[HN Gopher] A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
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A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
Author : Biba89
Score : 21 points
Date : 2021-01-01 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| A good use for a wind turbine far from the power grid is to power
| ammonia production at the base, which otherwise needs only air
| and water feedstocks.
|
| If erected on a farm, it provides both fertilizer and fuel for
| the farm, and any surplus for neighboring farms. Since the
| requirements for both inputs are wholly predictable, the value
| proposition is ironclad.
|
| A great advantage of this use is that it is extremely tolerant of
| intermittent supply; when wind is slack, you just leave off
| production; and produced ammonia is, exactly, storage, for as
| many barrels as you care to bother filling.
|
| There have been several recent projects demonstrating practical
| small-scale catalytic production of ammonia. An amazing thing
| about ammonia as fertilizer is that saturated aqueous solution
| may be injected behind a plow disc and be taken up by soil
| bacteria so quickly that no odor can be detected, following
| behind the plow. Injecting ammonia while plowing probably
| produces much less runoff to waterways than the much more
| frequently seen surface spraying.
| jonplackett wrote:
| How the hell do they build / erect something like this?
| Nokinside wrote:
| 68 of these bad boys produces the same power output as one modern
| BWR (100% optimal and constant wind power availability).
| ordu wrote:
| It is a thing of 220m diameter and 260m tall.
|
| It is just sad, that nytimes is happy to convert meters into
| feets, football fields and Empire State Buildings, but doesn't
| want to show metric numbers in a footnote, so I wouldn't need to
| find a converter to make sense of those numbers.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I don't know, the diagram of the turbine next to the Empire
| State Building made it much easier for me to picture standing
| near it. Awe-inspiring bordering on a kind of primal fear.
| kaliszad wrote:
| Does anybody have good data on how size improves usage and
| efficiency? I would ideally like to see statistics of how large a
| turbine hits what power output during a year.
|
| I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always
| in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite
| important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even
| nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of days in
| the year (at least Temelin in Czechia)
| TheMblabla wrote:
| I don't have numbers but generally, compared to smaller
| turbines, a larger blade length means a faster blade tip to
| maintain the same rotational frequency (the end of the blade
| will be going faster around the turbines circumference). This
| creates more noise, and noise is a HUGE limiting factor, so
| they increase the turbine's torque to get more power from
| slower rotations. That means a larger, more complex, and more
| expensive generator in upfront and maintenance cost.
| eigenvector wrote:
| The "who has the biggest turbine" race between wind turbine OEMs
| is the Formula 1 of the wind industry. It's mostly about bragging
| rights and long-range R&D. The vast majority of new turbines
| being installed today are in the familiar 2-4 MW class. The >10
| MW turbines are more important as an R&D platform than as an
| actual contributor to energy production.
|
| 4 MW class onshore turbines first introduced in 2017 are just now
| starting to hit their stride and be installed at large scale.
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(page generated 2021-01-01 23:02 UTC)