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If you keep scaling this up, you might naively think the tips of blades could reach Mach 1. They won't, due to a variety of reasons.

But that does remind of Thunderscreech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech

"The XF-84H was almost certainly the loudest aircraft ever built, earning the nickname "Thunderscreech" as well as the "Mighty Ear Banger".[16] On the ground "run ups", the prototypes could reportedly be heard 25 miles (40 km) away.[17] Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards."

Do you know what's the speed of a blade at the tip? It's not mentioned in the article.
For scale, you only need 75 of these 16MW turbines to replace one nuclear power plant (1200MW). Crazy.

EDIT: Taking operational capacity (26% for wind, 86% for nuclear) into account, you arrive at about 250 to replace one nuclear plant. Still insane.

Source: https://qr.ae/pGWlu4

Such large wind turbines break the 50% capacity threshold:

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

Mostly because at such heights wind is generally higher and more consistent.

Even at "only" 75 that's a lot of turbines. At 250 you'll need the size of a small country to build them: https://energyfollower.com/wind-turbine-spacing/ and https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...
> MingYang says the MySE 16.0-242 is just the start of its "new 15MW+ offshore product platform," and that it's capable of operating installed to the sea floor or on a floating base.

Am I reading that right? A tower 242 meters tall (read: a 70-floor skyscraper), with moving 118 meter blades, and they're proposing anchoring it to a floating base!?

Granted, it's a factor 2.5 difference in height, 1.6 in rotor radius and 6 in rated power, but Equinor operates a floating wind farm with 100 meter hub height outside of Scotland.

(I'm assuming that the article reported hub height and not the highest point of the rotor).

https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/floating-wind/how-hywi...

Yes, floating wind is a growing research area that may be successfully commercialized within the next 10 years. There are a variety of different substructure concepts, some of which have been tried at full-scale, though not quite this large. A recent example is the Tetraspar project [1]. The primary motivation for floating wind is the ability to access areas of the ocean with high levels of wind resources that have water depths which make it uneconomical to construct and install a monopile foundation.

[1] https://www.stiesdal.com/offshore-technologies/the-tetraspar...

Apparently floating these monsters is now a solved problem. But doing maintenance on a 200 m tower bobbing in the waves is still a challenge.

I'm a subscriber so I don't know how soft the paywall is:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/07/21/...

Why not? It must be a very wide floating base
This may seem like a silly question but I'm genuinely curious... are there are concerns about harnessing too much power from wind and affecting global climate, air currents, etc? It seams far fetched, but we are removing energy from the atmosphere.
Initially I thought this seemed like a silly question too given the enormous amount of kinetic energy available in the atmosphere. But...someone did the research and produced a paper:

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30446-X

Their conclusion:

In agreement with observations and prior model-based analyses, US wind power will likely cause non-negligible climate impacts. While these impacts differ from the climate impacts of GHGs in many important respects, they should not be neglected. Wind's climate impacts are large compared with solar PVs. Similar studies are needed for offshore wind power, for other countries, and for other renewable technologies. There is no simple answer regarding the best renewable technology, but choices between renewable energy sources should be informed by systematic analysis of their generation potential and their environmental impacts.

Make of it what you will.

Most people would consider the impact of planting a forest with tall trees on air currents to be mostly benign. I imagine this is the same, except with less fire risk.
Wind is caused by the sun. In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year. Humans are currently using nearly as much energy, as 0,011% of sunlight.
I seem to recall reading something along these lines from those anti-wind power tirades. They claim they have affects on birds. There's pretty much all sorts of claims. They are claims and not necessarily based on reality, but you could probably find something along these lines if you searched hard enough.
I've wondered the same. Especially over an area where we have so much scale for it that's so naturally windy in the middle of the US.
Does anyone know why vertical wind turbines didn’t take off?

I remember reading an article in popular mechanics about them years ago (found it [1]) and it seemed like a superior turbine…

[1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a246/128...

> Does anyone know why vertical wind turbines didn’t take off?

This had me really scratching my head for way too long, I laughed out loud when I realised my error.

“They are bolted down surely?”

There are a whole series of problems. Darrieus turbines and their variations are fun to watch.[1] But they have structural strength problems. Also, they're hard to stop. Large bladed turbines have variable pitch, and are set to neutral during high wind conditions to prevent overspeeding. Most of the vertical designs can't do that.

In the early days of California wind power, there were some Darrieus turbines at Pacheco Pass. They're probably gone now. In those days, 30KW was a big turbine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine

They face more turbulence and greater stresses, and less efficient combined with being more expensive from the start.

Efficiency in price per kwH is more important and big turbines have claimed their crown here. Given that stresses are behind size limits the strategy is clear here.

There's a nice video compairing vertical and horisontal axis wind turbines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM-gCvhQhPU
They look cool, but the standard three blade turbine is by far the best for engineering reasons. With vertical turbines you always have a blade going against the wind. With vertical turbines you get variable power from the wind depending on where the blade is in relation to the wind. Engineering can work around these to make the work, but in the end the standard 3 blade turbine is more efficient in both theory and practice.
Structural issues: https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurewhatever-...

The standard horizontal three-blade upwind turbine design seems to have been the one that scaled up the best; you can just keep making them larger and larger and they get more cost-effective.

I don't know anything more than what Wikipedia would tell you but I was driving out east one summer when I saw the largest one ever built in Cap-Chat, Québec. Very cool looking, I thought I was seeing the future. Apparently not though.
They are considerably more complicated to build and their main benefit is efficiency in turbulent flows, however it turns out that also turbulent flows tend to be slower in practice so there's less energy to get out of them anyway. This reduces your margins to zero if not negative unless you scale them up to sizes that are not practical for places that actually do have turbulent wind conditions. (e.g. cities.)

Source: I worked for a micro generation helical VAWT startup for 5 years.

Hmmm so they haven't even built the prototype yet, and it won't be built for another year, it won't be installed for another 2 years, and they won't start actual commercial production of these things for another 3 years. So this is pretty much just a CAD design / simulation. This is pure PR until all of those are accomplished.
The article is reporting an announcement, true, but that doesn't invalidate the headline ... scale brings huge advantages in wind turbine economics.
Well, GE's Halide-X in Rotterdam has 107-meter long blades, and this company's new one will have 118-meter long blades, so objects of similar scale do already exist.
Reminds me of a lady at the grocery store complaining about why the 8 inch cake costs 2x the 5 inch cake.
Pizza prices don't seem to track the same trend. An extra large is generally just a dollar or two more than a large, etc. I guess this is because dough and sauce are cheap so the cost impact is negligible from a manufacturing standpoint, so those few extra dollars are essentially pure profit.
It's a hybrid design. It's got a single planetary gear and a medium speed medium sized generator. High speed designs have multiple gear stages that enable a small high speed generator. And direct drive turbines don't have gears at all but the generator needs to be massive.

More info at http://www.myse.com.cn/en/jtxw/info.aspx?itemid=825

I wonder if that's really the right direction to go. Admittedly, the gains in output are impressive for comparatively small increases in size (I think there's a cubic growth somewhere). But the main problem with offshore wind energy currently seems to be installation. It might be economically better to produce more small turbines and install them much more efficiently instead of doing fewer, more complicated installations. One could, for instance, create 6MW floating in a large factory near the cost turbines and literally ship them to their location.
I mean, we have small wind turbines already but the industry keeps moving to larger ones. That says to me that the economics favour the fewer-but-large approach.

I can see why this would be - it has to be nontrivial to anchor an object of any size to the sea floor (not to mention maintenance and inspection) and doing that ten times at a large scales sounds easier than doing it hundreds of times at smaller scales.

The article states the opposite - that fewer bigger turbines are overall cheaper to install than many smaller ones to reach the same capacity

No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity

Area = pi * radius ^ 2.

Three time bigger turbine sweeps 9 times larger area / volume of air, and gives 9 times more power

Faster winds are accessible higher up, and power that can be extracted from the wind goes up as velocity cubed (V3)

Along the length of a wind turbine blade, the conditions vary widely. Near the pivot, the blade needs to be really strong, moves slowly and has a steep angle of attack. Near the tip the blade moves hundreds of mph, needs not much strength and has a very shallow angle of attack.

Having such widely varying conditions would seem to be very hard to optimise for - only one position along the blade can be at optimal conditions.

I would expect that there might exist another design of wind turbine not having this downside - perhaps with a linearly moving blade.

Will wind leave behind countries with narrow roads that wouldnt acomodate large trucks? My place in India has highways with 30kph curves and walls at the very edge.
No, probably not.. the big turbines are all designed for offshore deployment.

The bigger problem is that going offshore is expensive. On the other hand, shipping by sea should be easier than land :)

Seems that no one has updated the Wikipedia page yet:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_wind_tur...

Sorted by "Power rating (MW)", the top three are:

* Vesta V236 (15)

* Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD (14)

* GE Wind Energy Haliade-X (13)

MingYang has a MySE 11-203 at 11: currently listed as "Concept" like the top two, above.

I wonder how these huge structures would stand up to the increasingly powerful storms the world is experiencing. Presumably they wouldn't get built if they weren't up to the task.
If there is too much wind they stop the blades, but that brake can sometimes fail. There are some good videos out there of turbines failing catastrophically :)
Especially if you buy from a Chinese vendor :)
Is the article not saying the opposite, though? Power is very much proportional to scale.
The article says:

That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter.

So I think that their point is that the energy output goes up more (45%) than the diameter (19%), i.e. it's not linear, which is what "proportionality" [1] seems to mean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)

I don't think it improves the co2 cost per watt versus nuclear.
>> The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life.

No it is not without a balanced power grid.

I just can't get into wind energy personally. For a green energy source, it seems worse than geo, solar, and nuclear in almost every way. They are:

- intermittent

- expensive (more than solar)

- look bad (worst of all energy sources)

- no plausible route for it getting a significant fraction of the energy mix (nuclear or solar+batteries do)

I mean having some wind seems cool for some situations, but I just can't get excited about it.