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
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Snotnose on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)
Even though the wind turbines were over the horizon, the residents fought tooth and nail against them. The same ones that fought tooth and nail against coal, against oil, and against natgas?
Or am I confusing one group of hypocrital liberals, ooops, progressives, with another group of, um, lessee, lets go with progressives. Cuz that's what Hillary calls herself in her book "Gee, 40% of the populace hates my guts. I'll run for president, what's the worst than can happen?"
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:26AM
No, I think you (and eth, above you) are confusing "liberals / progressives" with "any group of people that you happen to disagree with on any issue". Please provide sources and statistics consistently linking liberal / progressive views with wind farm opposition. In my experience, the people opposing wind farms tend to be reactionary NIMBYs who can afford a sea view and/or climate change denialists on the interwebs who are happy to repeat the bullshit mantras of the dinofuels lobby. At the risk of drawing overly broad demographic assumptions, those don't tend to be the kind of people who vote left.
For the record: Liberal / progressive / leftie here, fully in favour of wind farms pretty much wherever they are viable.
(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
(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. 🏴
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:19PM
The link currently contains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters [wikipedia.org] used to spy on us little people.
I would appreciate if such were removed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:26AM
For the links in summaries, I'd prefer a proper hyperlink (containing the title of the article with spaces between the words).
Barring that, if the editors are going to just slop in a URL, would you guys at least remove the obviously unnecessary crap from the URL?
?utm_source=feedburner NOISE
&utm_medium=feed NOISE
&utm_campaign=Feed%3A NOISE
+IeeeSpectrum NOISE
+%28IEEE NOISE
+Spectrum%29 NOISE
Jesus Fucking Christ.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]