Posted on 09/19/2006 8:50:52 AM PDT by Uncledave
Most of these big windmills are designed to automatically "feather" the blades under conditions of high wind, so the "lift profile" would be minimal. I think the answer "is" no.
Alternator generators with blade pitch governors ought to work.
Dear Wonder Warthog,
I thought that there might be some mechanism like that in play.
Thanks.
sitetest
Let Darwin deal with the hapless birds.
Building, sorry.
A very long extension cord.
You're joking, but enough of these things to generate a significant amount of power, when located in deep water, would be a serious hazard to navigation.
It seems to me that they could be much closer to shore without 'offending' sensitive eyeballs, such as Ted Kennedy's.
Back in the day that telegraphy guy strung a cable covered in gutta-percha all the way across the atlantic. Took him about three tries too -- it kept breaking and falling to the bottom. That was some high-voltage stuff too, that was the only way they could keep it charged across all those thousands of miles.
Dear jrp,
"It would take thousands of these things to equal the capacity of one nuclear power plant."
Well, the article says that the turbines being designed can generate 5MW each. I live in Maryland, not too far from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plants. Each of the two Calvert Cliffs units generates about 850MW, for a total of about 1.7GW.
I'm sure there are bigger nuclear plants, but I'm sure there are smaller, too.
To generate as much electricity as Calvert Cliffs, one would need about 340 of these turbines.
I read another article posted by UncleDave about a proposed off-shore wind turbine farm in New England. From that article, it seems that one places hundreds of these turbines together in a "farm," several hundred feet apart from one another. I guess you could get roughly a hundred of these turbines in a square mile.
So, to generate the electricity equivalent of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility, you'd need a few square miles of ocean. Since these facilities can be "planted" between about 30 to 100 miles off-shore, and since we have a pretty good amount of coastline off the East and West coasts of the US, we could plant a few hundred of these farms without using much of the available surface of the ocean.
That'd generate a substantial portion of the electricity used by the United States.
sitetest
It would probably remain DC all the way to the shore, then conversion from DC to AC is done with an inverter. While they're not as big as what they would use, you can buy DC-AC converters at any electronics shop, or at Wal-Mart where it plugs into your cigarette lighter.
--thanks--I go all the way back to Ward-Leonard systems on AC-DC--have been around a few windmill setups from the highway--was curious about the big outfits with three hundred foot blades and the high-voltage three-phase conversion---
By keeping it "50 to 150 kilometers from shore" old sport.
In the late 60's early 70's Offshore Power Systems, I believe a div of GE, was going to build floating Nuclear power plants off the coast of Jacksonville FL, but I think the Enviro Nutcases got it killed before it was ever off the ground (or on the water)...........
You think THATS bad, what about the birds?
It was Westinghouse, not GE..........see link for more info......
http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html
BTW nobody speaks of OTEC which solves multiple problems utilizing the energy in sea water!
I wonder if the electricity from these things would be cheap enough for Iran to end their nuclear power development?
Yes, but that's not what that idiot wants!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.