Offshore Windfarms: Good or Bad?

i'm all for them. you gotta start somewhere w/ this, so complaining that alternative sources of energy aren't immediately as cost-effective as traditional fossil fuel sources is, IMO, stupid. we have to look at the long-term w/ these, not just the short term.
as previously mentioned, the "eye sore" critique isn't valid for a couple reasons. one being that the wind farm wouldn't be visible except on the most clear of days...we're talking MAYBE 3-5 days per year here. even then, the turbines will appear to be about thumbnail sized.
i'd personally like to see each region of the country tap into the sustainable energy sources that it has at hand. we've got wind here in the mid-atlantic. great, let's fire up the wind turbines! arizona, new mexico, set up some solar arrays. hydro-electric along the mississippi...that sort of thing. i think that's going to be the only way to fully wean our society off the coal/natural gas/nuclear grid.

oh, & unlike what one poster said, any impact these installations have on wave power is going to be so minuscule as to be irrelevant.

 

how/why will it f*ck up the swell?

 

Windfarms

Hey McLovin, heard about that conference and wanted to go....Off shore wind farms, good idea, its the farms inland that pose the most to interrupt our daily routine if they are constructed around airports and/or any radar facility i.e. NOAA.
I'm an RF guy and I know they can reak havoc on HF/VHF comms.
In short - I read a report out of the UK in where wind farm site data was collected over 2 years and the executive summary stated that the average energy output was around 24% of what was needed so it basically said it failed to keep up w/demand. This was for the entire grid, so I don't know how many wind turbines we're talking here. My point is as with new technology it needs to be studied for some time before definitive results.
But if you\'d like your own turbine check out this link..
http://m.cnet.com/Article.rbml?nid=20073308&cid=null&bcid=&bid=-54

peace!

 

I'd like to take a look at the actual turbine structures that will be in the water to see if they could actually refract/defract ocean swells. If the structures are more or less floating on top of the water, then it wouldn't have any impact. If the structures go deep under the surface, then perhaps there could be some impact. How close are the turbines going to be a part from one another? How many total?

I guess they will be moored to the bottom, like a buoy, and I would assume they would have the same influence on ocean swells as a buoy. The difference is, of course, that buoys are sparse, and one bouy isn't going to have much influence. If you have 200 of these structures all next to each other, then I could see swell refraction/refraction to be plausible.

 

there is an impressive wind farm set up a few miles off the coast of the netherlands, i could see them on the flight in to amsterdam. Hundreds of them!!! (saw what looked like a billion sharks too... crazy what you can see from above)

 

From my understanding, we are leaning toward the "floating platform design" as discussed in this article: http://www.windpowerengineering.com/construction/trends-offshore/

On a side note, to those here who insist on "knowing the facts(!)", please give google a shot. Most of this information is readily available, and it's really not that difficult to find.

Distance from land: Most articles I have read cite local groups protesting the "eyesore" argument. For right or wrong, there's a simple solution that involves moving the turbines further to sea. Luckily we have the continental shelf, so this is entirely do-able. Anyone who has worked at sea knows about the "line of sight" equation, which says that sqrt(height of eye, or top of turbine) * 1.34 = distance to horizon. This means a 100 ft turbine would be visible up to 13.4 miles away on the clearest of days. By visible, we mean you could see the very tippy top of the structure from there. Obviously, if you're on the roof of a big hotel, the distance is longer. This article says offshore turbines are huge, with the 5 MW structures up to 350 ft tall. This means they'd theoretically be visible at a distance of slightly less than 19 miles. That's pretty far, but I think most plans call for building at least 20 miles offshore because the wind patterns are more reliable. Definitely check out this link. It shows a lot of detail on proposed designs for offshore turbines and would likely answer many of your questions...
http://ocsenergy.anl.gov/guide/wind/index.cfm

 

If this in response to my post, I never mentioned cost. There's a lot more to having a dependable alternative power source than cost. From what I've read, I can't find one windfarm that powers a significantly-sized community without the support of fossil fuel or nuclear powered plants and these plants can't be shut down and started up as the demand (i.e. inability for windfarm to support power requirements). If that's the case, it's not really an "alternative."

The only idea that is stupid (your words) is the one that wants to sprinkle an unproven concept across a nation without figuring out the potential. Personally, picking one area...maybe a small city...and establishing a windfarm that can support it makes a lot more sense than arbitrarily erecting these things with no defined goal.

If your your reply wasn't in response to my post, I digress.

 

I'm not sure what the other guy meant, but just food for thought: wind farm building is mainly about location. Real estate values are obviously important (ie, nobody's building one in DC or NYC, even if the wind patterns were perfect), but most sites under consideration are those where wind patterns are favorable. Sure, you can't have 100% reliability with the wind. I don't think I'd have to try very hard to convince people here about that! At the same time, if we have an area where wind patterns are good 80% of the time, that's pretty freaking good. So wind itself isn't necessarily a "sole replacement" for burning coal, but we can head in that direction by supplanting it 80% of the time, and then fill in the remaining 20% as additional technologies (solar, and...???) advance. 80% carbon reduction is absolutely a good thing. In air quality alone we would reap tangible benefits. As for the cost increases, sure we must deal with that; as my very first post suggested, help is on the way for that as well. I devote most of my free time to energy technology, and I can show you very convincingly there is an ARMY of folks trying to solve the problems. Meanwhile, companies like Exxon are bribing governments and courts to maintain the status quo. They're winning now, but just about everyone working in this field is fighting like mad to change that. We'll see what happens...

 

I got ya, Aloha. I'm just trying to see if anybody's got any real data. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. I think most of us could make a pretty lengthy list of questionable programs that where created with improving the quality of life...combustion engines included. Personally, I'd rather not invest time & energy in a program with no established goal or test bed. Like I said, I'm all for green, but I have yet to see one shred of evidence that windfarms actually lessen a negative impact on the environment. If someone can provide anything but a theory or biased report, I'd like to see it.

I don't think one exists, so....just my 2 cents, but I before we start investing time, energy & hope in planting these things in different locations, I think it would be smart to see an actual experiment to see what kind of environmental improvement can actually be measured when a society converts or suppliments it's existing energy with windfarms. Not doing so sounds like an overly desperate move that could be real waste of time.

 

iT IS TRUE AND MORE

Jeanettes has two three at the most small wind turbines on the end of the pier. THis powers all the lighting, resturant, gift shop, and reception area above the resturant on the pier. These turbines actually produce so much energy the pier cant use all of it and they have to put some of the power back into the grid in Nags Head. To see these relatively smalls turbines from the line up and realize they provide more power than the pier needs, you wonder why this type of power isnt used more frequently.

 

The leasing agreement signed into law last year delineated the boundaries of the area to be "farmed." It begins 7 nautical miles off the beach between Barnegat Light and Avalon, and creates a patch of water more than 400 square nautical miles available for lease. About a dozen companies have submitted proposals, and I believe they're all of the non-floating type, which means some kind of tripod type structure, with or without a concrete footing.

 

What is all this talk about wind patterns being correct.
The wind turbines don't need any particular wind direction, they just need any amount of wind.
The ocean is the absolute best place for this, since there is no trees, buildings, hills, etc...
Of course, some areas are flat out windier then other places, but I'd say anywhere off the Mid Atlantic coast should be pretty similar. Obviously we get a lot more wind in the winter time. I wonder how these turbines would hold up through those 50+mph huge winter storms, or better yet, a hurricane?

As surfers, we should be on the side of the floating turbines, which should have minimal effect on the incoming swells. Allthough, they have to keep the turbines in place somehow, so I'm not sure how that happens.

 

energy is not the only benefit for creating these turbines. There will be so many jobs generated from a project like this. manufacturing, engineering, installation; the list goes on pretty long..

 

1. Right on about wind direction. Thank you for correcting me. I should have said wind CONSISTENCY. Almost all turbine designs (from my very amatuer-ish knowledge) incorporate a yaw rotor to provide semi-automated "steering". This way, when the wind changes direction, you can still optimize performance by turning the rotor.

2. I see few reasons to believe these would affect the swell in any measurable way. Ocean waves are created by long stretches of wind. Minor degradation from turbine "wind usage" strikes me as pretty minuscule at worst. As for the floating platforms degrading the swell size via damping, it's physically possible. I have enough grad work in acoustics to say it's absolutely possible. I have no clue how things would play out in a practical sense. Much like the artificial reefs built to "create surf spots", there's a huge uncertainty in any ocean engineering design. I don't think anyone could really predict the swell alteration accurately. Maybe someone with a lot of time and a calculator could prove mathematically that it's irrelevant, but it ain't gonna be me....maybe tomorrow if I get bored in the office.

3. Hurricane stability. This is the issue that worries me most. I couldn't find very much that addresses the problem. The Sierra Club's statement talks about how no Cat 5 hurricane has passed the northern mid-Atlantic corridor in 50 years. First off, I haven't checked that fact and feel like it may be wrong. Secondly, that's a pretty horrible design basis. Just look at Japan right now.

 

Live Aloha, you have the best quote of all time. "i picked the wrong week to quite sniffing glue". i chuckle every time i here it

 

I believe it is very similar to how they hold floating oil platforms and, to some degree, bouys in place. A portion of the structure is submerged and filled with ballast to provide stability. Depth of the submerged portion and amount of ballast required is directly proportional to the structure height and seaa/weather conditions. This portion of the structure is then anchored to the sea floor with cables that are connected to some sort of weight...typically a hug concrete block.

 

A couple of units power entire villages in Hungary where we have relatives. What started out as a single unit in their village is now spreading to all the nearby towns with 1, 2 or 3 units installed.

 

Ya, thats what i figured, it would have to be moored to the sea bottom some how. And so, I think there would be some dampening of swell energy. The swell energy would have to at the very least come in contact with the apparatus used to moor the turbine. I'll ask my friend, who is finishing his PhD in Ocean Engineering what he thinks about the effect on incoming swells.

 

I think they are a good idea my only consern is placement and if they could affect an incoming swell for surfing??