Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/05/the-arms-race-in-wind-turbines-is-heating-up.html
…
8 Likes
First arms race I can totally get behind, this is awesome.
7 Likes
Good problem to have.
4 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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.
7 Likes
“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?
4 Likes
Let me Google that for ya:
7 Likes
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.
8 Likes
Wait, was that Tonopah that had the leaky salts thing killing its efficiency and uptime?
7 Likes
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.
2 Likes
Things like this make we worry about the huge turbines they want to install in the Atlantic Ocean. Where the hurricanes tend to go…
4 Likes
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.
1 Like
My bad, I thought “farm” was the generic term for any array of renewable contraptions, like wind farm, solar farm etc.
2 Likes
Yeah, this and the dramatic drop in solar energy pricing are definitely good reasons to be optimistic for the future!
5 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.”
6 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
