Posted on 05/20/2016 8:05:51 PM PDT by Lorianne
Deep sea oil drilling makes sense, economically. Deep sea wind farms do not, at the moment, but that’s not stopping energy giants from trying.
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This week a consortium led by Norwegian energy company Statoil and Siemens won approval to build the world’s first commercial-scale floating wind farm, in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. With five six-megawatt turbines tethered to the sea floor and stabilized by floating steel tubes, the Hywind project is expected to be completed next year.
Floating wind farms can operate in seas much deeper than ones with foundations embedded in the sea floor. As a result they can access the powerful, steady winds that blow far offshore. Over the deep seas off Japan, for instance, there’s enough potential wind power to meet the country’s electricity needs many times over, and two pilot floating turbines have been operating there since 2013.
At the moment there are more than 40 projects, using multiple design concepts, under way worldwide. Tethered loosely to the sea floor, the turbines can operate in depths of up to 1,000 meters.
The obstacle, naturally, is cost: floating turbines cost more to build than onshore wind farms, not to mention conventional power plants. A 2014 study in the journal Renewable Energy found that the cost of energy from a hypothetical floating wind farm would be between $93 and $268 per megawatt-hour—in the range of conventional offshore turbines but far more, for instance, than electricity from natural gas plants.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
The article should address challenges associated with power transmission from the turbines to the customer location, but it does not.
I really don’t see the problem here. All you need is a taxpayer subsidy.
What happens when the propeller blades get iced up to where the no longer spin.....as they will in the North Sea....what....about six months out of the year? Also, it is my understanding that winds in those climes are frequently SO strong and wicked that the towers and propeller blades will very often be twisted or broken and unusable. Not to mention the ice build-up so heavy it sinks the floating platforms and the windmills on them.
One big boondoggle, comin’ up!
No economically implausible concept is “great”. Period.
And all the dead seabirds end up as shark bate.
They finally got around to mentioning this in about the 20th paragraph.
Also, they'd better be careful what they ask for. If you produced a significant amount of energy from windmills, you're more or less be directly changing the environment.
Giant fans all over the deserts, the oceans, the prairies. They just can’t build enough fans for all the liberal mental BS. All I see is decapitated, dismembered birds everywhere. Liberals SUCK.
My Electricity costs me $0.10 per kilowatt/hr. Try to match that, Eco-Weenies
If they put them off the coast of Guam, will the island blow away?
Has any wind turbine been profitable?
Cuts down on bird poop on your car
“If they put them off the coast of Guam, will the island blow aWay?”
Maybe they could put the wind turbines in the clouds. Then they could tether them to the ground with the power cable and move them where they need to be/S
Just need a federal grant of a few hundred million to do a feasibility study.
Yea, that’s the ticket!!!!
The build on these turbines will have to be seriously robust. I’ve seen cockpit assemblies from navy planes that were installed for less than one year and they looked like they’d done time on the bottom of the ocean. They looked ANCIENT.
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