Rotor diameter 774 feet, and a wind swept area of 11 acres. That's a big machine.

https://electrek.co/2021/02/10/vestas-gm-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-turbine/


"Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas today announced the launch of its new offshore wind turbine – the V236-15.0MW. It replaces US conglomerate GE’s 14MW Haliade-X as having the distinction of being the world’s largest offshore wind turbine.

A comparison

The V236-15.0MW will have will have a rotor diameter of 774 feet (236 meters) and a wind-swept area of 470,845 square feet (43,743 square meters).

In comparison, GE’s Haliade-X has a rotor diameter of 722 feet (220 meters) and a wind-swept area of 409,168 square feet (38,013 square meters).

......

The Vestas V236-15.0MW boosts wind energy production to around 80 GWh/year, enough to power around 20,000 European households and save more than 38,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing 25,000 passenger cars from the road annually. "

Holy schit. Not for self-sufficient home owners, then

Ah, the end of all bird life in Denmark.

How ya gonna store it for when the wind dies down?

I don't think they plan to take that down, but it would take a big barn!

Cool. Every 56 of those equal one of the big hydro units at grand coulee.

They have 24 at coulee.

It'll take a lot of them big fans to cool the whole world off - global warming sucks - big air condishners would be better i think - take a lot of power to cool off the whole outside

So, how many would it take to power say, Kalifornica? 2000?

With the Dem plans to eliminate fossil fuels, they better start saving their pennies. On the other hand, if the real plan is as I suspect to just tax our asses off to re-distribute wealth to the third world and Al Gore, they can just buy a couple for show.

The big boys promote big wind. As such it's all a scam.

Someone will have to do the math, but the Danes are planning to build an island to support their off shore wind farms, with the goal of powering the entire country:

https://awaken.com/2021/02/denmark-...r-wind-farms-to-power-the-whole-country/

"Denmark To Build Artificial Island For Wind Farms To Power The Whole Country

AFP reports that Denmark’s parliament has just committed to building an artificial island off its shores that will be home to hundreds of huge wind turbines…

It is the largest construction project in Denmark’s history, and will be as big as 80 football fields. It will be protected on three sides by an enormous sea wall and will have a harbor to receive ships. Some of the wind energy will be stored as hydrogen, which can be liquefied and shipped like liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The immediate goal is to generate 3 gigawatts, which would power half of Denmark’s buildings (its population is 6 million). The project could be scaled up to 10 gigawatts, which would provide electricity to all of Denmark and would allow 4 gigs to be exported to neighbors such as Germany. The project will begin in 2026 and will be finished between 2030 and 2033."

Stored as hydrogen, shipped like LNG, then combusted to generate power, and produce..........................................



water.

What a novel idea.

When I was working at the last big law firm I'll ever work at, we represented Vestas. It's a good company, but there are scams galore going on with the power purchase agreements and development deals that are part of the wind industry. Another lawyer at the firm ended up making many millions of dollars by going in house at one of the companies that buy and deploy the wind turbines, even though these things rarely produced the kind of output claimed. What they do is they sell off various parts of the wind projects, often for tax credits, and never really have to live up to the claimed energy production numbers.

It's legal, but like many things that are legal it stinks. The people who make the money are taking it from ratepayers and taxpayers without providing much in exchange.

Given the cost of off shore wind, the efficiency penalty of generating hydrogen through electrolysis and the efficiency loss converting hydrogen to work..... I'm rather skeptical on that prospect. But it might be the only way to fly planes other than bio-kerosene. And even there I think is a mighty big stretch given the fuel container weight and energy density penalties.

Fuel cells seem much more probably in transportation fuel, but looking at it from an economic viewpoint, I doubt off shore wind will be the way hydrogen will be produced. Just too darn expensive. Equatorial solar is about a quarter of the cost, and those costs are still dropping fast.

Gee, that sounds like...............................

big business.

SNAFU

Too bad converting electricity to hydrogen via electrolysis of water, and back to electricity via a fuel cell powerplant is at best 60% efficient.

But, are the Danes hoping to go for an "economy of scale" type of thing? And it would seem they are going for control of their power needs, self reliance and all that. Perhaps worth some extra cost?

No doubt. My college room mate was the economic analyst for wind power projects for Rabobank for many years, and there really was no analysis done on the performance of the project. It was completely driven by the legal environment and rate incentives.

My best friend in High School just retired after "selling" several wind turbines to the public through a "buy shares in green energy" scheme. He did good, not sure the "investors" will see much of a return, especially since their investment is essentially technically obsolete the day it goes on line.

All that said, by building these things, the technology gets proven, and this allows the engineers to design much better machines and the cost of wind generation is still dropping about 2% per year. In other words, the cost of wind should be about half of what it is today in 30 years.

Yes, but in a quick search, that number is as good, and sometimes better than other forms of electrical generation

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=coal+electricity+efficiency&ia=web

https://www.brighthubengineering.co...r-plants/#natural-gas-fired-power-plants

Of course, it's on the internet and there are likely some built in biases depending on which link you click on.

But in general, even at 50% efficiency perhaps the best benefit would be the end products of electrons and..................... water?

So, how does that compare to the efficiency of transcontinental electrical transmission lines?

Energy independence is a big motivating factor, as is providing a proving ground for their domestic industry. The Danes export a LOT of wind turbines, and having a big show case of the things helps sell. And they do love selling.

The hydrogen thing, in my opinion is a pipe dream borne out of group think. The electricity part makes enough sense I won't quibble. Off shore wind is still relatively expensive, but when your other options are importing natural gas from Putin or the Middle East?

Besides, they are feeling terribly guilty about all the money they are making selling oil from their North Sea fields, and I think this project helps assuage their collective national guilt. Kinda like the Norwegian government decided to basically offer enough tax credits that anyone that bought an electric car did so at nearly zero cost. All of a sudden, 54% of sales were electric cars? Who would have thunk it? Meanwhile, keep pumping, baby!

Yep,

keep pumping................................

but everyone, please look the other way at all our cool new technology.!

One of these days, they will solve the mysteries of controlled fusion reaction. And then the world will run on electricity and Hydrogen. But I doubt it will happen within the lifetime of anyone posting on this board.

Building an island won't make much of a carbon footprint, I'm sure.

You should apply for a grant to study the matter......

As soon as my people from "above" release the plans.

Problem is, we're still not sure if we should annihilate all humans first, then just use the planet as our own.

Thanks for this. That's a nice explanation of one of the reasons why you can't believe anything you're told about the actual cost of renewable energy. A few years back I was privy to an analysis of some renewables proposals pricing. Basically, if you manipulate the residual or salvage value of the project after the 20 years or so of the PPA, you can justify any price you want. No idea how they get away with this but some of the numbers seemed pretty unrealistic. Honestly, I'm not convinced the majority of these projects are even intended primarily to make money over the long run, but that's another discussion.

Regarding capacity, the numbers in the OP are claiming a capacity factor for this new turbine HALF AGAIN as much as the Danish offshore fields are currently producing. Barring an explanation of how they hope to achieve that performance, that is just way beyond optimistic.

How much carbon dioxide and energy was required to BUILD this monstrosity?? Lifespan? Maintenance cost?

Bah........

The machinery to build them and maintain them run on gay european tears. That is a bottomless well.

Company is proposing to use off shore turbines in a new wind farm up here and folks don't like it at all, except for the landowners.

Good thing DJT penned an EO for small reactors..

In all fairness, that applies to all projects, including fossil fuels. The things you mention, plus things like externalization of reclamation costs, etc, makes the economics a barrel of fish hooks.

I suppose burning 20 years worth of fossil fuels to build a 'green island' makes sense to some.

Seems to me the whole wind and solar energy premise was to make it available to individuals, cutting the need to be paired to energy companies. It was soon realized the cost savings was non-existent, thus marketing energy related products became a deceptive paradox. (Except to Prius drivers - pun intended) If it doesn't work on a smaller scale it won't work elsewhere. (i.e. Lib Think - It's the ideology man)

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses equaled about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2015 through 2019.

The only place presently that accepts unusable turbine blades is a landfill near Burlington, IA.. They grind them and bury them. Wonder how long it will be until they "break-down"? Never. What was used for the manufacturing of these blades? Crude oil.
Presently, Germany is having a hard time keep the lights on. They are in the depth of winter and their 30,000 turbines aren't producing much with low wind.
Panels are buried in snow.
Germany is surviving by buying natural gas from Russia, coal from Poland and nuclear from France. A misguided Merkel orchestrated the removal of nuclear plants after [bleep] making a commitment to renewables - which aren't renewable.

Valsdad,

You're comparing something different. You're examples regard the initial generation of the electricity.

The efficiency number I provided presumes you already have electricity, do the conversion to hydrogen, and back to electricity.......and in that round trip, you only get back 60% of your original electricity.

Got it.

But, how does converting electric to hydrogen to electricity compare, efficiency and cost-wise to battery storage? (environmental costs included, like mining and disposal of old ones)

As Dutch pointed out, a barrel of fishhooks, many of them treble hooks.

Burning Fossile fuels to start producing Renewable energy.

or

Burning Fossile fuels to produce even more fossile fuels.


Everything costs... but I would rather have Renewable energy in the end.

That COULD apply to all projects, if all things were equal. But when you're directly comparing (supposed) production costs from a regulated utility-owned generating asset with a merchant-owned renewables asset, the advantage in manipulating the cost numbers is clearly with the PPA side of the equation. There's just too much scrutiny of utilities for them to do the kind of cooking the books that it seems is going on with merchant renewables projects. (I can't say about utility owned projects.) This doesn't even address the question of why you might be directly comparing assets that run with a 90+% capacity factor against those in the 20-40% range. My contention is that renewables pricing today is primarily about running the coal and nuclear plants off the grid permanently, not about making the most money. Even if that's not the case, their (qouted) cost numbers are in all likelihood the least useful of any type of generation.

Efficiency, shmefficiency. The important thing is that it makes Liberals feel good.

A giant one square mile of solar panels in space can generate the capacity of a nuclear power plant. It can be beamed to earth using lasers or focused microwaves to where ever the power is needed. However, no bird or plane can fly in the beam without getting zapped. A study was done and the solar panels could be built in space for the same price as a nuclear power plant. This was before SpaceX's reusable rocket and lower costs.

Seems like nuclear power would be cheaper and actually safer in the long run using thorium instead of uranium or plutonium. The half life of thorium is only a couple hundred years instead of a couple of thousand for uranium and plutonium. Nuclear can run 24/7, and only shut down during spring or fall for maintenance or refueling when demand is lower.

Solar, wind, or nukes only solve about 20% of the fossil fuel problem. Another 20% is vehicle transportation. However, cities produce 40% of the CO2. This is from building to fuel use. It takes a lot of steel and concrete to build a city. Steel requires smelting with coal to produce. So does copper, zinc, lead, tin, aluminum and glass, and even making bricks.

Grid level battery storage is not practical with our current battery technologies.

Be interesting to count the revolutions per minute and derive the velocity of blade tips.

Your point is spot on.

The trouble is that we're trying to make decisions today, for the future, with yesterday's numbers. In that case, I tend to lean to looking at trend figures. What is the cost trend of solar, wind, fossil fuels and nuclear? Well, best I can figure, the cost of solar is trending down by as much as 6% per year, the cost of wind by about 2% a year, and the cost of oil is indeterminable due to both fracking technology bursting on the scene and geopolitics. So, one would need to make a SWAG, and the best I would be able to come up with is "it's not going to go down". The cost of nuclear, likewise, is driven by politics, not economics, and therefore not predictable.

My view is that you have two technologies with consistent down trends in cost vs. two sources with stable or unpredictable cost trends. If I had to make a choice, I'm going to put money on the sources with costs trending down.

To my limited knowledge the blade tips must be kept subsonic, to avoid a portion of the blade living in that stressful transonic zone.

New technology may have changed that.

Each blade tip traverses nearly 1/2 mile per revolution, so 20 RPM will put the blade tips at nearly 600 MPH or a bit shy of Mach 1.

A few thoughts for consideration:

We need a mix of power sources, one size doesn't fit all.
Rotor tips do a max of 180-200 mph.
Wind farms pay significant taxes and landowner payments are equally significant.
Wind farms make it economically possible to keep land in grass and untilled.
Almost everyone got something for Christmas that plugs in and uses electricity.
Wind farms have no fuel costs and operating them doesn't pollute.
Wind turbines kill birds. So do cars and trucks.
Wind farms require a lot of concrete, steel, copper and other materials.
Nothing is perfect, everything requires tradeoffs.

Wind farms suck. My nephew sold his place in the country because of the noise. I pay 50 dollars per meter because our power company is required to buy the expensive power under Obummer law. 150 bucks a month for nothing. Gee thanks. Edk

So much for the fallacy that Wind Farms create no pollution.
Noise pollution is very real.

Wonder how it compares to a modern average size nuclear plant.

Wonder how the panels would fair with a meteor shower?

My major issue is that a lot of wind turbines come from China and what is their lifespan and who is going to pay to tear them down when they fail and the end of their life span? Probably the tax payer again

Between 1980 and 1984 I was designing a wind mill with a 7' prop.
I could do the power conversion electronics, but the wife did the computer programming on a borrowed Pet computer for collecting anemometer data, storing on a cassette, and then displaying the wind survey on the little screen.

As the years went by, I realized that "alternative energy" meant "not financially feasible".

As an engineer, I find renewables neat and interesting but I think trying to convert all generation to them is going to significantly increase cost. Plus they don't really work without some kind of storage because they are intermittent and erratic. After it's all done they aren't as green as presented.

The sharks around that thing will be well fed by all the sea bird carcasses.

Pacific Gas and Electric now shuts down the grid when the wind blows for fear of another power utility caused forest fire.

Result: burned down eco friendly windmills

Since an a/c creates a net gain of heat, I'm surprised that haven't started telling us to turn them off.

Nothing wrong with gas and coal which burn clean now, at least in the USA.