A new wind turbine product is slated for release toward the end of 2011 and it might actually be usable by electric companies, to see an article about it, click here.
I’m going to do something they failed to do on their site and actually explain what problems this turbine fixes when compared to the normal wind turbines, or at least do it in such a way that the audience readily understands what it means. (I’m not saying you’re dumb, I’m saying that they didn’t go far enough in explaining the benefits of their technology).
1. Probably less likely to kill birds – current wind turbines kill birds. Lots and lots of birds. It’s the only industry in the US that is allowed to kill endangered birds. It’s stupid how many birds are killed by these things. Putting the wind turbine 1000 feet in the air results in waaaaaaaay fewer birds being in the flight path of the blades, hence you will likely have fewer dead birds. I say likely because knowing how a new piece of technology will affect wildlife is difficult to determine before implementation and there may be something about this floating turbine that will kill even more stuff.
2. More stable electricity source – Because the wind blows much harder and more constantly the higher in altitude you go there is a much more stable source of wind. Combine that with a better turbine that can run at even low levels of wind and you’ve got something that can actually act as baseload electricity. You’ll still need to backup every kilowatt of wind power with a fast starting natural gas turbine, but you’ll hopefully be using those a lot less than we do now. For instance, right now we use the fast starting natural gas turbines to back up our current wind power so much that we are wasting more natural gas than if we were to run strictly natural gas power plants without the wind power.
The second one is really important in the area of making wind power an actual usable source of electricity. If we can get wind power into the realm of real baseload electricity then things could get real good on the alternative energy circuit.
Now for the problems.
1. Cost. How much is this thing going to cost? Will be it be prohibitive to put a lot of them out there to make a wind farm? If the cost of the unit can’t be recovered in electricity sales within a five to ten year time span then a lot of electricity companies may give this a pass just because they won’t have the upfront capital to buy and install them.
2. Weather. While the wind blows much more steadily up there at 1000 feet in the air, the weather can be a lot more severe up there as well. Especially since these things are going to be veritable lightning magnets. Also it’s nice that the turbine runs on low winds, but what is the maximum wind speed at which the tethers snap and the wind turbine crashes into downtown Las Vegas? Something to think about and something that may rule these things out for pretty much any place that has severe weather.
3. Maintenance. Fixing these things when they break could be a real bitch. Considering that you either have to fly up there to fix it, or reel the sucker back down to the ground. Plus, what happens when something that is keeping it in the air breaks? How hard is it going to hit the ground? How far could it travel before crashing into something? Again, something to think about, and if the solutions are too expensive, again it rules this approach out.
So new tech, could be cool and useful, could make Wind Power more viable, but we’ll see.
The article says the units function in winds up to 63 mph. That’s a Whole Gale, which is two steps down on the Beaufort scale from a freakin’ hurricane. So as long as whoever’s operating the thing pays attention to local tropical storm warnings, the wind speed shouldn’t be an issue.
As to maintenance, the diagram shows a winch system, so I would think they’d just reel it down to fix it. Yeah, it might take a while and create some downtime, but I can’t imagine it’d be any different than mechanical maintenance in a standard turbine.
As to cost…yeah, cost is an issue. More details would be needed. Just from looking at it though, cost of materials has got to be loads less than a traditional turbine, simply because there’s no tower. Manufacturing might be expensive at first due to lack of specialists, but that problem solves itself as the market for the product increases.
I’m not sure how many birds fly at a thousand feet, but that altitude combined with the lower profile of the design would definitely reduce the slayings.
Good points, but as to the 63 mph wind, you are thinking in terms of ground level wind, not 1000 feet in altitude wind. As you move higher into the air it generally gets windier and at that high up, 63 mph might actually be somewhat common conditions depending on the location.
General wind versus altitude graph from a balloon experiment: http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/investigations/es1702/es1702page09.cfm
Some comments from a variety of scientists on the wind versus altitude question: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00160.htm