deep water wind turbines in OpenSim at i live in science land

deep water wind turbines in OpenSim

wind turbines are huge! the blades can be 130 feet long each! and the latest research shows that maybe they should be painted purple to decrease bat deaths

big and purple = Barney!

i love you and you love me but big purple wind turbines are a tough sell. people already don’t want the white ones near their homes so imagine the purple ones! but wind turbines don’t have to be on land, they can be in the water too. typically they are built in shallow water into the seabed and still visible from shore. wind turbines in the ocean make a lot of sense because winds tend to be more steady and reliable and a few miles out at sea would help solve the objection to them. they also would not need to be painted purple as far as bats are concerned

there are prototypes for true deep sea wind turbines that are intended to be towed out to sea by work boats and anchored and that’s what i built tonight. this design is a very clean one as far as how it is anchored and can move with the wind. instead of the nacelle (that is the real name of the part housing the generator) pivoting on the turbine’s tower, the entire rig floats and pivots around it’s anchor

the turbine sits on one of three corners and the other two corners act as counter balancing outriggers. in a design i saw a few months ago, the chambers could automatically fill with more water, or pump water out, as needed for current ocean conditions. the design is pure simplicity (like a three legged milking stool, it never wobbles and is always steady – i grew up across the road from a 300 cow dairy farm . . . )

this was a fun build taking about 4 hours by starting our with an existing turbine i had made a few months back. i made the nacelle a bit smaller, put the access hatch on the bottom with a ladder and platform, made the floats, anchor, anchor lines and power cable, and that was it (for these wind turbines in real life a cable has to run all the way to shore, but hey, there are dozens of transatlantic cables)

if you plow into this thing, your eyes were closed

i went a bit nuts on the rope knots . . .

yay for more prims - i never would have built a platform like that inSL

it's not finished until a backup is made on the spot!

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22 Nov 10 at 1:54 am

Completely agree. One needs to think of hydrokinetics on a smaller scale too–I like puting microturbines to generate electricity in gutters or gravity-fed pipes. We can go bigger and think about storm water drains or industrial cooling water systems easily.

I found the following site: http://www.hydrokinetics.com to offer info suitable to water turbines as you descibe.

Charlie Rheo

22 Nov 10 at 11:09 am

excellent Charlie! your kind of thinking is what we need to do as a society! i am not all into tree hugging per se, but into being just a bit more science literate and question our practices just a little

great mention on gravity fed pipes, i had mentioned a great article about capturing the energy of wastewater from high-rise buildings in this post:

http://iliveisl.com/harness-the-energy-of-your-flush/

thank you on your link! my next in-world project was an in-stream turbine like you mention on that site. i also like that oscillating one that captures ocean swells, that is a neat idea as well =)

thanks for the insight!

Ener Hax

22 Nov 10 at 11:24 am

How about some giant floating sky turbines, held aloft by giant(er) zeppelins, with a powerline running down to the ground (or beamed down via microwave)? Wait, microwaves would fry bats, too. Ooops. Okay, powerline cable it is.

Get ‘em high enough to avoid the birds n bats.

Oh, some peeps take this very seriously… read about the “Eurobats”, hee hee:

http://www.bats.org.uk/publications_download.php/459/Carlin_and_Mitchell_Jones.pdf

Or go all out and put solar arrays in orbit, with carbon fiber wrapped powerlines down to Earth.

I obviously watch too much Discovery Channel!