Massive offshore wind turbines to float in waters over a thousand feet deep
The US and UK last week announced plans to develop enormous floating offshore wind turbines that can be deployed in much deeper waters and further out to sea.
Full Story: ArsTechnica
Wind Energy Without the Blades?
What if we could harness wind energy without the fields of enormous blade turbines that have come to be associated with modern wind farms. It would certainly help eliminate the “spinning blades of death” that many birds have to deal with, as well. Levant Power of Cambridge, MA turned to nature for an inspired alternative:
The proposed design calls for 1,203 ““stalks,” each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge.
Not to mention that I wouldn’t mind having one of these near my house at night … just beautiful. If this doesn’t work, then all we have to turn to is purple turbines.
(via DiscoveryNews)
IBM’s big data helps Vestas wind turbines crank | CNET News
A wind farm in North Dakota
(Credit: Google )
In a classic pairing of IT and renewable energy, an IBM supercomputer will optimize placement of wind turbines to improve performance.
Flying turbine harvests wind energy from thousands of feet up
Of all the different kinds of renewable energy, wind might be both the easiest to manage and the most frustrating. Turbines are relatively cheap and easy to build and deploy, but wind is a fickle mistress, and an idle turbine is barely fit for birds to poop on. Solution?Send the turbine to the wind instead.The 130 pound, 28 foot wide wind turbine in the picture above (called Wing 7) is probably not like any wind turbine you’ve ever seen. Most notably, it’s not a giant white tower plugged into the ground. Instead, it’s more of a helicopter, able to take off vertically and fly several thousand feet straight up, tethered to the ground by a power cable. When the craft finds an altitude with a steady wind, it uses its tail to rotate 90 degrees, and the wing provides enough lift to keep the system aloft (like a kite). Meanwhile, the propellers are free to function as wind turbines, sending electricity back down to the ground through the tether.
Wing 7 may seem small compared to more traditional wind turbines, but it’s able to produce a respectable 20 kilowatts with just 22 mph worth of wind. And since the winds aloft tend to be much more reliable than winds at ground level, it’s a much more consistent source. Wing 7 is modular and movable, and just needs a flatbed truck for deployment and to act as a base station. To land, the Wing simply transitions back to vertical, and it gets winched down to the ground.
With this proof-of-concept ready to go thanks to funding from ARPA-E, the next step is to embiggen Wing 7 to a much larger version capable of producing a megawatt, which could see commercial deployment by 2015.
One of our 1.5-megawatt #wind turbines at an installation in Salzbergen, #Germany. The #GE 1.5 MW wind turbine is the most widely used megawatt-class wind turbine in the world, with over 16,500 installed globally. #windturbine (Taken with instagram)
Lightning flashes over a field of wind turbines in Jacobsdorf, Germany. (Photo: Patrick Pleul / AFP-Getty via the San Francisco Chronicle)
Google Investing Heavily in $5 Billion Atlantic Wind Power Line
Google is positioned to be a major investor in a proposed transmission line for offshore wind farms on the Atlantic seaboard, a bold plan that could radically reshape the electrical grid in the region. The proposed Atlantic Wind Connection, which would cost $5 billion in all, would run from New Jersey to Norfolk, VA, collecting energy from offshore windfarms and redistributing it among mid-Atlantic states. The bold plan has been praised by regulators who say it could service many smaller wind projects dotting the coast, and the mid-Atlantic wind farms it would engender would be less likely to raise aesthetic objections than similar projects in Cape Cod and other areas. Google has agreed to take a 37.5 percent stake in the 350 mile transmission line, along with Good Energies (also 37.5%) and Japanese trading company Marubeni, which has committed to a 15 percent stake.
Iowa: The Wind Energy Capital of the United States
China may have overtaken the U.S. as the Saudi Arabia of wind power (got that?), but the U.S. is still home to some major wind energy powerhouses. The annual Wind Technologies Market Report tells us that four states—Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota—managed to squeeze out over 10% of their in-state energy production from wind power last year. Iowa emerged out in front with 20% of all in-state production coming from wind energy—unsurprising for anyone who has been pummeled by wind in the Midwestern state.
» via Fast Company
Massive, redesigned wind turbines produce three times the energy
Your typical wind turbine in operation today is a set of blades mounted on a horizontal axis. You know, like a windmill. Well, this is the Aerogenerator X, and it’s making a case for a vertical axis and a much, much larger turbine. Deployed out at sea, the Aerogenerator X would have a blade span of just over 900 feet — triple today’s average turbine — and cranks out ten megawatts of electricity (also three times your usual turbine). While the three-bladed, horizontal axis turbines we use today have gotten us pretty far, there’s a worry that the design has peaked. We can’t build them as big as, say, the Aerogenerator as the stresses from gravity would be too much and the cost alone would probably make it not worth it. A coalition of green engineering firms would like to make something like the Aerogenerator a real prototype by 2013, with the aim of taking wind turbine tech into the next generation. Via Inhabitat
The more wind power you have hooked up to the grid, the more important it is to have a good wind forecasting mechanism in place. The government of Ontario has decided to give a hand to the various wind power producers in the province by taking that responsibility and creating a central forecasting service in 2010.
(via TreeHugger)
