agoI live here in Jutland, and it is indeed heartening to see those giant wind mills spread out across the fields. Surprisingly so many can be found inland. I wish they focus as much on micro grids as much on energy generation.
- coryfklein 8y agoThe engaging cinematography on this article really drew me in. Somebody could write an article about brick laying and if it had the same Nutella-smooth video I would read the entire thing.
- dschuetz 8y agoI'm sorry, stupid question, but exacly how much power do those big ones generate? 20 times more than what? This actually most crucial tidbit isn't even covered in that article, or am I blind?
- boxcardavin 8y agoThe biggest ones produce over 5 megawatts at peak capacity, I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure. 5 megawatts is a pretty useless figure for most people to imagine, and I think imagining it in units of homes-powered isn't great either because we don't have a sense of the heat or kinetic energy equivalent because our homes are quiet machines. A 260 horsepower car (think new minivan) at full throttle is producing about .2 megawatts, so the worlds largest turbines are generating the same power as 10/.2=20 minivans at full power. Another way to think of it is in terms of heat. A big stovetop burner will generate about 3000 watts of heat, so a minivan is like 65 burners at full blast, and a 10 megawatt turbine is like 3300 burners.
- lyk 8y ago50 minivans!
- gascan 8y agoBut perhaps the most useful might be power-plant-equivalents. The Stockton Cogeneration Facility near San Fran had a nominal output of 60MW. Thus, around twelve of these mega-windmills would roughly equal the output of that coal plant.
- hackerman12345 8y agoA large size nuke plant does about 1300 MW nominally (it is initially about 3000 MW thermally but only 35% or so is successfully converted to power for the grid).
- dschuetz 8y agoSo, basically a single big offshore turbine 5-10MW can power a single electrical locomotive with power ranges 5000-10000 kW continuously. That's rather impressive considering how insanely powerful locomotives are.
- coryfklein 8y agoSelling solar back to the grid has one major problem that, fortunately, doesn't plague windmill installations: The Duck Curve [1]. The problem is that peak energy usage now occurs after sunset. So no matter how many solar panels you stack on your home, around 6-7 PM the coal, oil, and gas power plants all have to spin up to their max capacity. Your solar panels are new less likely to _replace_ a coal power plant, although they do change how many hours a day it runs. Unfortunately for the power companies, running a coal power plant for 3 hours a day costs just about as much as running it for 8 hours a day. This leads to the power companies naturally feeling rather sour about being forced to credit residents for the power they supply to the grid during low-demand hours. Their costs are staying about the same, but now their revenue stream goes down. In some regions (Utah/Idaho/Colorado is the one I'm aware of) these power companies are now negotiating with governments for lower and lower solar credits for these kinds of residents and they're winning because the abundance of solar power at mid-day is legitimately creating an oversupply, thus making that energy worth less and less. I see this causing problems for many of my neighbors, who had solar sales reps factoring in energy buy-back rates from 2016 into 10-year loans models to pay for the solar panels. Soon the energy the power companies pay my neighbors is going to offset their panel loans less and less, which may result in a reversal of the economics that led to them buying the panels in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
- vosper 8y agoThere was a very interesting article about hydrogen fuel cell cars posted on HN the other day, one of the things they mention is that excess energy could readily be diverted to hydrogen manufacture. http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-next-big-thing-again http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...
- fulafel 8y agoWhen power gets more expensive in the evenings, a lot of heating/cooling/charging loads may shift in time. Also, hvdc grids let you transmit over a couple of timezones. (And wind does not have the problem the first place, obviously)
- dmix 8y agoAnyone familiar with these "bladeless" wind turbines as an alternative to large blades? http://www.vortexbladeless.com/ http://www.vortexbladeless.com/ Based on their marketing (far quieter, 40% more energy) it seems like an interesting option. I know one of the biggest complaints that farmers have is the noise they cause, so they have to be placed far from houses. I'm curious to see if it's mostly fluff or has any potential... but I'm not expert on the subject.
- andbberger 8y agoFluff... dominant factor in potential energy production is area swept out...
- jcun4128 8y agoWow glad I have great internet the footage was great/visual is more direct. Those turbines appeared to have an upward inclination, curious why that is. Also interesting that the trailing edge near the hub isn't as sharp as the tips probably due to slowest rotation. Good stuff, those things are seriously massive. I also like that giant wall monitor with all the 'stats'?
- DoctorOetker 8y agoregarding superfluous wind energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency