| Subject: |
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Re: Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power |
| Name: |
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JMW |
| Date Posted: |
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Sep 4, 07 - 5:03 PM |
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Mmm. On the other hand this might not be so half-baked..... |
| Message: |
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So how realistic is this proposal?
I have to say that of all the wind power options so far mooted, I am most attracted by this one.
I can see only two real problems:
a) the cable strength and conduction capacity for w
b)what happens when it all goes pear shaped and one or two come down with a bump.
Cable strength and ability to transmit electrical energy: well, the prof has plenty of data on strength from tethered balloons along the US/Mex border and he seems to have addressed this problem and cites his sources. Maybe he is optimistic but even so I suspect that this isn't the sort of unresolvable problem engineers would take too long to solve if they had to.
That leaves us with things that go bump in the night.
I am not too happy about the idea of a 20MW *** landing on my head but it seems to me we could adapt the *** concept quite happily within the UK where we already have the concept of offshore windfarms. I have to suppose than an offshore *** farm would be far more realistic than the Pylon tower types simply because of the peak load excursions that they have to manage and FEGs don't.
OK, so we need some associated no fly zone just as we still need a no ship zone, but on the whole I'd say there is a fair chance that falling FEGs would create a big splash (real) and none media wise because the body count and property damage would be quite low.
I suspect that a winch station at sea could be less problematic than the foundation for a 5MW turbine pylon for many of the reasons mentioned by the professor i.e. that there are far less excursion forces to manage, because there are no gusts at altitude and because of the resilience of the *** to such gusts. I guess we could relax the interval requirements to a degree also since we could go for a higher density and accept a greater collision risk between devices flying in opposed directions.
Pylon type wind turbines have an interval problem due to the wake effects created by the pylons. With FEGs we shouldn't have any of these problems since we don't have any similar structures to create vorticies. and if we did, we could stagger the heights to veer them out of each others wakes.
One could consider a group of FEGs connected by a net with one tether per group with explosive safety device to cut away any *** that fails and threatens to drag them all down.
Falling FEGs would fall into the sea. Big splash, no damage.
So let us consider the technical aspects: technical problems rarely defeat engineers for long and I suspect the problems here are not so great as to defy resolution.
All one is then left with is the question of whether the cost benefits are as favourable as the prof says they are and somehow, I suspect this might be the Achilles heel. But then, our lords and masters are collecting plenty of our money: enough, with hypothecation (how glad we are that John "no-hypothecation" Prescott is a beast of the past) to pay for ours and our European neighbours wind farms together. |
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