Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/05/the-arms-race-in-wind-turbines-is-heating-up.html
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First arms race I can totally get behind, this is awesome.
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Good problem to have.
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Real Engineering is a great channel.
Here is a great one explaining a flaw in the Spitfire engine, which was fixed thanks to a Beatrice Shilling coming up with a simple stop gap solution.
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The size of wind turbines is increasing so dramatically that the industry faces the same issue solar farms have faced, where by the time construction is completed, the whole farm can already be obsolete.
Uh, citation please? I’ve been in the solar industry in some capacity for nearly three decades and can’t recall ever having heard such a thing. Solar farms don’t take long to build.
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“Light up”? As in supply enough energy to power the lights in those homes? Or enough to power all the energy use of that town?
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Let me Google that for ya:
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Yeah, that reporter dumbed that down a bit. As I understand it, these turbines have a power rating of 13 megawatts, which means each one can produce something like 12-15 million kWh a year. The average US household consumes ~ 10,000 kWh annually (not just lights), which is probably how they came to their “light up a town of roughly 10,000 homes.”
“Light up a town” is way too inaccurate. New York City uses about 11,000 Mwh a day, so they would need around 1,000 of these things running at capacity at all times to meet their needs.
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Wait, was that Tonopah that had the leaky salts thing killing its efficiency and uptime?
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Is that a normal way to describe the amount of energy generated by a wind turbine? I assume the thing is capturing kinetic energy rather than producing it.
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Things like this make we worry about the huge turbines they want to install in the Atlantic Ocean. Where the hurricanes tend to go…
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Ah, a solar thermal power plant. Honestly, it didn’t even cross my mind that you might have been referring to that because hardly anybody thinks they’re economical, nor have they for quite some time. Very few of these are built anymore, and those that are usually suffer a similar fate to the Crescent Dunes plant referred to in the article.
The vast majority of solar farms built today – and in the past few decades – use photovoltaic panels, a completely different technology than the one referenced in the Bloomberg article, which is why I didn’t understand what you were referring to. I’ll qualify my original statement and say that for solar-thermal power plants you’re spot-on, but for solar photovoltaic power plants I’ve never heard such a thing.
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My bad, I thought “farm” was the generic term for any array of renewable contraptions, like wind farm, solar farm etc.
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Yeah, this and the dramatic drop in solar energy pricing are definitely good reasons to be optimistic for the future!
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Oh, it absolutely is. But the solar-thermal power technology is not the only technology that has been used for solar farms and has been far from the dominant one.
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Yeah, IMO, Solar will ultimately be our main source of power. It is insane how much free energy the sun shoots at us every day.
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Doing it wrong.
This reminds me of one of my favorite “I can’t believe I was quick enough to come up with that” jokes.
Several years ago we were driving through central California on the way to Yosemite and we passed a hill with dozens and dozens of turbines on the crest.
“Oh look, a wind farm.” I said, then corrected myself. “Actually, I guess they don’t really grow wind here. It’s more like a wind catch-and-release program.”
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