"High-altitude winds between 1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters) above the ground are stronger and steadier than surface winds. These winds are abundant, widely available, and carbon-free.
"The physics of wind power makes this resource extremely valuable. “When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold, triple the speed, and you have 27 times the energy,” explained Gong Zeqi "
This looks like a good way to bring power to a remote area, and China has lots of those.
Am I crazy or didn’t we see these in Big Hero 6?
a l a l a l a l h a BKinda.
Very interesting development. Especially that it can be deployed in disaster zones to provide energy - if there is a strong foundation to anchor it, probably.
Wow. I hope this tech works out practically.
They’re trying to get it to100kW. That’s like a pretty big generator but not a huge one. So this isn’t a replacement for wind farms just yet. The picture is from a year ago. No mention of costs.
Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.
The article says:
The S1500 features a main airfoil and an annular wing that together form a giant duct. Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.
That suggests to me (admittedly a layman) that each blimp is more like 1.2MW?
The title itself already says it’s 1MW.
Finally the stupid floating jet engine looking turbines from Big Hero 6, except IRL they actually look good.
1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters)
I feel like this needs a second look.
They used different people’s feet.
As a European… Are feet logarithmic? Wouldn’t even surprise me that much.
Only when viewed from the north.
The zero key got stuck.
I like how everyone conveniently leaves out the part that this is an emergency backup not actual full time scalable tool.
Ha! Watch us burn some liquid dinosaurs!
- USA
Fossil fuels are from shit the dinos ate, like plants and other dumb crap. The belief that coal-rollers are cool enough to burn liquid dinosaurs is easily the single biggest lie of the oil industry.
Closely followed by -gestures wildly-
Oil is solar power with extra steps.
Just cut out the 300 year old middle man
Lol, got your new advert campaign… Gasoline is vegan
That might actually stop the conservatives from using it.
Want to eat it?
I mean some small part of it is dino. But yeah by biomass it’s mostly plant.
Fun fact , oil is mostly from carboniferous period , so its alot older than dinos … few hunder million years older
And Africa, and South America, and the middle east, and Europe. Don’t pretend the rest of the world isn’t still burning fossil fuels it’s not just the US
USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I’d say it’s an accurate statement
I cant wait for the conspiracy theories about this
This is totally breaking loose and heading toward the nearest city in the final act.
With a traditional wind turbine, if the wind speeds get too high, the turbine locks the rotation and feathers the blades. For the airship however, people will have to manually take it down and later erect it again. Hopefully they get to it in time, otherwise it’s going to violently take itself down and/or fly off. Either way, that is a bunch of extra cost incurred on a regular basis.
Strikes me as an impractical solution.
Article says wind speeds are môre steady up there, wouldn’t that mean whatever you put up there is build to withstand those winds?
A wind turbine automatically feathers. Why can’t the airship automatically raise and lower itself?
With modern forecasting, getting it’s height right shouldn’t be too hard?
When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold,
Edit: I’m wrong, see edit below!
Huh? Kinetic energy increase is square, not cubic.
KE=1/2 m v^2
So every doubling of speed should increase the available kinetic energy by 4 times, not 8. 3 times the speed is 9 times the energy. Granted there are probably some efficiency gains in excess of this at the low end,
but as a rule that’s just wrong.Edit: Cool, I learned something new! I neglected to consider it in terms of power, just thought about kinetic energy.
So something like: KE = 1/2 m v^2
= 1/2 ( rho V) v^2
= 1/2 ( rho A d) (d/t)^2
= 1/2 rho A d^3 1/t^2
Where P = KE/t
Thus:
P = 1/2 rho A (d/t)^3
= 1/2 rho A v^3
Lots of other aspects I’m sure I have wrong, but I see how the cubic came to be.
TIL thanks for bringing this up
Its cubic actually
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/wind-power-impacts-of-larger-turbines/
I don’t understand the physics, but every model of power output from wind turbines uses V^3 for the formula
thx for the link! just spent the last hr reading about windmills. and although I live in a country full of them I’ve often wondered, but never really paused to ponder about the intricacies that go into windmill design. fascinating stuff!
That’s a good link.
During the stampede scene in the Lion King, imagine the wildebeests were stampeding twice as fast. Then Simba’s dad Mufasa would not only have quadruple the amount of energy imparted by each wildebeest, but also be trampled by twice as many wildebeests per second, so the rate of energy imparted on Mufasa per second would be 4 x 2 = 8 times greater when velocity doubles.
Education via childhood trauma
Thanks for the correction! I got way ahead of myself.
Increasing the speed increases both the kinetic energy of the wind hitting the turbines and the amount of wind that hits the turbines each second.
We don’t directly harvest the kinetic energy. That increase probably has to do with how the wind provides lift to the blades. Of course, you couldn’t keep increasing like that until the harvested energy is greater than the kinetic energy. But I’m sure at any wind speed we only get a tiny fraction.
Kinetic energy is exactly what’s harvested, which is why modern wind turbines are not far off the theoretical limit of the amount of energy that can be extracted. (Betz’s law)
By taking energy from wind, you slow it down. Slow it down too much, and it can’t get out of the way in time for new air.
That looks like a giant…
Austin Powers sketch
500 to 1,000 meters AGL is going to be a problem for aircrafts. You need remote areas to have no interference bc these are big balloons.
This is intended as emergency power relief not a full time energy source.
Air traffic has to adapt.
