- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
"High-altitude winds between 1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters) above the ground are stronger and steadier than surface winds. These winds are abundant, widely available, and carbon-free.
"The physics of wind power makes this resource extremely valuable. “When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold, triple the speed, and you have 27 times the energy,” explained Gong Zeqi "
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This thread is telling me one thing and one thing only: I need to see Big Hero 6…
Incredible progress on a concept that has been seeking investment for last 15 years. It doesn’t just provide 1.2mw, it also operates at a higher capacity factor than capturing winds closer to ground. I’m sure it can scale even higher.
This is useful for clean energy shipping. Design supports an unthethered airship that produces H2 and transports it at the same time. I believe the design would support forward momentum directly upwind, but some tacking angle would be supported.
This is not just a breakthrough in wind energy generation, it is a breakthrough in airship capability.
Meanwhile in the US, rich assholes are firmly convinced coal and oil are the future.
God I hate this place.
It’s late stage capitalism.
These fools are just hoarding what they have and trying to continue the « golden age ».
China will be the next superpower for sure
An untethered AWE cannot produce any power
Contentious. Thethering increases power production by restricting the “sail movement power”. The blimp part is highly/perfectly aerodynamic, and the betz limit means that a turbine does not fully “act like a parachute”. Ground vehicles that proved faster than wind speed directly upwind could use similar principle to turn a propulsion prop, that increases forward/apparent wind speed generating more power.
This relates to same incredulity for faster than wind upwind ground experiment, and needs experimental proof. But principles of sailing are indeed magical, and simply generating enough power to move forward is extremely useful, even if tacking were needed.
Also, it looks cool as fuck!
…produces H2?
electrolysis of water (partially from starting water reservoir, and partially from air humidity = dehumidifier step), can displace water weight with increased H2 pressure in airship. Can put an infinite amount of these over ocean with no land lease costs, but moving giant ships solves the issue of thethering them.
Shira, get me my god damned tea!
I’d be more interested about the cable that is going to bring all that power to the ground level. With traditional tech that would weigh a shit-ton. Light weight generator would be easy peasy compared to that.
Maybe over estimate temperature deratings and maybe add a new wind speed thermal pulling capacity. But more likely forgo European and NA electrical standards entirely and submit questionables value for CE approval.
Maybe there’s energy intensive processes that they could do up there instead. Something like Haber Bosch. Then bring the products down.
City in the clouds
Where they’re keeping my crew.
Will it be run by Billy Dee Williams?
Saw this in Big Hero Six. It’s a crazy concept. Hopefully it works.
I wonder what happens to the world when we take this energy from the wind? Like what are the effects of harvesting wind power?
I feel like this should be an xkcd explains (if it isn’t already one)
Enough wind redirection could affect weather patterns. But we won’t run out of wind, spoiler but wind power is just indirect solar power.
To be fair everything but nuclear is just indirect solar power (and if you count other stars besides just Sol, even fission kinda is)
Edit: And I guess geothermal isn’t really solar power either, that’s residual heat from formation of the planet
Tidal too. Slows the Earth’s rotation a minuscule amount more than usual.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
(And also @[email protected] as per their other, simultaneous reply within the upper sub-thread)Isn’t the gravitational pull from the Moon part of the force behind winds? My reasoning here is something like Moon orbits the Earth -> Moon exerts gravitational pull on Earth’s oceans -> water from oceans get displaced as the Moon orbits -> water displacement displaces air -> breeze/wind.
Ya that makes sense but looking it up that doesn’t seem to be a major source of wind and I don’t know why not. Probably has an effect but is order of magnitudes weaker than solar heating and Coriolis effect (which having looked it up seems to be the #2 cause of wind).
I’m no scientist but I think it would take an absurd and unrealistic amount of these to have any sort of noticeable effect on average wind speeds.
Typically wind is dissipated by friction losses with the surface I think (bleeding off speed and energy by making waves, waving trees, and just rubbing against the ground) and wind is generated by heat from the sun (warm air expanding pushing against cold air, creating pressure differentials across thousands of miles).
Because wind is quick to regenerate and this does nothing to stop that the result is probably a pretty small drop in average wind speeds around the new mill and no greater ramifications than slightly less pollen travel in the spring.
The windmills will steal all the spinning from hurricanes, a bust to home owners insurance
This could be devastating to kite sales.
While it is rather complex and hard to predict, the most likely global outcomes are fewer extreme weather events and extremely mild cooling. The hairy ball theorem tells us there’s already somewhere on the globe with no wind, so it’s not that big of a deal to convert some wind into electricity. This particular approach couldn’t convert “all” wind into electricity.
https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/spinning-skies-how-earths-rotation-shapes-our-weather – We won’t run out of wind until after we start slowing down the rotation of the earth, and we watch that pretty closely to know when to add leap seconds, and I imagine it’s an just absolutely huge store of energy in the form of angular momentum (et. al.).
I feel like all the responses you’re getting are probably generally correct in the context of wind at/near ground level. But I feel like sticking a bunch of these in a JET STREAM is (maybe?) an entirely different matter. Or at least it could be, and I too am curious what the potential ramifications are.
Jet stream winds are not just wind like any other, are they? Various jet streams have serious impacts on weather. If they harnessed and substantively bled off the Pacific jet stream, are there potentially grave consequences on the already variable El Niño and La Niña oscillation? If it could cause serious shifts in the weather, that would affect the livability of areas, create more dangerous weather conditions, and impact farming way around the globe from their wind farm installation.
Maybe none of these are genuine scientific concerns, but frankly I don’t trust China to do the science for the rest of us. Pretending these are genuine concerns, say they screw something up - it probably doesn’t too seriously impact Chinese weather as they harness the jet stream winds right at the point where it leaves their airspace. But the ramifications for the rest of the world could then be dire, and I’m not sure that is remotely a concern for them. Could be an economic advantage even. Two birds, one stone.
In theory nothing. Wind is just the flow of air from high pressure to low, which itself is caused by heating from sunlight. If uncollected, the kinetic energy of the wind would eventually be lost as heat to friction between air molecules.
It will impact weather patterns and severity. I’ve certainly not done the work on how much, nor do I really have a grasp on the scales involved, so that’s mostly a meaningless statement, but I can say with confidence the impact will be real. Just like dams affecting rivers, icecap mass affecting heat reflection, and solar panels increasing local temperatures.
Given that one of the impacts of global climate change has been increased weather severity and chaos, I am not afraid of positing that reducing the severity and chaos of the jet streams could be a good thing.
Similarly, there are some interesting projects going on surrounding the use of aerogel and other materials that could help focus sunlight at the top of the oceans, where evaporation can actually occur, that are focused on creating clean drinking water—and while I think this is a good end unto itself, a nice side benefit would be less solar energy reaching the ocean and raising the body temperature.
For once, it’s cool to hear about proposed industrial projects and their side effects and they’re maybe positive, instead of “well that sounds like it’s going to leech heavy metals into the surrounding community”
Of course, aerogel is horrible to work with and clogs if it doesn’t break, and nobody else has solved the problem of scaling up and dealing with the steam getting in the way. On the lightweight flying jet stream turbine front, well, I’ve been following development for 8 years and nobody has even solved the ‘limited supply of helium leaking away into space’ problem for starters. And it’s hard making an efficient generator so lightweight that it can fly. So we don’t have to worry about them potentially improving global weather severity just yet. Or potentially devastating our remaining populations of migratory birds!
Say what you will at least China seems produce some much needed tech in exchange for selling their people to capitalism, the latter which almost all countries do but in exchange for funnelling the 99.99 % of the revenue to billionaires and/or war (pulled the stats out of my hass).
They aren’t limited by democracy.
This is a factual statement. Whether people like how it sounds or not.
It is true, though lacking fail safes of a real democracy is a dangerous game to play in the long term, even if technically positive in an instance. As most autocratic leaders seek to gain continuous and more power. Or their predecessor does.
Switching to renewables makes a lot of sense from an economic and ecologic point of view but also geostrategically. Unfortunately, Western governments have pretty much lost the ability to act on those considerations. This is due to then being beholden to a few billionaires who would rather see civilisation as we know it end than accept a few percentage points revenue drop for a couple of quarters.
It’s because the regulatory bodies are captured by the interests of the fossil fuel companies
Neat.
Any real reason you can’t fill them with hydrogen? A fire can’t start inside the bubble, because there’s no oxygen. If a fire starts on the outer surface, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s hydrogen or not. It’s also cheaper and slightly better at lifting. There is some more danger with handling it on the ground, but you should be able to mitigate that with safety procedures.
Hydrogen is hard to contains long term, it leaks through most materials. I’m no expert on the matter but I suspect the gains in lift would be partly negated by the changes to the envelope of the container.
Yes the Hindenburg disaster had more to do with the flammable paint used than the hydrogen inside it. But the safety procedures when working with on the ground may be more expensive than just using helium.
Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.
It’s a novel approach, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones trying to harvest energy from high winds: https://skysails-power.com/how-power-kites-work/
Promising concept too, but this is 250-500x the scale of that.
How so, when skysails talks about “Venyo harnesses the power of high-altitude winds with speeds of 13 m/s and a continuous output of up to 200 kW.” while the S1500 is featured with “Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.”?
It’s more like factor 5-6.Their v2 product produces about 5kw at much lower altitude (weaker 9m/s winds). 13m/s is a big ask. They don’t go as high as 1000m. I was comparing to their v2 product instead of the 200w theoretical max of their v1 product. But the blimp may not produce 1.2mw all the time either.
Yah, we need to have them running to get real numbers.
I find both approaches promising.
Ways to make electric energy available without burning fossil fuel are good.
That looks complicated and frankly kind of stupid. Imagine trying to get something like that working without having an engineer standing by that can get everything fixed once it crashes down or something else like that happens.
IDK, the benefit to the goofy kite design is that the aerial portion is far simpler - and there’s no massive energized cable hanging in the air. It’s a little… non-conventional, but it’s a great deal less complicated than floating a massive generator like the chinese solution. Downside is presumably lower energy density per unit, but the reduction in operational footprint might make the two designs competitive. It’s good people are exploring both options!
The simpler design might lead to lower prices per kWh, which will in the end play a role together with reliability, e.g min/avg power output, durability, outages.
I find it impressive how creative engineers get. Let’s hope for a third option ;)
Fair, but please name one single way to generate that kind of electrical power that can be fixed by a layperson in case something crashes.
At least the Chinese version doesn’t rely on as many moving parts to keep it aloft. And a complicated mechanical system to produce a flight path. The blimp itself is complicated, but it’s not a kite.
In the end the TCO (per kWh) will play a major role, especially for big installations and for smaller ones the price floor.
I suppose a helium filled blimp with 12 turbines will be more pricey than a kite with a generator. If the kite fills your need, pick that.
Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.
But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won’t be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.
But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.
They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.
This looks like a good way to bring power to a remote area, and China has lots of those.
1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters)
I feel like this needs a second look.
As a European… Are feet logarithmic? Wouldn’t even surprise me that much.
Only when viewed from the north.
And on Tuesdays.
No, but feet are analogue. Hands are digital.
They used different people’s feet.
Chinese feet are smaller.
So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.
Agreed. I had the same thought and then saw the numbers and was like wait, “which part of this is the fucked up part?”
they’re talking about the extra 0 on 10,000
I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.
The zero key got stuck.
Am I crazy or didn’t we see these in Big Hero 6?
Yes but, you see, that was an animated film aka a work of fiction. This is happening in reality.
a l a l a l a l h a BKinda.
Finally the stupid floating jet engine looking turbines from Big Hero 6, except IRL they actually look good.
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