- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
The World’s Largest Wind Turbine Has Been Switched On::It’s turbo time.
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just one of these turbines should be able to produce enough electricity to power 36,000 households of three people each for one year.
per year? per lifetime? per second?
I took it to mean that in 1 year it will produce the equivalent amount that 36k 3-person homes would use during that same year.
One year per year. And no, they obviously don’t understand basic math.
Article is inaccurate:
The behemoth is 152 meters (500 feet) tall, and each single blade is 123 meters (403 feet)
This is impossible, the total height cannot be lower than twice the length of the blades.
I found a better article: https://electrek.co/2023/07/19/16-mw-offshore-wind-turbine/
has a rotor of 260 meters (853 feet)
So it must be more than 260 meters high. Maybe 152 meters is the height of the tower? Generally the height of a turbine is measured as the high point of the wing tips. Which is what for instance air traffic must observe.
It is the tower that is 499 feet tall. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-largest-and-most-powerful-wind-turbine-ever-built-is-now-operational
Yes I figured as much, and added it to my comment.
It’s an impressive turbine, but whether it succeeds commercially remains to be seen.
It beats the Vestas 15 MW turbine, which has been tested for 3 years, and goes into production next year.
PS. The Vestas turbine is 280 meters high.
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Won’t somebody please think of the Albatross?!
It’s turbo time
You’re not part of the turbo team!
Has this ever happened to you!?
According to the corporation, just one of these turbines should be able to produce enough electricity to power 36,000 households of three people each for one year.
These types of statements always trip me up. Why one year? If it’s producing that amount of energy in that same year, shouldn’t it just be “…power 36,000 households of three people.”?
As an engineer feels like the turbine will only work for a year
50,000 square meters (nearly 540,000 square feet)
That’s approximately 3 square Walmarts
Caveat: I’m pro wind if it gets us off fossil fuels. It’s better than doing nothing and perfect cannot be the enemy of good enough (for now).
That said: in the late 1890s and early 1900s, scientists already knew about fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses and they didn’t speak up loud enough.
Take the idea of wind energy and project it’s growth a hundred years. From a pure physics perspective, when harvesting wind energy, you must steal kinetic energy from the wind. What happens when we’re harvesting say, 1% of all the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. Or 10%. Surely that will have major weather and climate effects. Or some far future anime sci fi outcome where we’ve captured 100% of the kinetic energy of the atmosphere and no air is moving except through turbines…
This turbine is very cool. What else should we be doing to prevent wind power from turning into the next generation’s climate disaster?
Is it really stealing any more wind than say, a tall building though?
A tall building does not stop the wind. The wind moves around it. Think about it from a conservation of energy perspective: if the building stole the energy from the wind, that energy has to end up somewhere. The building isn’t converting that much of the energy into some other form (electricity, heat, etc.) so the energy must still be present in the wind. (Some small amount is converted to heat through friction when the wind hits the building, but it is tiny.)
You’re getting shit on for asking questions, but these articles seem to bring out the worst in armchair engineers.
It’s worth remembering that wind is the result of solar flux adding energy to our atmosphere. From a practical perspective, we can’t deplete the energy as it gets added constantly no matter what we do. Putting big turbines in the wind does alter local flow profiles but, again from a practical perspective, the mass fraction of air flow modified is minuscule. Further, part if the design of wind farms includes making sure that the turbines stay out of each other’s wake, sort of like keeping solar panels on a solar farm from being in the shadow of another panel.
To bring solar into it again, the concern about stopping the wind is like the concern for overheating the planet by putting up to many solar panels. You see, solar panels have a higher albedo (absorption) of solar radiation than the planet, on average. It’s like pavement vs a gravel road - the pavement is going to heat up more. If you run the numbers, though, the effect is negligible, more like adding 1 dark rock out of every 1000 to the gravel road.
We use, worldwide, something like 1/10,000th of the solar energy that falls on earth. It’s often worthwhile to ask questions like yours, even if only to offer a vehicle for explaining why and how engineers and scientists have had the same questions and found the answers.
Stay curious, friend.
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Fair enough, but if humanity had geared up for renewable electricity generation, there would have been more motivation to fund and perform research on battery tech.
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Renewables is plural for a reason. We need to combine multiple sources just as we have done with fossil fuels. Solar, geothermal, ocean currents, etc all compliment wind nicely.
The real challenge is energy storage. Fossil fuels are effectively batteries until we expend them.
Also distribution. It’s relatively cheap to transport energy in the form of hydrocarbon type fuels because most of your fuel(oxygen in the atmosphere), is in abundant supply pretty much everywhere. Solar has huge variation in seasonal production at higher latitudes, geothermal, hydro, and wind power tend to be most economical in places where the geology/topology is favourable.
Valid point and not one that I had considered. Thanks.
Wow. It’s great that you thought of that!! Thankfully, scientists almost as smart as you have already created a model that specifically keeps us from stealing all the wind. It’s somewhere around 60% and under and we’ll be fine.
There is no one solution, that’s how we got ourselves into this mess.
Diversify energy production and reduce energy use, make more efficient houses, cars, machines, work places, more energy efficient living.
Wright’s Law applies to solar panels, wind turbines, and more. Basically, as production capacity increases, the cost of production decreases by approximately the ratio of 18% for each doubling of production capacity. This equation will continue to drive the total energy production capacity up while driving energy costs down. With abundant cheap energy, we will keep finding things to use it for.
On an individual level, this looks like: you installed LEDs, so now you have budget available to run the giant TV.
Basically, even though we become more efficient in our daily lives with regard to energy use as individuals, the more energy we produce and use as a civilization. Cheap energy enables progress. Yes, the CPU in your cell phone is very energy efficient, but the energy it took to manufacture it isn’t included in your calculations. The more advanced our stuff becomes, the more energy it takes to make it, and run civilization itself.
There is very little you can do as an individual to change the trajectory of global energy production and consumption, but we can at least try to choose better energy sources. The only thing we can do as a civilization in the very long term would be to move production off planet. Or, you know, revert to a stone age civilization where everyone ceases to exist.
Hey now, better not mess with those quarterly profits. Will you please think of those poor shareholders?
