cheaper/near silent/bird friendly 100kw Russian Wind Turbines for Mass?

[papau]

I am trying to find out is there is a possibility of using the new Russian Technology - funded by our EPA - on the Mass Wind Farm proposal - does the proposal that the Federal folks have approved allow for the State to insist on this version of "best" technology - or would the better efficiency of the high speed conventional ones mean we are stuck with that design? And as the EPA is funding this ("funding (is)from the US department of environment") do we get a better price on parts?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,12978,1358527,00.html

Talking about a revolution

Thursday November 25, 2004
The Guardian

Russian scientists, from the Makeyev State Rocket Centre near Miass, have developed a wind turbine that is almost silent and much less dangerous to birds. The turbine looks a bit like an egg-beater, with lightweight, glass fibre blades that revolve around a vertical structure.<snip>

"The blade speed is around twice the wind speed, which is much less than the speed on the conventional propeller design," says Richard Halstead, president of US company Empire Magnetics, which supplies the turbines' alternators. In theory birds will be able to see and avoid the slow-moving blades, while low speed makes the turbines very quiet.

<snip>....So far the team has built a 9m high (3kW) turbine, suitable for fitting to the top of a home. They are now developing a 100kW turbine for use on commercial wind farms.

[hatrack]

1. Huh, best wind power technology wasn't developed here . . .

Who could have guessed it? :eyes:

[htuttle]

8. Actually, way back in the 1970's...

I remember a place called Windworks about 4 miles from my home in SE Wisconsin that developed a vertical wind turbine.

It wasn't exactly like the Russian one -- it was made of half-cylinders offset from one another (looked vaguely like an 'S' from above), but operated on much the same principles. It was also designed to spin much slower.

Then again, Windworks gave up wind power systems in the 80's when Reagan cut all the tax credits (and oil dropped) and now just do industrial power controls, so they may as well not have invented anything. :shrug:

[Massacure]

2. 100 kw isn't very big, but I suppose you could scale them up.

The bigger you make them they cheaper they on a per kilowatt basis.

The efficiency could also be improved with a little bit of research. New things are never very efficient.

[phantom power]

3. These vertical designs aren't really new. As I recall, one problem

they have is that they do not self-start. They require a small amount of energy to get them rotating. Probably not a big deal, but I imagine it complicates the design.

People keep bringing up this bird-safety issue. I'm having a hard time seeing how this is a big threat. Do these things really kill *that* many birds?

Likewise, noise. How noisy are they compared to a coal-fired plant?

[papau]

4. bird-safety/noise seem non-issues except fpr getting approvals

The sea view change and the boating obstacle seem to be the real objection.

That and a feeling that this is another corporation ripping off a piece of the common for profit.

And doing so at a higher cost than necessary - meaning the advantage to the Cape in low cost electricity is not that great - or at least not as good as it should be

plus they may have over-grabbed in terms of the size of the area of the water they want for their wind farm.

[phantom power]

5. Of course. Hardly anybody seems to mind the ongoing

commons rip-off being committed by fossil fuel companies. We're giving away drilling rights in public lands, and ripping the tops off of our mountains for coal, but everybody is screaming about a plan to build wind turbines in the ocean.

[One_Life_To_Give]

6. Boating Obstacle?

Most boaters don't go out more than a couple miles from land. And Radar is getting pretty cheap, not to mention GPS. So navigating around the turbines shouldn't be an issue.

Opposition to this project appears to be NIMBYism.

[phantom power]

7. I believe the concern is shipping lanes, not recreational boating.

I'm sure that this can be resolved. As you say, this is mostly nimby-ism.

[midnight armadillo]

10. It's all about the VIEW

It's quite simple - the rich folks with the seashore homes don't want the view of the fuzzy horizon to be filled with windmills. Most days they won't even be visible due to haze.

The handful of yachtsmen can certainly navigate around or through the windfarm as well.

What's at stake is the rich people's enjoying of natural resources for their leisure. They don't mind when the Filthy Five (the nickname of the 5 nasty-ass powerplants in eastern MA that cause most of our 'ozone days' in the summer) fill the air of poorer towns with shit. They don't seem to care that on some summer days us asthmatics are cautioned to avoid breathing from fossil fuel pollution. But damn, spoil a tiny piece of their ocean view and they shit cinderblocks. Mind you, 99% of the people bitching about the Cape getting its electricity from the wind never go out on the water, for that matter.

Moving towards renewables means they get sited where they're most productive - solar on the south side of buildings, windmills where it's windiest, etc. No more sticking 'em in the poor cities and towns just because they don't have the clout to stop them. Poor wealthy people, they're going to have to notice our energy generation now. I bet a significant number of the people figting Cape Wind come from Hingham, where a minority of shitheads held up a commuter rail project (the Greenbush line) for YEARS because it would disturb their quaint, exclusive downtown. Never mind it was running on existing rail lines, or that there was even an offer to tunnel under the downtown. They just didn't want ordinary people daring to pass through their fucking exclusive, wanna-be-gated town.


www.capewind.org for more info.


While I"m at it, one thing about CW that bugged me was their use of the ocean site for nothing, but then it occured to be that this is peanuts cmpared to ur subsidies of nuclear and fossil fuels. Check your home insurance for the line about nuclear accidents :-)

[Xithras]

9. Er, these have been around for decades

We've had egg-beaters in the Altamont Pass since the early 80's:


The egg beaters do kill less birds, but they tend to have a few problems that keep them from gaining wider acceptance for wind farms. First, they have a lot more weight spinning around, requiring a higher minimum wind speed to get them running and increasing the maintenance needs of the weight carrying lower bearings. They also generate less power than traditional propeller style windmills, and the long, curved blades have a tendency to distort and lose efficiency at higher speeds.

Modern materials can probably reduce some of these issues, but modern materials tend to be far more expensive (reducing the viability of the windmill design), and do nothing to counter the decreased power output caused by its lower speed.

Eggbeaters do have a number of valid uses, but large scale wind farms aren't one of them. The ones used at Altamont are more than twenty years old and are slowly being phased out in favor of the propeller windmills because they simply weren't practical to run and never even generated enough power to pay for their construction costs.