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Thursday, January 04, 2007

Wind Power In Stormy Waters


"QUANTUM SHOT" #75


Offshore Wind Turbine Farms: Ambitious and Beautiful.

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

There is nothing like the promise of readily available and bountiful energy in our resource-strapped world. Based on data determining that average wind speeds at sea are higher than on land, the modern offshore wind farms promise to be exceptionally energy efficient. When the weather is calm they also look fetchingly beautiful:

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Rev Wind Farm panorama (image source)

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

But when the seas are rough, the graceful structure is put to the test, and it's not a fact that every turbine will survive:
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

The Horn’s Reef project, located 14 kilometres off Denmark’s West coast in the North Sea, is located in some of Europe’s roughest waters. (source article)
“There are other offshore wind parks in the world but everybody agrees that Horn’s Reef is the first ’real’ offshore wind park because of its size and its placement in the North Sea. So far, all other offshore parks have been placed close to land in protected waters“ says project manager Jens Bonefeldt. “The North Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water in the world.”

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Floating wind turbine.
It is now possible to build offshore wind parks
at sea depths of 200-300 meters.

8 to 10 meter waves are expected at the site
(not counting nasty "global warming" storm surprises)

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

Some failed turbine structures (source here):
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, ArchitectureEnergy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

- One of the turbines failed in spectacular fashion following a lightning strike, the blades disintegrated, hurling debris at speeds approaching 200 mph.
- A whole blade weighing over a tonne became detached from the VESTAS turbine.
- The pictures above show a spectacular failure of a turbine during a storm in Lichtenau, Germany (Thanks to Wilfred Heck for supplying these photographs).



Many Hollywood thrillers show a helicopter chase through the forest of such giant windmills. The havoc produced by the flying blades is usually quite spectacular...
Huge wind farms may be a dream come true, but it's also a challenge to designers and engineers, demanding a combination of experience and new thinking.

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

CONSTRUCTION OF THE OFFSHORE WIND FARM

In 2002 the world’s largest offshore wind farm was constructed at the Danish west coast. The Horns Rev wind farm is sited 14-20 km into the North Sea, west of Blåvands Huk, and represents the first phase in the Danish Government’s ambitious plan - to have wind turbines with a total capacity of 4000 MW in Danish waters before 2030.

Thanks to Gunnar Britse, photographer (all rights reserved), we can witness the grandiose operation of setting up a forest of windmills at various Dutch (and Swedish) offshore locations:

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture
Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

"The world’s first major offshore wind power plant has since December 2002 produced enough energy to run 150,000 Danish households. Eighty 2.0 MW turbines from the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturer Vestas are sited across an area of 20 sq. km." (source) With the Horns Rev project it will be possible to determine whether or not the Danish Government’s ambitious energy plan is feasible. And whether or not the long-bladed Goliaths will survive the harshest of North Sea storms.

Energy, Heavy Machinery, Construction, Architecture

More info: 1, 2, 3, 4

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COMMENTS:

14 Comments:

Anonymous alinush said...

wow truly amazing pieces of engineering!

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Anonymous Rick said...

They have built a lot of those in my neck of the woods, but I've never seen them out in the water like that. It's amazing how huge they are up close and personal.

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Blogger Tiel Aisha Ansari said...

The failed ones look like birds that have flown into someone window, and fallen crumpled to the sidewalk.

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Anonymous Anita said...

This is amazing! Nice collection!

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Too many wind turbines leads to global air slowing

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Anonymous fuse13 said...

also, the wind pushing so many turbines actually makes the earth spin faster

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Anonymous Poetry said...

spinning energy from hurricanes...
sounds good to me... Now if only someone could figure out how to to all that insufferable heat they have in the south and west every summery. Imagine converting so much solar energy to electricity or hot water that the ambient temperature went down one degree...after all, dissimlar metals release electricity when in contact under heat...

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Blogger Avi Abrams said...

Fuse13: - LOL

Poetry - converting solar energy will the subject of our next post in this series...

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

You don't even mention the idea of Nuclear power... A lot of people worry about the waste, but the fact of the matter is that it's been thought through and it's not a problem. You can eat Uranium cake (the byproduct of nuclear reactions, 99.7% pure uranium) by the spoonful and it won't harm you for years. One scientist even offered to do so until the environmentalists allowed the opening of Yucca mountain's nuclear waste storage facility. This isn't just a waste storage facility, there's also future hopes of refining the uranium cake into more fuel for future use (technology right now doesn't exist, but it may in the future, that's why we keep the stuff). Transportation is also non-hazardous. They shot the storage containers with rockets and they survived, what more do you want?

What about Chernobyl and 3 mile island? 3 mile island was an almost-fuck-up. The most radiation _anyone_ encountered was about that of a chest x-ray (and spread out over a longer period of time). As for Chernobyl, that was a shitty reactor, even by soviet Russia's standards. IIRC, they used liquid graphite instead of water for reactor cooling. Water, as it heats up, makes the reaction less reactive. Graphite, when heated up, makes the reaction _more_ reactive. No wonder the thing melted down.

I'm not even going to get environmental impacts (you think fish like those turbines at all?), the scalability (how many solar panels will you need to power the US?), the cost, and the waste products (think: solar panels) of manufacturing items needed for each method of power generation. I'll leave that up to you for your own research.

Cold fusion, the holy grail of power generation, is a ways off still (Tokamak is a joke and a money hole). But until then, lets not run around like chickens with our heads cut off. Please oh please run the numbers before we panic about stuff like this.

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Blogger Avi Abrams said...

wow, thanks for this comment - good food for thought

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

for more information on offshore wind projects in North America visit www.offshorewind.net

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

they should be installed in the congressional halls...

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Anonymous John Eberhardt said...

All I can say is WOW! Great post. Complete and excellent. Where did you gat all those cool pictures? Keep up the good work. We need to keep the word out there so our people and our government stay on track. Hopefully oil prices will remain high and interest in alternative and renewable energy will also remain high. The shortage of wind turbines is disturbing but hopefully that will change as soon as they catch up with demand.
JCE
http://johnceberhardt.wordpress.com

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

youd be suprised how many thousands of birds die from wind power.

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  • wow. i need a towel cause my head's swimming. life on earth i'm sorry to admit can seem blah sometimes but put into a perspective like that i'm literally seeing stars..ha..ha. raise the roof.
    Read more

  • Awesome post!

    Check out Renegade's BS
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  • LOL these are awesome. And I love Banksy's graffiti art.
    Read more

  • Passei por aqui p/ diser q teu blog tah bem legal... parabéns, vou tentar vir mais vezes... mas, quando der passe tbm no meu blog, deixe um recado.
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  • Another cool ad, (youtube movie). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL4TXPTAfc
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  • Nice work! I put a link on my blog so other people could enjoy your ads.
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  • What a great page!

    Visit me some time:

    R2K
    Read more

  • Wow, cool collection of pics. Thanks for the link. I've reciprocated.
    Read more

  • Don't believe some of them are original! What are your cam configurations? You seem to be doing a lot of macros, must be a great lens!
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  • Currently I'm reading a book about Theodore Roosevelt's trip into the unexplored Amazon in the earl 20th century. It's amazing what exists there..
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  • Well, we haven´t even finished exploring the "known" parts of our world and YET a new paradise had been discovered, if you thought those were interesting, try searching for "yeti crab" and bring new panties.
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  • The picture of the large red 'flower' (# 5) is actually a member of the carrion flower genus Rafflesia, which only grows in south-eastern asia (Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Kalimantan, West Malaysia and the Philippines).
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  • That blue butterfly is beautiful! Thanks for posting these photos!
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  • I saw Jeff DeBoer's armor in a show in Calgary, it is utterly amazing up close.
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  • Wow! I liked the armor for the opposum and for the mouse. Really interesting.
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  • hugh.. i think it's ugly.
    I prefer normal trucks.
    Read more

  • I have to admit....I like it.
    Read more

  • Wow that's trippy. At first I thought he meant truck in the american sense, but after looking at some of these i think it'd be cool to see one on the road. Better than the current semi's (lorries, etc.) out there. I especially like the one with the 3 rotating windshield wipers.
    Read more

  • they all have rotating wind screen wipers, i like the shapes of these but the windscreen is jumt rubbish, i wonder what would happen if i wer to smash that - would it fold in or shatter ?
    Read more

  • Interesting and probably the Shape of Things to Come...

    A Bit "Ugly for Sure" and I wonder how Efficient it is?...

    If nothing else it will show up in the next 4 or 5 Sci-Fi Movies that we haven't seen yet...
    Read more

  • Wow, I can claim to have peaked at what trucks will look like in 100 years. Very futuristic concept and looks very efficient on overcoming drag.
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  • Eeww.. interesting, but surely ugly.

    Using the same style, but a lot prettier are the instruments made by basslab
    Those are beauties.
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  • I was obsessed with semi-trucks growing-up as a kid, and I remember having a book about them that showed a prototype Chevy truck from sometime in the 50's or 60's which looked very similar to these. To me, these designs are not anything new.
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  • Is it a truck ?
    Is it a car ?
    Is it a train ?
    Is it a Space Ship ?
    www.glendalegolfs.com
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  • Hate these for the same reason I hate cabovers. What happens when you hit something? Looks like a whole lotta "ouch " to me. Good for show not for go.
    Read more

  • Cool! i cant wait to see those on the street!
    Read more

  • beautiful!
    Read more

  • I would kill for that truck
    Read more

  • In a truck like that the driver would be the first one at the scene of an accident.
    Read more

  • as a truck driver myself, I can say that I would hesitate to put a Pamela Anderson poster in the back of this truck's cabin. Well, maybe the poster of Reina Borg, or Princess Leia...
    Read more

  • Maybe just a bit overdone. But American semis have really horrible aerodynamics, they can easily up their milage with little work.
    Read more

  • Hahaha...yeah when I first read trucks I was thinking the typical pickup truck not semi. As out there as they look, I kinda like them. This front view picture does not do them justice. The 1/4 side view is a much better vantage point. And I like how the space between the cab and trailer is at a minimum.
    Read more

  • The windshield looks crazy, but there's got to be a functional purpose for it. From the looks of it, the driver can see what's directly in front of the vehicle, such as pedestrians.

    If that goofy windshield means more visibility, I'm for it. Also, in a collision with anything shorter than the windshield (cars, for example), its odd shape might not be a concern.

    I'm talking out my ass, though. I'm no engineer.
    Read more

  • UGLY!
    Read more

  • I wonder w/ the air dynamic design if it saves fuel in the long run. With gas prices and competition, you could save quite a lot of money.
    Read more

  • seen years ago...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwayman_%28TV_series%29
    and
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grvQE93wqb0
    Read more

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMszP6VSI60
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  • I really got very ecxited to seeing such beautiful trucks and I wish I could use them one day But I'm Iranian and not only can use them but my own country trucks!
    Read more

  • Colani studied aerodynamics, in 1981 he presented a Citroen 2CV with 1.71 L/100km, only by aerodynamic modifications: a living guru of aero efficiency. Ergonomics is his second obsession: a designer casting vision in useable things, from supersonic planes to beer glasses. I always liked his stuff. Search for his name on Wikipedia!
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  • Colani states that this aerodynamic form reduces fuel consumption by 50%
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  • Oh that's not so bad looking. Sure it's weird, but it looks European, which is fine.
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  • dont understood that truck..
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  • these are interesting. I'd like to see pictures of the interior of the trucks, though.
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  • i saw one of these in tennessee a couple of weeks ago. are the available now or what was it doin?
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