'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds

1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters)

I feel like this needs a second look.

As a European... Are feet logarithmic? Wouldn't even surprise me that much.
- Only when viewed from the north.
- No, but feet are analogue. Hands are digital.
The zero key got stuck.
They used different people's feet.
- Chinese feet are smaller.
So that "10,000 meters" didn't scale right, clearly. But you also can't possibly call those "high altitudes". Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that's lower than some buildings.
- they're talking about the extra 0 on 10,000
- Agreed. I had the same thought and then saw the numbers and was like wait, "which part of this is the fucked up part?"

Incredible progress on a concept that has been seeking investment for last 15 years. It doesn't just provide 1.2mw, it also operates at a higher capacity factor than capturing winds closer to ground. I'm sure it can scale even higher.

This is useful for clean energy shipping. Design supports an unthethered airship that produces H2 and transports it at the same time. I believe the design would support forward momentum directly upwind, but some tacking angle would be supported.

This is not just a breakthrough in wind energy generation, it is a breakthrough in airship capability.

Meanwhile in the US, rich assholes are firmly convinced coal and oil are the future.
God I hate this place.
- It’s late stage capitalism.
  These fools are just hoarding what they have and trying to continue the « golden age ».
  China will be the next superpower for sure
- To be fair, coal and oil are narratives are being pushed by foreign actors too on the US. China knows exactly how to win a race, and step 1 is to tie your opponents' shoe laces.
An untethered AWE cannot produce any power
- Contentious. Thethering increases power production by restricting the "sail movement power". The blimp part is highly/perfectly aerodynamic, and the betz limit means that a turbine does not fully "act like a parachute". Ground vehicles that proved faster than wind speed directly upwind could use similar principle to turn a propulsion prop, that increases forward/apparent wind speed generating more power.
  This relates to same incredulity for faster than wind upwind ground experiment, and needs experimental proof. But principles of sailing are indeed magical, and simply generating enough power to move forward is extremely useful, even if tacking were needed.
Also, it looks cool as fuck!
...produces H2?
- electrolysis of water (partially from starting water reservoir, and partially from air humidity = dehumidifier step), can displace water weight with increased H2 pressure in airship. Can put an infinite amount of these over ocean with no land lease costs, but moving giant ships solves the issue of thethering them.

Ha! Watch us burn some liquid dinosaurs!

USA

Fossil fuels are from shit the dinos ate, like plants and other dumb crap. The belief that coal-rollers are cool enough to burn liquid dinosaurs is easily the single biggest lie of the oil industry.
Closely followed by gestures wildly
- Lol, got your new advert campaign... Gasoline is vegan
- Oil is solar power with extra steps.
  Just cut out the 300 million year old middle man
- Isnt all feces by definition dumb because of lack of advanced functioning brain?
- The whole term fossil fuel is wrong.
- I mean some small part of it is dino. But yeah by biomass it's mostly plant.
And Africa, and South America, and the middle east, and Europe. Don't pretend the rest of the world isn't still burning fossil fuels it's not just the US
- USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I'd say it's an accurate statement

It looks like a boss bloon from BTD6 lol

Say what you will at least China seems produce some much needed tech in exchange for selling their people to capitalism, the latter which almost all countries do but in exchange for funnelling the 99.99 % of the revenue to billionaires and/or war (pulled the stats out of my hass).

Switching to renewables makes a lot of sense from an economic and ecologic point of view but also geostrategically. Unfortunately, Western governments have pretty much lost the ability to act on those considerations. This is due to then being beholden to a few billionaires who would rather see civilisation as we know it end than accept a few percentage points revenue drop for a couple of quarters.
- It's because the regulatory bodies are captured by the interests of the fossil fuel companies
They aren’t limited by democracy.
- This is a factual statement. Whether people like how it sounds or not.
  It is true, though lacking fail safes of a real democracy is a dangerous game to play in the long term, even if technically positive in an instance. As most autocratic leaders seek to gain continuous and more power. Or their predecessor does.

Finally the stupid floating jet engine looking turbines from Big Hero 6, except IRL they actually look good.

_

I cant wait for the conspiracy theories about this

I'd be more interested about the cable that is going to bring all that power to the ground level. With traditional tech that would weigh a shit-ton. Light weight generator would be easy peasy compared to that.

They should do a Nikola Tesla and transmit electricity wirelessly
Maybe over estimate temperature deratings and maybe add a new wind speed thermal pulling capacity. But more likely forgo European and NA electrical standards entirely and submit questionables value for CE approval.
Maybe there's energy intensive processes that they could do up there instead. Something like Haber Bosch. Then bring the products down.
- Microwave death ray to beam it down could be fun.
  Local residents metallic objects would shoot sparks every now and then.
- City in the clouds

This looks like a good way to bring power to a remote area, and China has lots of those.

This thread is telling me one thing and one thing only: I need to see Big Hero 6...

You don't need to, but your life will have been without purpose if you don't see it. Kidding, but I did see it for the first time last year, and it was pretty good

I wonder what happens to the world when we take this energy from the wind? Like what are the effects of harvesting wind power?

I'm no scientist but I think it would take an absurd and unrealistic amount of these to have any sort of noticeable effect on average wind speeds.
Enough wind redirection could affect weather patterns. But we won't run out of wind, spoiler but wind power is just indirect solar power.
- To be fair everything but nuclear is just indirect solar power (and if you count other stars besides just Sol, even fission kinda is)
  Edit: And I guess geothermal isn't really solar power either, that's residual heat from formation of the planet
Typically wind is dissipated by friction losses with the surface I think (bleeding off speed and energy by making waves, waving trees, and just rubbing against the ground) and wind is generated by heat from the sun (warm air expanding pushing against cold air, creating pressure differentials across thousands of miles).
Because wind is quick to regenerate and this does nothing to stop that the result is probably a pretty small drop in average wind speeds around the new mill and no greater ramifications than slightly less pollen travel in the spring.
The windmills will steal all the spinning from hurricanes, a bust to home owners insurance
- This could be devastating to kite sales.
While it is rather complex and hard to predict, the most likely global outcomes are fewer extreme weather events and extremely mild cooling. The hairy ball theorem tells us there's already somewhere on the globe with no wind, so it's not that big of a deal to convert some wind into electricity. This particular approach couldn't convert "all" wind into electricity.
https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/spinning-skies-how-earths-rotation-shapes-our-weather -- We won't run out of wind until after we start slowing down the rotation of the earth, and we watch that pretty closely to know when to add leap seconds, and I imagine it's an just absolutely huge store of energy in the form of angular momentum (et. al.).
In theory nothing. Wind is just the flow of air from high pressure to low, which itself is caused by heating from sunlight. If uncollected, the kinetic energy of the wind would eventually be lost as heat to friction between air molecules.
It will impact weather patterns and severity. I’ve certainly not done the work on how much, nor do I really have a grasp on the scales involved, so that’s mostly a meaningless statement, but I can say with confidence the impact will be real. Just like dams affecting rivers, icecap mass affecting heat reflection, and solar panels increasing local temperatures.
Given that one of the impacts of global climate change has been increased weather severity and chaos, I am not afraid of positing that reducing the severity and chaos of the jet streams could be a good thing.
Similarly, there are some interesting projects going on surrounding the use of aerogel and other materials that could help focus sunlight at the top of the oceans, where evaporation can actually occur, that are focused on creating clean drinking water—and while I think this is a good end unto itself, a nice side benefit would be less solar energy reaching the ocean and raising the body temperature.
For once, it’s cool to hear about proposed industrial projects and their side effects and they’re maybe positive, instead of “well that sounds like it’s going to leech heavy metals into the surrounding community”
Of course, aerogel is horrible to work with and clogs if it doesn’t break, and nobody else has solved the problem of scaling up and dealing with the steam getting in the way. On the lightweight flying jet stream turbine front, well, I’ve been following development for 8 years and nobody has even solved the ‘limited supply of helium leaking away into space’ problem for starters. And it’s hard making an efficient generator so lightweight that it can fly. So we don’t have to worry about them potentially improving global weather severity just yet. Or potentially devastating our remaining populations of migratory birds!
Things get more violent. Wind tries to find the path of least resistance, though as a fluid, so it's taking all paths in proportion to how much resistance it has (just like electricity). If you increase the absolute resistance in one area, it reduces the relative resistance everywhere else, so you end up with increased airflow everywhere else and a reduction where you added resistance. Which means more wind outside of the turbine's path (because it's going to equalize that pressure differential one way or another). More flow through the same volume means higher speeds and forces (think like turning up the pressure on a tap).
But wind turbines don't have a constant effect on wind resistance; it depends on how fast it's spinning or how fast the wind is moving. When the wind slows, the resistance goes down, and when resistance goes down, wind speed increases. So you end up with an oscillating effect where the wind goes through cycles of strengthening, losing more energy to the turbines and weakening, which means the turbines take less energy, and the winds strengthen again. Though you'd need to be taking a significant amount of that energy to see an extreme effect like this.
Apparently taking more than 53.9% of the total wind energy in an area is enough to slow the wind to a stop (again, a violent, turbulent, oscillating stop, not a gentle end of wind).
I feel like this should be an xkcd explains (if it isn't already one)
I feel like all the responses you're getting are probably generally correct in the context of wind at/near ground level. But I feel like sticking a bunch of these in a JET STREAM is (maybe?) an entirely different matter. Or at least it could be, and I too am curious what the potential ramifications are.
Jet stream winds are not just wind like any other, are they? Various jet streams have serious impacts on weather. If they harnessed and substantively bled off the Pacific jet stream, are there potentially grave consequences on the already variable El Niño and La Niña oscillation? If it could cause serious shifts in the weather, that would affect the livability of areas, create more dangerous weather conditions, and impact farming way around the globe from their wind farm installation.
Maybe none of these are genuine scientific concerns, but frankly I don't trust China to do the science for the rest of us. Pretending these are genuine concerns, say they screw something up - it probably doesn't too seriously impact Chinese weather as they harness the jet stream winds right at the point where it leaves their airspace. But the ramifications for the rest of the world could then be dire, and I'm not sure that is remotely a concern for them. Could be an economic advantage even. Two birds, one stone.

It's a novel approach, but the Chinese aren't the only ones trying to harvest energy from high winds: https://skysails-power.com/how-power-kites-work/

Promising concept too, but this is 250-500x the scale of that.
- How so, when skysails talks about "Venyo harnesses the power of high-altitude winds with speeds of 13 m/s and a continuous output of up to 200 kW." while the S1500 is featured with "Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW."?
  It's more like factor 5-6.
- What matters is scalability and how much material and cost you need to produce per energy unit. Kites (either parasails or fixed wing) are much simpler, can be scaled up too, and you only need a simple cable that pulls the generator's winch. Overall kites seem much more efficient to scale up.
That looks complicated and frankly kind of stupid. Imagine trying to get something like that working without having an engineer standing by that can get everything fixed once it crashes down or something else like that happens.
- IDK, the benefit to the goofy kite design is that the aerial portion is far simpler - and there's no massive energized cable hanging in the air. It's a little... non-conventional, but it's a great deal less complicated than floating a massive generator like the chinese solution. Downside is presumably lower energy density per unit, but the reduction in operational footprint might make the two designs competitive. It's good people are exploring both options!
- Fair, but please name one single way to generate that kind of electrical power that can be fixed by a layperson in case something crashes.

Neat.

Any real reason you can't fill them with hydrogen? A fire can't start inside the bubble, because there's no oxygen. If a fire starts on the outer surface, then it doesn't really matter if it's hydrogen or not. It's also cheaper and slightly better at lifting. There is some more danger with handling it on the ground, but you should be able to mitigate that with safety procedures.

Yes the Hindenburg disaster had more to do with the flammable paint used than the hydrogen inside it. But the safety procedures when working with on the ground may be more expensive than just using helium.
Hydrogen is hard to contains long term, it leaks through most materials. I'm no expert on the matter but I suspect the gains in lift would be partly negated by the changes to the envelope of the container.

Edit: I was trying to get more information from other articles and got the S1000 (100kW) mixed up with the S1500 (1000kW)

~~They're trying to get it to100kW. That's like a pretty big generator but not a huge one. So this isn't a replacement for wind farms just yet. The picture is from a year ago~~. No mention of costs.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

The article says:
The S1500 features a main airfoil and an annular wing that together form a giant duct. Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.
That suggests to me (admittedly a layman) that each blimp is more like 1.2MW?
- The title itself already says it's 1MW.
- Sorry about that, I got all excited at just a tenth of what they are trying to achieve. Oops
Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.
Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It's also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it's essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it's possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.
I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.
The transmission line question is interesting though, there's a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line... The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?
It seems tricky, but like perhaps there's just a right answer, an optimal size.
- Can they preference the generation to favor voltage over current? Current is what tends to need really thick cables.
it is 1.2mw = 12x100kw
- Did they actually generate power during the test flight?
Using hot air instead of helium would not work. The density of hot air is much higher than helium, so you would need a significantly larger airship to lift the same mass of payload (the useful bits). That and keeping the air hot would require constant energy input reducing the efficiency of the system dramatically. I'm pretty sure that system would be literally impossible to construct.
- Hydrogen is simply the right lifting gas. Helium not abundant enough for sustainable scale. AFAIK, this model did use H2. Previous protototypes used helium.
[face Palm].
JFC people, take a grade 10 physics class.
- How about you take a ninth-grade speech class first?

Am I crazy or didn’t we see these in Big Hero 6?

Yes but, you see, that was an animated film aka a work of fiction. This is happening in reality.
- Yeah and it’s amazing that they took this crazy idea from a kids cartoon and made it work!
Kinda.

Saw this in Big Hero Six. It's a crazy concept. Hopefully it works.

When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold,

Edit: I'm wrong, see edit below!

Huh? Kinetic energy increase is square, not cubic.

KE=1/2 m v^2

So every doubling of speed should increase the available kinetic energy by 4 times, not 8. 3 times the speed is 9 times the energy. Granted there are probably some efficiency gains in excess of this at the low end, ~~but as a rule that's just wrong.~~

Edit: Cool, I learned something new! I neglected to consider it in terms of power, just thought about kinetic energy.

So something like: KE = 1/2 m v^2

= 1/2 ( rho V) v^2

= 1/2 ( rho A d) (d/t)^2

= 1/2 rho A d^{3 1/t}2

Where P = KE/t

Thus:

P = 1/2 rho A (d/t)^3

= 1/2 rho A v^3

Lots of other aspects I'm sure I have wrong, but I see how the cubic came to be.

Its cubic actually
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/wind-power-impacts-of-larger-turbines/
I don't understand the physics, but every model of power output from wind turbines uses V^3 for the formula
- That's a good link.
  During the stampede scene in the Lion King, imagine the wildebeests were stampeding twice as fast. Then Simba's dad Mufasa would not only have quadruple the amount of energy imparted by each wildebeest, but also be trampled by twice as many wildebeests per second, so the rate of energy imparted on Mufasa per second would be 4 x 2 = 8 times greater when velocity doubles.
- Thanks for the correction! I got way ahead of myself.
- thx for the link! just spent the last hr reading about windmills. and although I live in a country full of them I've often wondered, but never really paused to ponder about the intricacies that go into windmill design. fascinating stuff!
Increasing the speed increases both the kinetic energy of the wind hitting the turbines and the amount of wind that hits the turbines each second.
It has to do with type of turbine that uses "airfoil principle". Your formula works for "cup"/Parachute design, but airfoils/upwind sails are "magic"
I'm out of practice with my physics so apologies if this is a n00b question, but:
I'm unclear what (rho V) is and how you converted to that from mass (m). Further unclear what (rho A d) refers to.
Can you explain / link to an explainer on this?
- Rho is density
We don't directly harvest the kinetic energy. That increase probably has to do with how the wind provides lift to the blades. Of course, you couldn't keep increasing like that until the harvested energy is greater than the kinetic energy. But I'm sure at any wind speed we only get a tiny fraction.
- Kinetic energy is exactly what’s harvested, which is why modern wind turbines are not far off the theoretical limit of the amount of energy that can be extracted. (Betz’s law)
  By taking energy from wind, you slow it down. Slow it down too much, and it can’t get out of the way in time for new air.
TIL thanks for bringing this up

Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.

Shira, get me my god damned tea!

Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.

But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won't be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.

But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.

They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.

This is totally breaking loose and heading toward the nearest city in the final act.

Very interesting development. Especially that it can be deployed in disaster zones to provide energy - if there is a strong foundation to anchor it, probably.

Wouldn't the heavy transmission line itself act as the anchor like the chain on a cruise ship?
- You are aware that a ship lays several times the depth in chain on the ground as weight. And the chain is much heavier as the tether will be, or it would not really get up high. And the distance between ship and ground is rather fixed, while the windmill blimp is in a rather floating position.
  No, I think a bunch of heavy duty ground anchoring is necessary here.
  On the other hand, as the Chinese are rather good at planning important things like that, I could imagine them to set up some anchor points ahead: Bury a large lump of concrete somewhere in the city. Maybe use it as an open place in a park, where nobody would notice that instead of a layer of stones it is actually going a few meters deep. Have a metal trapdor in the center where you can hook up a blimp to a connection below, and have a way to plug the power into the local grid. If catastrophy happens, drop off the blimp, blow it up and send it skywards. The park should give more than enough space to set it up.

With a traditional wind turbine, if the wind speeds get too high, the turbine locks the rotation and feathers the blades. For the airship however, people will have to manually take it down and later erect it again. Hopefully they get to it in time, otherwise it's going to violently take itself down and/or fly off. Either way, that is a bunch of extra cost incurred on a regular basis.

Strikes me as an impractical solution.

Article says wind speeds are môre steady up there, wouldn't that mean whatever you put up there is build to withstand those winds?
A wind turbine automatically feathers. Why can't the airship automatically raise and lower itself?
With modern forecasting, getting it's height right shouldn't be too hard?
- Why can’t the airship automatically raise and lower itself?
  It doesn't just need to be lowered, that would leave it exposed still. It needs to deflated/reinflated every storm, while also having someone strap the carefully folded deflated bits down, or put itself into a very expensive massive hangar every storm. Are these possible, yes, but again, it needs to be economical, not just possible.
  Weather has always been a severe issue with airships. It's the main reason you don't see them filling the sky.

That looks like a giant...

Austin Powers sketch

Wow. I hope this tech works out practically.

https://archive.is/b20HL

Is that thing going to be able to float itself and support the weight of the cables at the altitudes they talk about?

It's a Zeppelin. 100 year old tech.
Tether to the ground limits X-axis. Buoyancy limits Y-axis. Draw a circle around the sine of ground-to-windmill hypotenuse and you immediately know the max constraints of where the windmill will be
- Oh, I understand that perfectly well. The question is: that thing is a tethered balloon. If they expect to have it float 10 Km up, it has to be tethered with a cable at least 10Km long, which should be able to withstand the forces created by wind resistance, plus its own weight, and be conductive, so some lightweight cable won't cut it, metal will have to be involved, and not some lightweight signal cable, but hefty metal. Will that thing be buoyant enough to lift that cable?
It did that already, yes. It's a BFB: Big Friendly Blimp

I assume they have designed these in a way that doesn't adversely impact migratory birds

Birds don't fly at 3,000 feet.
- Some very few do, not sure if they're in China though.
  "Windfarms hurt birds" is 90+% fossil fuel propaganda though. Yes birds run into windmills, they also run into skyscrapers and houses and antennas and planes.
  We should of course look for ways to mitigate that. We should not just pretend smokestacks do no harm and not develop renewable energy projects.
- Just vultures, cranes, geese, ducks, kites, swans, condors...
- The tether / power transmission line does pass through potential flight paths, tho.
  Still, I imagine the impact to be even less than ground-based turbines.
They'll hire Anna Paquin, she'll sort something out.
- And her cousin, Anna penguin, the avian consultant.

That is really cool!

500 to 1,000 meters AGL is going to be a problem for aircrafts. You need remote areas to have no interference bc these are big balloons.

Air traffic has to adapt.
- That is not how it works. Air ways would be rerouted and emergency aircraft would be effected. The cords would be the hidden danger.
Paint the balloons red and put lights on them so aircraft don't hit them.
- Why red? Paint it like a brick wall so they can pass through.
This is intended as emergency power relief not a full time energy source.
- Hmm interesting. I don't see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you'd use them to generate electricity/passive income.
  You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.
  So yeah, they'll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.

I like how everyone conveniently leaves out the part that this is an emergency backup not actual full time scalable tool.

This one in particular: maybe.
The approach in gerenal: not so much.
Have a look here: https://skysails-power.com/systems/venyo/
- The one you posted is not for scaling either. I just dont see how this maintenance overhead could ever scale for mass use.