World's Largest Wing Turbine - Tall as a 70 story building.

Clem72

Well-Known Member
Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. New Atlas reports:[T]he new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents."

Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against. So both MingYang and CSSC sell these mammoth mega-turbines primarily as cost-cutting measures that'll help bring down the capital cost of wind farm setup, and eventually the cost of the energy they produce.
"Compared to the installation of 13MW models," reads a statement by MingYang on LinkedIn, "the higher output of the MySE18.X-28X would save 18 units required for a 1GW wind farm, shaving off construction costs by 120,000 - 150,000 USD/MW." New Atlas calculated this to "represent a CAPEX saving of $120-150 million on a gigawatt-scale project."

"For reference, the 1.2-GW Hornsea One Project, built using 7-MW turbines, is estimated to have cost "at least $5.153 billion, so while $150 million can't be considered chump change, it might represent a couple of percent on a project this big."
 

Clem72

Well-Known Member
Yeah, i'm not convinced wind is the way of the future. in theory you would think something like that should be low maintenance but they sure do seem to break a lot.
 

spr1975wshs

Mostly settled in...
Ad Free Experience
Patron
I prefer Savonius vertical axis rotors, which I first saw in Mother Erath News Magazine in the late 70's.
You can kit bash them at home. As I recall, they were using semi-truck alternators to produce 12 VDC to charge a bank of deep cycle batteries.
120 VAC was produced by using an inverter.
1673995945365.png
 

stgislander

Well-Known Member
PREMO Member
I prefer Savonius vertical axis rotors, which I first saw in Mother Erath News Magazine in the late 70's.
You can kit bash them at home. As I recall, they were using semi-truck alternators to produce 12 VDC to charge a bank of deep cycle batteries.
120 VAC was produced by using an inverter.
View attachment 168362
I think that's what Gilligan is putting on his club island.
 

Sneakers

Just sneakin' around....
There's a lot of "new" tech being tried. I've seen vids on a few different types that have a lot of promise, lower wind needs, lower impact on nature. Problem is, they are all relatively low to the ground. The real wind advantage is not at ground level, but up much higher. I guess that's why free-standing prop towers will still dominate.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
The article blames the “rash” of incidents on the rush to install turbine capacity, but there are also permanent factors that make engineering, building, and maintaining wind farms difficult and risky. To develop meaningful amounts of power, the blades on the turbine have to be big, and when big blades spin in heavy winds, the tips can end up hitting supersonic speeds, putting great stress of the materials used to construct them. Big blades also requite tall towers, which are then subject to stresses as winds blow and can gust during storms to velocities that test the strength of the materials and the design of the towers.

243606_5_.jpg


And, of course, tall, string towers require a lot of construction materials that have (ahem) a considerable carbon footprint to create. Compared to the amount of “carbon free” electricity generated, the carbon emitted in manufacturing and construction of the towers may take many years to counterbalance. Consider that the relatively low electricity production of each tower (compared to a coal or nuclear fired plant) means that far more power transmission lines must be constructed, and there is a carbon footprint involved, not to mention the excess demand created for copper, which has its own environmental issues in mining and refining, and the problems with meeting demand when creating new copper mines hits a high wall of resistance from the very same environmentalists who think windmills are a solution to the problems they imagine CO2 creates.

But with wind farms, longevity is an issue. The unpredictable nature of winds, with the speed and direction changing abruptly, means that complex transmission boxes must be attached to each turbine, and these transmission boxes are stressed when high winds occur and suddenly change direction. They need maintenance crews at the ready. In my consulting days, I encountered a wind farm project whose transmission boxes regularly exploded when sudden gusts of wind over-stressed them, creating their own mini environmental disasters from the transmission fluids spewed onto the ground.




 

phreddyp

Well-Known Member
The article blames the “rash” of incidents on the rush to install turbine capacity, but there are also permanent factors that make engineering, building, and maintaining wind farms difficult and risky. To develop meaningful amounts of power, the blades on the turbine have to be big, and when big blades spin in heavy winds, the tips can end up hitting supersonic speeds, putting great stress of the materials used to construct them. Big blades also requite tall towers, which are then subject to stresses as winds blow and can gust during storms to velocities that test the strength of the materials and the design of the towers.

243606_5_.jpg


And, of course, tall, string towers require a lot of construction materials that have (ahem) a considerable carbon footprint to create. Compared to the amount of “carbon free” electricity generated, the carbon emitted in manufacturing and construction of the towers may take many years to counterbalance. Consider that the relatively low electricity production of each tower (compared to a coal or nuclear fired plant) means that far more power transmission lines must be constructed, and there is a carbon footprint involved, not to mention the excess demand created for copper, which has its own environmental issues in mining and refining, and the problems with meeting demand when creating new copper mines hits a high wall of resistance from the very same environmentalists who think windmills are a solution to the problems they imagine CO2 creates.

But with wind farms, longevity is an issue. The unpredictable nature of winds, with the speed and direction changing abruptly, means that complex transmission boxes must be attached to each turbine, and these transmission boxes are stressed when high winds occur and suddenly change direction. They need maintenance crews at the ready. In my consulting days, I encountered a wind farm project whose transmission boxes regularly exploded when sudden gusts of wind over-stressed them, creating their own mini environmental disasters from the transmission fluids spewed onto the ground.




Yep, nothing is as simple as the simpletons want you to believe!
 
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