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This only impacts wind farms when they are arranged such that the wind front passes over multiple turbines. Often, wind turbines are arranged in a line across
by koheripbal 4y ago
This only impacts wind farms when they are arranged such that the wind front passes over multiple turbines.
Often, wind turbines are arranged in a line across the usual wind front, so turbulence isn't typically an issue.
So, in this case, when wind passes over multiple nearby turbines serially, then there is a 1.2% gain on efficiency.
Still a worthwhile deployment if the model is accurate. Needs to be tested.
- rocqua 4y agoThe 1.2٪ figure was a month long average from a real-world test. In certain conditions they got 32% higher efficiency. Presumably those are the conditions when the wind is blowing sub-optimally. Unrelatedly, from personal experience both onshore and offshore windfarms seem to be packed much tighter than in a line.
- briffle 4y agocompletely anecdotally, I have noticed in the midwest, its very common to have a large grid of windmills. But out west, some (not all) of them are placed along ridgetops in a wide line, with none behind each other.
- dylan604 4y agoWhy go anecdotally? Here's photographic evidence: https://www.google.com/maps/search/wind+farm/@32.3343137,-100.4444907,16289m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/search/wind+farm/@32.3343137,-10...
- koheripbal 4y agoThese rows are spaced far enough apart that I don't think the OP research would help as much. Even where they are clustered, they are at different elevations.
- dylan604 4y agoThat was the point of the prior comment about seeing them strung out vs clustered. Obviously, location location location. West Texas wide open spaces means you can spread them out so they are not ideal candidates. I was just saying that rather than saying something anecdotally, you can make the claim with supporting evidence.
- hinkley 4y agoMost importantly, anything that increases the minimum power production from a wind farm (on “bad days”) reduces the need for base load power. You can only store so much power for interday variations. Everything beyond that takes fossil fuels.
- koheripbal 4y agoI think the minimum remains at 0 - the no-wind today condition.
- im3w1l 4y agoThis made me try to imagine solutions to the no-wind condition, whether there is any control strategy that can work for it. And I laughed at the idea of one wind mill blowing at another to get a net gain of energy. But then I thought, is that really such an absurdity..? What if.. what if you can expend energy to "suck in" a nearby storm for instance? I don't know how viable it would be, but at least it doesn't seem to obviously break physical laws.
- hinkley 4y agoStored hydro is basically this. I’d like to see stored hydro that was a little more environmentally friendly. Perhaps a series of floodgates where one area is mostly dry and another mostly wet, rather than everything being intermittently wet all year.
- sgc 4y agoI get it. You want to store energy in man-made tornadoes, then discharge them slowly when wind calms down. So the optimal layout is circular. By adjusting the turbine, they can either feed into or pull out of the cyclone. Genius!
- HPsquared 4y agoI think it's more like cloud seeding, trying to redirect a weather event (which is happening anyway) to a more fortuitous location.
- fastest963 4y agoWhat about when the wind is tangent to installation line and blowing across them. Wouldn't they all rotate to face the wind and now be in front of one another?
- Bilal_io 4y agoI think placing them in a grid format, where each grid node gets a turbine. That way you'd have them aligned when the wind blows E<->W, S<->N, but also SW<->NE and SE<->NW even if they're x√2 away from each other in that case
- PeterisP 4y agoThe majority places have a strong directionality of wind due to the terrain, it's quite plausible that this place this happens very, very rarely (and the planners of that wind farm definitely took that into account). E.g. the first random example of a wind rose plot I googled - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wind-rose-plots-of-all-NPF-days-a-and-non-NPF-days-b-and-wind-speed-and-wind_fig3_323201207 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wind-rose-plots-of-all-N... - is quite typical, where winds almost all times go one way or the opposite way, and very rarely in the perpendicular direction.
- photochemsyn 4y agoLooks like they did some pretty comprehensive testing: > "In a months-long experiment in a real utility-scale wind farm in India, the predictive model was first validated by testing a wide range of yaw orientation strategies, most of which were intentionally suboptimal. By testing many control strategies, including suboptimal ones, in both the real farm and the model, the researchers could identify the true optimal strategy. Importantly, the model was able to predict the farm power production and the optimal control strategy for most wind conditions tested, giving confidence that the predictions of the model would track the true optimal operational strategy for the farm. This enables the use of the model to design the optimal control strategies for new wind conditions and new wind farms without needing to perform fresh calculations from scratch."
- timerol 4y agoThere are definitely a number of installations where this could be useful. My favorite example is Antelope Valley in Southern CA, where the turbines stretch out as far as the eye can see. The scale is absurd. 3288 turbines are there, according to https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/wind https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/wind Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0385954,-118.2567896,3a,75y,190.2h,69.75t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-Pi5jy3-_p7D6PNfPszNPw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0385954,-118.2567896,3a,75y,...
- rootusrootus 4y agoThat's interesting from the satellite view, seeing the various installations next to each other and various approaches to layout. Some lined up tight, some spaced out, some perfectly straight lines, some meandering a bit.
- koheripbal 4y agoBrowsing around, it looks like several have had a serious failure events... One example, but it's easy to find more... https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0727844,-118.2627452,139m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0727844,-118.2627452,139m/da... Are they really so fragile? It looks like maybe 2-3% of them have fallen apart.
- mgsouth 4y agoI live in the Valley; we get some huge winds and gusts around here, especially along the north slopes. Once I repaired a blown-down wooden fence out in the county for the Nth time, "really" fixing it by bracing with a 2x4 from the top to the ground behind it. Came back a few weeks later and the wind had jacked the whole panel out of the ground, pivoting on the brace's grounded end, pulling up fence posts buried three feet deep.
- WalterBright 4y agoIs the fence solid? Perhaps make a slatted fence, so the wind can blow through it.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoWind farms in my state have grids of towers across square miles. So nearly every tower is in the 'wind shadow' of any number of other towers. This seems like a very suitable innovation here.