The World’s Largest Wind Turbine Has Been Switched On

As an engineer feels like the turbine will only work for a year

Because it does not run at the same capacity 24/7. Sometimes it produces energy for 0 households and sometimes for 50,000. Total production in one year corresponds to the yearly consumption of 36,000 households.

They're leaving out an important part of the claim.

I can set up some piezoelectric things in my office chair such that when I sit my fat ass down it generates a small electrical charge. I can say that my ass can generate enough electricity to power a million homes for 10 years, assuming I don't tell you how long it takes to generate that power, which would be on the order of decades, if not centuries, if not longer.

I'd wager someone saw the average energy output for the expected service lifetime of the turbine, then was like, "How much energy does one 3-person household use?" and started playing with Excel until they got a good mix of time and # of households for the press release.

Does make me wonder if they mean an average. Like if the lifespan of the turbine is 50 years or whatever, so instead of saying 720 homes for 50 years they say 36,000 for one year to make it sound more impressive?

Because using a yearly average is useful to account for fluctuations in power generation due to the change of the seasons. It might produce 50% of its power in 3 months if the fall usually is particularly windy in that part of the world.

Don't know how they calculate that number.

The turbine can produce 80M kWh per year, I seriously doubt that would be enough to power 36000 family homes with 3 people.

I could be wrong, but I think the average power consumption per capital is around 6000 kWh per year in the EU.

But you are right about the wording being odd, when both a per year.

One eVinci micro reactor is enough for 5,000 homes a year and doesn't depend on weather.

So, instead of manufacturing each of these giant blades that might last 20 years, we should instead be manufacturing three microreactors that are much smaller and easier to transport.

@sin_free_for_00_days
@L4s

One year per year. And no, they obviously don't understand basic math.

I took it to mean that in 1 year it will produce the equivalent amount that 36k 3-person homes would use during that same year.

Finally, someone posts the American units.

You know, we Americans take a lot of shit for our measurements (anything but metric), but this really does put the numbers into a perspective that the article’s image just can’t convey.

or 1.2355 square furlongs

It is the tower that is 499 feet tall. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-largest-and-most-powerful-wind-turbine-ever-built-is-now-operational

Is there a technical reason for this (e.g. strength of materials) or are we forgetting that this is rotating around a point at the top of the tower and that it utilizes the space above that point?

Albatross? What flavor is it?

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Has this ever happened to you!?

There is a whole lot of sky, my dude. I don’t think it’s plausible that we could capture even 1% of the kinetic energy of wind currents if we wanted to.

But also, wind is ultimately solar energy: the sun heats up parts of the planet at a time, the temperature differences cause pressure differences, and pressure flows from high to low. If we could somehow capture most of that kinetic energy, the result would be that areas which heat up stay warmer, and areas which don’t heat up as much stay cooler.

But we’re talking about gravity-bound gases, here. If we tried to capture too much, the gases would just find an easier route to equalize, such as going above our turbine network.

Is it really stealing any more wind than say, a tall building though?

What happens when we're harvesting say, 1% of all the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. Or 10%. Surely that will have major weather and climate effects.

What else should we be doing to prevent wind power from turning into the next generation's climate disaster?

Stop making assumptions, don't jump to conclusions. Do the science, gather data, apply math.

Until then, we can at least appreciate global warming means an increase in atmospheric energy or wind speed and availability. We should rather be worried about storms damaging turbines.

You’re getting shit on for asking questions, but these articles seem to bring out the worst in armchair engineers.

It’s worth remembering that wind is the result of solar flux adding energy to our atmosphere. From a practical perspective, we can’t deplete the energy as it gets added constantly no matter what we do. Putting big turbines in the wind does alter local flow profiles but, again from a practical perspective, the mass fraction of air flow modified is minuscule. Further, part if the design of wind farms includes making sure that the turbines stay out of each other’s wake, sort of like keeping solar panels on a solar farm from being in the shadow of another panel.

To bring solar into it again, the concern about stopping the wind is like the concern for overheating the planet by putting up to many solar panels. You see, solar panels have a higher albedo (absorption) of solar radiation than the planet, on average. It’s like pavement vs a gravel road - the pavement is going to heat up more. If you run the numbers, though, the effect is negligible, more like adding 1 dark rock out of every 1000 to the gravel road.

We use, worldwide, something like 1/10,000th of the solar energy that falls on earth. It’s often worthwhile to ask questions like yours, even if only to offer a vehicle for explaining why and how engineers and scientists have had the same questions and found the answers.

Stay curious, friend.

Why are you trying to blame "scientists for not speaking up loud enough" and not the ruling class and politicians who have time and time again worked against the interest of people and the stability of Earth's climate in the name of quarterly profits and claiming lower taxes.

And then you're suggesting that the climate impact of wind turbines is going to cause more changes versus what we're already doing.

Do you not think trees? Buildings? Cars? Other mega structures? Are not already changing the way wind is moving? Look at the physical profile of a wind turbine, how much space does it take up at once? Now compare that to the face of a building. How many tens, hundreds of blades could fit in that space? Compare that to Earths entire atmosphere. And you're out here suggesting somehow we'd be at 10% coverage? Even 1% is completely outlandish.

You claim to be pro wind and then just offer absolutely absurd arguments against it. And you're acting like we're doing enough with our current climate crisis to run into another disaster in the future. Wishful thinking, honestly we'll be lucky if we can get far enough to have the issues you're imagining.

There is no one solution, that's how we got ourselves into this mess.

Diversify energy production and reduce energy use, make more efficient houses, cars, machines, work places, more energy efficient living.

Renewables is plural for a reason. We need to combine multiple sources just as we have done with fossil fuels. Solar, geothermal, ocean currents, etc all compliment wind nicely.

The real challenge is energy storage. Fossil fuels are effectively batteries until we expend them.

Permanently Deleted

Wow. It’s great that you thought of that!! Thankfully, scientists almost as smart as you have already created a model that specifically keeps us from stealing all the wind. It’s somewhere around 60% and under and we’ll be fine.

In the 19th century internal combustion engines commonly ran on grain alcohol, but it was too expensive and too hard to mass produce so they went to petroleum based fuels. Electric cars have existed since the invention of the electric motor, but they've always been held back by battery technology. An electric car that uses hydrogen fuel cells in conjunction with batteries would be more environmentally neutral while improving usability, but the cost of fuel cells and logistics of hydrogen fuel makes it infeasible.

Advancement in our way of life has always been driven by profit. If it's not profitable, forget it. Advancement may even be held back by companies that see it as a threat to profit. Environmental impact has historically been a background concern. It's not until the damage has become an actual threat has it moved to a forefront consideration. And solutions are mostly driven by government, not the responsible profiteers.

Tech is now pushing toward sustainable solutions, but it's still profit driven. Business is looking to capitalize on new markets that have been opened up by government subsidy and popular opinion. It should have been there from the start, but the desire was never there. The attitude of government and big business in the first half of the 20th century was destructive. They felt the Earth was a resource to be plundered without regard for anything but profit.

We have to turn around over a century of damaging industry and way of life. It's got a lot of inertia and it's going to be hard to do. I think the human race is going to have to reap what it has sown and it could get pretty bad. We'll have to get through it and change our way of life so it doesn't happen again. If we become caretakers instead of destroyers the Earth can survive this era of human impact and heal much like it has for natural calamities in the distant past.

In the simplest models the bulk of wind is mostly caused by two major factors. The sun heating parts of the earth's atmosphere creating high pressure zones and the Earth's rotation displacing air.

The only observable effects we'd see in the conceivable future are that scaling wind energy utilization would decrease the effectivity of other technologies that rely on wind vs such as sails or wind turbines, as wind turbines locally disrupt airflow patterns.

The larger environmental cost of them like many green energy solutions would be the materials used in their manufacturing and the energy spent to haul them to their site of deployment.