Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-should-be-croissant-shaped dept.

Floating wind turbines for offshore use are seen by many as embodying the future of the sector: they circumvent the problem of unsuitable seabeds and may even cost less than grounded alternatives. A consortium working under the FLOATGEN banner is looking for a share of the pie with the first-ever floating wind turbine to be set-up in the Atlantic close to the French coast.

FLOATGEN is looking to pioneer the expected burgeoning of offshore floating wind farms in European waters. To do so, it will set up a 2 MW turbine in the Atlantic Ocean, at the SEM-REV test site located 12 nautical miles from the city of Le Croisic. The seven-strong consortium hopes that this groundbreaking set-up—on a site which features an electrical substation connected to the national grid—will demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of floating-wind turbines and enable their development in windy and deep waters that are currently not commercially viable.

The demonstrator is using a cost-efficient, ring-shaped floating platform patented by Ideol. It boasts novel hydrodynamic properties that, according to its manufacturer, 'make its performance exceptional compared to other floating platforms.'

How long before Brexit Britain seizes the turbines and anchors them off Jersey?

[Editor's Note: Le Croisic is a commune and not a city. The nearest city is Nantes.]


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:02PM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:02PM (#434685) Journal

    That guy returning from the hillside with that bag of coal could never imagine the damage coal would do.

    What will we find in the future as every windy place has its winds absorbed and turned into electricity?
    How can this NOT change the weather, first locally, then over wide areas?

    Apparently some are looking at this already. [leeds.ac.uk]

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Funny=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fritsd on Tuesday November 29 2016, @10:27PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @10:27PM (#434710) Journal

    What will we find in the future as every windy place has its winds absorbed and turned into electricity?

    I found that an interesting question so I tried to look up some stuff. Interesting BTW that somebody studied the effect of wind turbines on gravity waves :-) have they been detected already?

    The turbines only absorb a bit of the wind, the rest gets turned to turbulence, and they only work close to where those turbines are.

    The troposphere, where the weather is, is 10 km high.

    The largest wind turbine that I could quickly find, Vestas V164, has 80 m blades, and the total height is 220 m.

    http://www.mhivestasoffshore.com/first-v164-8-0-mw-turbine-installed-burbo-bank-extension-2/ [mhivestasoffshore.com]

    So you'd have to stack 45 of those monster turbines on top of each other to get all the wind to blow past them.

    But there are two more factors:
    - At sea level, the air is much more dense than on top of Mount Everest, and
    - Wind force is a function of height. I just didn't know what kind of function. Turns out it is quite complicated.
    Apparently from ground to something called the Planetary Boundary Layer [wikipedia.org] the wind force increases with height (that's why people try to build large turbines), and then above that the wind isn't slowed down anymore by the planet below it and is constant speed.
    And this planetary boundary layer is higher than any wind turbine. But the numbers mentioned in the Wiki article talk about less than half a kilometer high, so that the effect of the pressure gradient can't be very much yet (most people don't need oxygen masks when climbing a 500 m high hill).

    So one turbine modifies 1/45 of the troposphere, but less than 1/45 of the wind, because there's still an increase of wind speed above its maximum height, if I'm still making sense.

    It was difficult to find a graph of wind speed vs altitude that I could understand. But a few showed that the relationship looked approx. linear, at least upto 15 km high.

    And you should integrate wind = int_ground^height windspeed(h) dh I think, so then it's approximately quadratic as a function of height, upto that PBL where it becomes linear again (integral of a constant is linear).

    So I think there's a LOT more wind blowing above and over those turbines, than through them.

    BTW did you know that wind power is disguised solar energy? The Sun causes those temperature differentials that cause pressure differentials that give rise to wind.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @10:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @10:51PM (#434719)

      > BTW did you know that wind power is disguised solar energy? The Sun causes those temperature differentials that cause pressure differentials that give rise to wind.

      Not to nitpick, but everything is disguised solar energy, with the exception of nuclear isotopes, but those were formed from a supernova, which was once a sun somewhere. Even coal and oil is just trapped solar energy.

      Thanks for the interesting breakdown. I suspect that with time people will find that turbines also alter the environment and threaten some wildlife. Fact is, you cannot extract energy from a system without affecting the environment. We humans (as many seem to forget) are as natural as everything around us, and by extension, all the alternations to the environment we do is just as natural as everything else.

      It is a matter of what causes the least disruption for the maximum energy capture, and what is the easiest to contain in a limited area of disruption.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:57PM (#434733)

        Hydrogen is primordial.

    • (Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:30AM

      by Adamsjas (4507) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:30AM (#434768)

      Isn't this the same as handwaving the problem away? Trying to come up with numbers to show how small the problem is seems sort of likke frojack's dude with a bag of coal harvested from an outcroping. It could never get that big, because the soot from his stove compared to the whole atmosphere is just totally insignificant, right? Isn't this the same old denial-ism repackaged?

      You don't have to stack up windmills 45 high to affect the entire atmosphere, any more than you have to have a smoldering coal fire on every square yard of earth to poison the entire planet. If we learned anthing in the last couple hundred years it is that cumulative effects have significance beyond the here and now.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by EETech1 on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:31AM

        by EETech1 (957) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:31AM (#434810)

        First you'd have to calculate the changes caused by replacing the forests and meadows with asphalt parking lots, then multiply that by the number of giant buildings, mostly covered by gigantic air conditioners.

        Then you can calculate the windmill factor.

      • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:58PM

        by fritsd (4586) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:58PM (#434877) Journal

        I didn't mean to handwave the problem away. Maybe you're right, and Bin Laden did the New Yorkers a favour by blowing up the Twin Towers that blocked so much of New York's wind :-/

        I just wanted to see if I could, with high-school physics knowledge (except I've forgotten all about 76 cm Mercury is how many Torricelli etc.), make a first-order approximation of how much of the wind goes through a turbine. Then I secretly hoped that somebody who actually knew about this stuff would stand up and say "you're wrong because..." or "you're right as a first order approximation".

        In order to show that windmills cause a cumulative change in the atmosphere or land temperature etc., you'd have to first prove that there is an effect that can be caused by wind turbines and that can be cumulative, and next to find out if it actually happens.

        That needs serious research, not just my highschool physics :-) I haven't heard of any permanent or cumulative changes due to wind turbines and they've been around in the Low Countries most of my life. We'd need to ask an actual meteorologist or climate expert or field biologist.

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:14AM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:14AM (#434741) Journal

    That guy returning from the hillside with that bag of coal could never imagine the damage coal would do.

    Santa on his way to Trump tower?