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China Earth

Wind Turbine as Tall as a 70-Story Building Announced in China (newatlas.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. From a report: Only a week ago, we wrote about CSSC's new H260-18MW, the world's largest wind turbine. Partially constructed at a special and very spacious seaside facility, this offshore wind giant took over from MingYang's MySE 16.0-242 as the biggest wind turbine on the planet. Now, MingYang has struck back in this game of one-upsmanship with the announcement of something significantly bigger. And it's not like CSSC's 18-megawatt rated effort was small; each of its three blades stretches a near-unthinkable 128 m (420 ft). But the new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft).

MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against.
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Wind Turbine as Tall as a 70-Story Building Announced in China More

Wind Turbine as Tall as a 70-Story Building Announced in China

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  • What's an NFL field?
    • It stands for Non Fungible League, an American thing. I do not recommend it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      What's an NFL field?

      Apparently it's about 5000 square meters based on numbers in the summary... 3.14 * 140 * 140 / 12.3

      • It is indeed. Depends on how exactly you define "field" of course. A standard NFL football field is 100x50 yards for the play area. So exactly 5k square yards. Of course, sqm is 21% bigger, but if you include the endzones it becomes 120x50, which translates to 5,017 square meters.

      • I particularly like how they standardized the length of the field in yards, and the width in feet. It's a nice touch.

        Hut hut hut...

    • A standard FIFA football pitch is basically to a NFL field as a meter is to a yard. Though oddly, the NFL field is more standardized.

  • How many (Score:5, Funny)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:07PM (#63213540)
    How many libraries of congress of electricity will it produce?

    • Re:How many (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:20PM (#63213586)

      How many libraries of congress of electricity will it produce?

      Thanks. I try to be helpful and now I've got the police at the door asking why I Googled "how much energy would I get from burning the library of congress".

      • You won the internet for a minute!

      • Re:How many (Score:4, Insightful)

        by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @04:24PM (#63214006)

        How many libraries of congress of electricity will it produce?

        Thanks. I try to be helpful and now I've got the police at the door asking why I Googled "how much energy would I get from burning the library of congress".

        According to ChatGPT:
        It would not be appropriate to burn the Library of Congress, as it is a valuable cultural and historical resource. Additionally, burning books is illegal in many places and morally reprehensible. It is important to consider the value and importance of the information stored in the Library of Congress before suggesting any destructive actions.

        If only they could have trained it not to be a wet blanket!

    • Re:How many (Score:5, Informative)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:38PM (#63213846)

      How many libraries of congress of electricity will it produce?

      Answer is 2.8. Also, FWIW, it appears that 1 Library of Congress of calorific energy of incinerating paper is about 2 PJ.

      * Library of Congress: 173 million items (we will assume contents are hardcover books)
      * Average weight of a hardcover book of 0.88 kg ( https://pennbookcenter.com/how... [pennbookcenter.com] )
      * Annual increase of Library of Congress: 11 tons per year (same source above) -> negligible compared to base weight
      * Calorific value of paper 13 MJ/kg ( https://answer-all.com/common-... [answer-all.com] )
      * Lifetime of a wind turbine: 20 years nominal (and expected production: 80 GWh/a)

      Weight of Library of Library of congress now (including 20 years increase): 152 240 220 kg of paper
      Calorific value of the paper contained in Library of Congress: 2.05 PJ (= 152 240 220 x 13.5e6)
      Electrical production of the wind turbine over lifetime: 5.76 PJ (= 20 x 80e9 x 3600)

      The Result: 2.80 (5.76/2.05)

    • All of them!

  • There are good reasons for that (Score:4, Informative)

    by joh ( 27088 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:17PM (#63213568)

    Wind turbines need to sit high to get a good bite at the wind. Wind is slowed by the ground (or the sea in this case) and the wind is more turbulent. Also bigger is more efficient and especially out at sea foundations and connections are cumbersome and expensive, so it's better to make fewer and bigger ones.

    All of this favors going as big as you can. It's also good for bragging of course.

    • All of this favors going as big as you can. It's also good for bragging of course.

      It's not how big the wind turbine is, it's where you situate it!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dantoo ( 176555 )

      It's not about the height or otherwise it would be built on a mountain.

      There are more factors in play:

      Wind velocity and reliability are more predictable over the ocean where there the "friction layer" is less in play and doesn't extend to the same height as over land. Nominally the layer is universally accepted as extending to 2000 feet above land (in reality it varies enormously between say forest and deserts).

      The main advantage of long blades is the efficiency that arises from the massive increase in volu

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Apparently it can be deployed floating as well. Very handy for far offshore fields, where the wind is even more consistent.

    • It's also good for bragging of course.

      Otherwise known as advertizing, so that governments will actually buy it.

    • But one good reason for going for a few smaller windmills is that it eliminates the single point of failure problem.

  • How many cases of windmill cancer will this cause? (Score:3)

    by CmdrPorno ( 115048 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:04PM (#63213718)

    Is it really worth it?

  • Wow, seems like a crappy design done for penis posturing only. Based on swept area it should be about 20-21MW, and 80GWh only is a 45% capacity factor best-case.

    I am curious though how wind shear is addressed over 200-240m altitude difference, especially in storm conditions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rbrander ( 73222 )

      I couldn't believe the low capacity factor, when large offshore wind products are claiming over 60%, for years now. Like the GE Haliade-X, a 'mere' 14MW, but 74 GWh/year:
      https://www.ge.com/renewableen... [ge.com] ...making the new announcement just 8% more productive than the GE effort now going into Dogger Bank, UK.

      • I couldn't believe the low capacity factor, when large offshore wind products are claiming over 60%, for years now. Like the GE Haliade-X, a 'mere' 14MW, but 74 GWh/year: https://www.ge.com/renewableen... [ge.com] ...making the new announcement just 8% more productive than the GE effort now going into Dogger Bank, UK.

        Most likely it's the wind speed difference.
        (8.5 m/s 30.6 km/h / 19 mph) for this. vs " a typical German North Sea site." for the GE Haliade-X
        North sea is probably just windier than 8.5 m/s

    • You'd think they'd use more blades as they get bigger... less gap between them.

  • Sounds perfectly safe to me.
  • Resistance to 125mph sounds inadequate to me, but then what do I know about Typhoon behavior, especially with global warming effects? Of course, if the turbine fails, just dump it in the ocean like all our other trash.

  • Wind Turbines: 7
    Lobster Traps: 0

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