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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: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:26AM
Wind farms are a disaster for the environment. They kill the birds. They are very expensive in terms of energy. They're made in China. Who would build a hotel where the windows are looking right into an industrial turbine? Scotland, if you pursue this goal, of these monsters all over Scotland, Scotland will go broke. As sure as you are sitting there, Scotland will go broke. Vattenfall's already taken a pass. Whoever buys it is going to lose a tremendous amount of money. So nobody's going to buy it, and I don't see it getting built, so I think we are very close to having that thing abandoned. 🏴