Wind power potential
When will wind power become a more serious source of energy in the United States?
Most likely not any time soon because it may make way too much sense.
Not only is it a possibility for the U.S., but wind power is emerging as a serious alternative in India and China where they need viable and legit energy sources.
There is now a new idea to capture wind energy without having to look at the huge wind mills, and that is a floating offshore turbine.
Not offshore as in you can see them off on the horizon, but hundred of miles offshore.
Paul D. Sclavounos, a MIT professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture spent decades designing and analyzing large floating structures for deep-sea oil and gas exploration now thinks we can build floating wind turbines and tether them out to sea where the winds are blowing fairly consistently.
In 2004, he and his MIT colleagues teamed with wind-turbine experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to integrate a wind turbine with a floater. Their design calls for a tension leg platform, a system in which long steel cables, or tethers, connect the corners of the platform to a concrete-block or other mooring system on the ocean floor. The platform and turbine gain their support from buoyancy.
The floater-mounted turbines could work in water depths ranging from 30 to 200 meters, Sclavounos said. In the Northeast, they could be 50 to 150 kilometers from shore. And the turbine atop each platform could be big, which is an economic advantage in the wind-farm business. The MIT-NREL design assumes a 5.0 megawatt (MW) experimental turbine now under development. (Onshore units are 1.5 MW; conventional offshore units are 3.6 MW.)
No one is saying wind power is the only answer. In fact, wind power may end up being a small part of the whole equation, but wind is clean, renewable and safe.
Seems like a good bet to me.
Talk to me.
Most likely not any time soon because it may make way too much sense.
Not only is it a possibility for the U.S., but wind power is emerging as a serious alternative in India and China where they need viable and legit energy sources.
There is now a new idea to capture wind energy without having to look at the huge wind mills, and that is a floating offshore turbine.
Not offshore as in you can see them off on the horizon, but hundred of miles offshore.
Paul D. Sclavounos, a MIT professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture spent decades designing and analyzing large floating structures for deep-sea oil and gas exploration now thinks we can build floating wind turbines and tether them out to sea where the winds are blowing fairly consistently.
In 2004, he and his MIT colleagues teamed with wind-turbine experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to integrate a wind turbine with a floater. Their design calls for a tension leg platform, a system in which long steel cables, or tethers, connect the corners of the platform to a concrete-block or other mooring system on the ocean floor. The platform and turbine gain their support from buoyancy.
The floater-mounted turbines could work in water depths ranging from 30 to 200 meters, Sclavounos said. In the Northeast, they could be 50 to 150 kilometers from shore. And the turbine atop each platform could be big, which is an economic advantage in the wind-farm business. The MIT-NREL design assumes a 5.0 megawatt (MW) experimental turbine now under development. (Onshore units are 1.5 MW; conventional offshore units are 3.6 MW.)
No one is saying wind power is the only answer. In fact, wind power may end up being a small part of the whole equation, but wind is clean, renewable and safe.
Seems like a good bet to me.
Talk to me.
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