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Fluffeh writes:
"At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, spoke in a session on renewable energy.
Jacobson was invited to speak at the conference because he has developed a roadmap to convert the entire U.S. to renewable energy using primarily wind, water, and solar generated energy. His detailed analysis includes looking at costs and benefits on a per-state basis, including the obvious benefits to human health from reduced pollution. One of his slides showed a very unexpected benefit, however: taming of destructive hurricanes with the help of offshore wind farms.
Jakobson's study, co-authored by Cristina L. Archer and Willett Kempton, has been published in Nature Climate Change (full text available here)."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mojo chan on Friday February 28 2014, @08:34AM
In what way? They pay for themselves after a while, then it's all profit. The mooring points can be recycled at the end of their lifetime too with a new, better turbine.
The UK National Grid considers it more stable than nuclear, because there is almost zero chance that all turbines in a wind farm will fail at the same time. Wind speed is very predictable over the short term (a few hours). Also, the Japanese have developed large (50MW+) batteries for smoothing out wind power which are installed and working at a few locations. They are low temperature sodium sulphur based.
No. Go read TFA, it points out that a large number of turbines will sap energy from the storm and reduce its intensity to a safer level. They won't "stop" all that energy, merely syphon some of it off, enough to make a difference.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @12:55PM
Except for water there is no green energy source that is predictable and scalable for use in a national size grid. The main reason for that is that we lack the technology to store energy in a big and efficient way. (Excpet for hydroplants that are extremely location dependent)
If 80% of your energy comes from wind and solar, then what are you going to do on a calm winter night? Your fucked, unless you were able to build big energy reserves. When we have that tech, we can go all green on most of the planet, except for just in Iceland now. (loads of hydroplants + geothermal + big area with small population makes that possible)
Furthermore, the cost is a big deal. Even if (a big if) the windmills can soak energy out of a hurricane, I doubt the windmill farm can withstand a hurricane without damage. Repairing that damage in the ocean is likely to be more costly than on land.
One more big problem for windmills (this is a few year old knowledge, might be improved at this time): Their peak generation is at windspeeds around 60 km/h. If the wind goes much faster then that, they actually shut down the windmills, turn them in a direction they catch least wind and lock them in place. Apparently, something in the windmill can't take it if the blades spin to fast. So that pretty much invalidates the entire idea that they can draw energy from hurricanes.
(Score: 1) by sidd on Friday February 28 2014, @09:48PM
1) they will be injecting sustained 1TW into the grid, (instantaneous demand in USA about 3 times that at max i think.) Storing it will be interesting.
2)They seem to be extracting just about as much energy as is naturally dissipated by surface drag in a stable Atlantic hurricane.
3)I suspect that the hurricane path will change in the presence of the windmill array. I don't see that their model allows for such a feedback. I have in mind phenomena such as change in precipitation patters around a city.
sidd