4 ms·
I work in the wind industry. Dont see any chance of this becoming commercially accepted
by ishtanbul 5y ago
I work in the wind industry. Dont see any chance of this becoming commercially accepted
- jcun4128 5y agoyeah arm chair comment, too many parts (strings), Makani couldn't do it
- lanamo 5y agoa bird killer.
- wmertens 5y agoMakani needed expensive equipment and locations, and worked very differently.
- jcun4128 5y agoI wonder if you were to design a conventional turbine that was made out of a telescoping rod. The blades were CF with fabric like an old wind mill, and then gearbox/motor/charging circuit... say it was only 10 ft tall, compare it to this (power). 1.5KW is nice but guaranteed 30mph constant wind?
- _p8hc 5y agoWhy, out of curiosity?
- Uberphallus 5y agoNot parent, but aside from the novelty factor: For small scale energy production small VAWTs [0] are relatively cheap, they offer more W/m2, and they are much more easily serviceable and installable. For large scale production it's orders of magnitude less efficient, plus having multiple kites on the same plane brings in the wake effect [1] in full force. That's why regular turbines are generally laid in lines rather than wide surfaces, or with significant separation between them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine [1] https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/wake-effect.html https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/wake-effect.html
- fragmede 5y agoOkay, but why is everything wind-related so impossibly big? What's the physics behind needing blades so big that they can't fit into a cargo container? Instead of several very large turbines, why not 1000 or 10,000 of them?
- wmertens 5y agoPower goes up exponentially with size. To get good RoI, you need to go huge.
- divbzero 5y agoPower is roughly proportional to the wind turbine’s cross sectional area. So power scales by the square of blade length but isn’t quite exponential.
- Grustaf 5y agoYes, it's not exponential at all. Larger blades also need to be thicker, and the tower stronger etc. But still, it's economies of scale like everywhere else.
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoIt's more than square, because bigger also means taller which means more wind.
- flavius29663 5y agoIt's more than squared, it's cubed. If you consider height advantages, it's going to produce 22 times more energy for each doubling of the blade length. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/parise1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/parise1/
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoAnd not only is there more output, it's more valuable per unit. Higher winds are much more stable. Both in having less completely still days, and having the median be much closer to the maximum. A wind turbine that is built big enough starts having a large part of it outbut be effectively baseload instead of intermittent, and as more renewables are built out, baseload capacity is increasingly more valuable than intermittent.
- rhn_mk1 5y agoThat's a lazy comment. Please explain when you have something substantial to say, instead of just baiting.
- Grustaf 5y agoI don't think that is his intention.