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« The Future of Coal | Main | Update on Saft-Johnson Controls Joint Venture »

March 16, 2007

Comments

amazingdrx

Bigger is better and cheaper per kwh.

But consider this? A small 3 kw wind machine powering every suitable home or business location in the US would be a good thing too.

Featuring: Really flexible blades about 10 feet long that bend instead of break. And simple grid synchonized electronics.

All molded plastic stamped out on an assembley line. For 300 bucks per copy. those could be installed and grid connected for 1500 dollars per kw of real capacity. No capacity factor BS involved.

But these huge machines? I think breakthroughs to under 1000 dollars per kw could be attained with large scale mass production and installation.

It is going to be important for the government to set aside conservation land in the high wind areas of the prairie states that can be leased at reasonable prices to wind power producers.

Otherwise land speculation will build a new OPEC, with foreign government corporations taking major stakes. Chinese government owned corporations are already trying to monopolize Canadian tar sands oil.

amazingdrx

The organic model for large structures that resist the destructive force of wind, while harvesting renewable energy (in this case solar energy) are trees.

Constructed from small efficiently produced units, cells, the whole structure arranged to bend instead of break.

Wind generator tensegrity structures, like communications towers, could use the same design principles.

Very light tower units, the cells, of welded steel. Mass produced, then assembled into huge wind harvesting structures, 50 megawatt scale structures.

intead of blades as on the current large wind designs. Roller furling sail wing "blades". That automatically adjust their surface area to the wind speed.

The sail wing "blades" deployed within the steel tower units. Curved sides on the tower units to form the blade shape.

The current size of the largest wind machine blades are running up against the "King Kong" engineering limit. The bigger you go the heavier you go by an exponential factor. So King kong would crush himself.

This hollow frame design is the answer. The amount of wind load on each part is controllable with the roller furling sails.

Wind load goes up with the cube of wind speed, just like the weight of king kong goes up with the cube of height. Relieve the wind load by making it controllable and the structure can be much lighter, alleviating the load due to weight and centripital acceleration.

Crazy Jules Vernism, hehey.

John F.

amazingdrx writes:
"A small 3 kw wind machine powering every suitable home or business location in the US would be a good thing too."

The key word here is "suitable". Wind energy increases with the cube of its velocity. For any given level of global turbine manufacturing output, the way to deploy it that maximizes wind energy harvest is to install them where the wind is best. Even if they're out in the boonies, the higher electricity production dwarfs any transmission losses.

amazingdrx

That is assuming locations that average 12 mph or more are suitable for these small units. With solar covering summer and wind winter, in many locations these designs are complimentary. Then when grid connected a more constant renewable supply results.

Biogas digestion from manure, garbage, and farm waste can also fill in gaps in this sort of distributed supply.

But I like remote high wind (hopefully conservation land)areas like the great plains and floating offshore for huge wind machines.

Chaindropz

I think it is worth saying that Ultracapacitors are used to trim the blades on the large wind turbines. You have a number of articles on ultracapacitors under energy storage.

Brian Wolf

I am the inventor of a new type of electric vehicle propulsion which I call surface wave electric vehicles. The concept utizes an electroactive polymer to create travelling surface wave, not unlike a seismic s-wave, to propel vehicles.

I welcome your comments at my blog website
www.surfacewavecars.blogspot.com .

gerry thompson

i have expe in wind turbines and for now i love the site i have..check it out guys..

http://www.windpowercost.org/
http://www.windpowercost.org/
http://www.windpowercost.org/

generic propecia

Is it possible to have king kong jumping around and surviving his
various crash landings? Why not? Please explain this in terms of
atomic physics using natural units (planck units). An answer might
discuss the force of the impact of King Kong (use approximate
equations) and the chemical bonds in his bones. Ignore factors of 2,
pi, and such pesty constants.

Penegra

Great write-up dude. What you suggested I did the same and I must say I got fruitful results. Your step by step instructions are clear and I could make out my way to success. Thanks for sharing this with us. Looking forward to more from you.

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