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The world's first offshore wind farm employing floating turbines is taking shape 25 kilometers off the Scottish coast and expected to begin operating by the end of this year.
[...] Wind power generation is obviously contingent on how fast and how often winds blow. But only over the past decade have scientists and wind farm developers recognized that the winds measured prior to erecting turbines may not endure. For one thing, dense arrays of wind turbines act as a drag on the wind, depleting local or even regional wind resources.It is now generally accepted that drag from wind turbines in the boundary layer (where the atmosphere interacts with Earth's surface) limits the kinetic energy that large land-based wind farms can extract to about 1.5 megawatts per square kilometer (MW/km2). "If your average turbine extracts 2-6 MW, you really need to space those turbines 2-3 kilometers apart because the atmosphere just doesn't give you more kinetic energy to extract," says Carnegie postdoctoral researcher Anna Possner.
Wind speeds over open ocean areas are often higher than those in the windiest areas over land, which has motivated a quest to develop technologies that could harvest wind energy in deep water environments. However, it remains unclear whether these open ocean wind speeds are higher because of lack of surface drag or whether a greater downward transport of kinetic energy may be sustained in open ocean environments. Focusing on the North Atlantic region, we provide evidence that there is potential for greater downward transport of kinetic energy in the overlying atmosphere. As a result, wind power generation over some ocean areas can exceed power generation on land by a factor of three or more.
Research Article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/03/1705710114
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:26AM (1 child)
With regard to harvesting power from the ocean, wind-farms are one part of the picture. There is ongoing research for using wave-powered buoys [static-economist.com] as well as wind farms to generate power. Note that the link i posted is one type, there are other types which directly generate electric power [wordpress.com] themselves using simple "baby's first electromagnet" principles.
This method is a lot more NIMBY-proof than the wind-farm method, and being somebody whose old stomping ground has embraced wind power I find the appearance of wind farms to be rather relaxing (the tri-bladed turbines are like fidget-spinners, except that they do all the spinning for you), but so-called "environmentalist" liberals do not because it hurts their property values. They say it is because wind-farms hurt a few birds every year, but you know and I know they are full of shit. Don't believe me? Ask the "staunch environmentalist" Kennedys and others fighting tooth-and-nail to keep wind farms from Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedBear on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:10AM
Also in Scotland there is a company that already has a 2MW device making energy from the tidal flow between islands. The UK government basically turned the Orkney Islands into a renewable energy experimental zone at least a decade ago, so there are lots of interesting things going on. There are all kinds of wave-power, tidal-power, wind-power and solar-power projects happening. There's a ferry that will run on hydrogen generated from excess renewables. There are tons of electric cars driving around. They even have plans for generating energy from the mash that's left over from making whiskey.
Robert Llewellyn (of Red Dwarf fame) has done a number of videos about what's going on in the Orkneys. Just search YouTube for "fullychargedshow orkney". Or I guess you could click here [youtube.com]. Lots of interesting stuff on that channel if you like renewable energy and electric vehicles.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ