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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: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:25AM (3 children)
One picture says it all: http://www.ict-aeolus.eu/images/horns_rev.jpg [ict-aeolus.eu]
Turbines blank other turbines and our land based wind farms have them spaced too close together for optimum energy harvest, There are places in California (like" rel="url2html-13719">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass_Wind_Farm>like Tehachapi where this became obvious early on, but they kept on building more even as the third row back was barely spinning in a stiff wind, being almost totally blanked by the towers in front.
Putting them out at sea may solve the crowding temporarily, and it might reduce land rental costs, because nobody owns the oceans. It will probably take a bigger navy to protect them.
And it WILL change the weather over land. There's no free lunch. Cheaper lunches, perhaps, but there will be an environmental cost that we still don't begin to fathom.
How many droughts over land will we worsen by slowing the water laden winds? And what court arbitrates those disputes?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:53AM
crikie, how did I mess up that url?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass_Wind_Farm [wikipedia.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BK on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:10AM
Are you suggesting that using the wind to generate electricity could cause climate change?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:55AM
I can forsee legal battles over wind rights similar to water rights.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek