Posts Tagged ‘wind power’
Japan’s Richest Man Unveils Scheme for $26 Billion Renewable Energy Supergrid
Son, who's known in Japan for his ballsy, high-risk ventures--he acquired a floundering mobile network and became the exclusive Japanese carrier for the iPhone and iPad--has already created a foundation for the "supergrid," which he says will eventually cost about $26 billion to create. He's already put about $13 million of his own money into the pot, and is pushing for partners to help create a whopping 1,200-mile-long grid that, he hopes, will deliver 60% of the country's energy needs from renewable sources.
The plan, unveiled Monday, was short on specifics, but would rely on both on- and offshore plants, mostly wind and geothermal energy. "Globally, wind power in particular has very good cost performance," he said at the announcement. The plan would also involve shutting down many of , which he says are a risk due to the country's high likelihood of earthquakes and tsunamis like the one that caused so much havoc .
Son promised that Softbank would chip in as much as $260 million, and is even looking beyond just Japan for this sort of grid--he says it could eventually be expanded to connect to mainland Asia, incorporating grids that cover China, Russia, and even India. According to , with frankly outrageous construction, Japan could achieve something like this, but it would mean constructing thousands of wind turbines and installing solar panels on basically every available surface. Still, there's no better time than now to embark on a massive infrastructure rebuild.
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First Hybrid Power Plant Will Combine Solar, Wind and Natural Gas
The solar component is a field of sun-tracking mirrors that will focus sunlight on a tower to produce steam, which will be fed into the steam turbine to increase the plant’s output. A small wind farm connected to the plant will provide another 22 megawatts of power.
The plant will produce 522 megawatts in total, with 450 of that coming from the natural gas plant, so its renewable portfolio is not exactly robust. But the real gain may be in the ease with which wind and solar are being added to the power grid. Instead of localized solar arrays, or distant behemoth wind farms, the renewable sources are being added to a traditional-style power plant. The varying systems can share a control center as well as connections to the grid, which can make them cheaper and easier to integrate. GE says it can cut the cost of a solar thermal system in half, according to .
The natural gas component also smooths out the variability problems inherent in wind energy. When it’s not blowing, natural gas will generate steam to spin the turbines.
The solar thermal technology comes from a small company called eSolar, which uses thousands of small, pre-fabricated mirrors called heliostats to reflect sunlight toward a receiver, which uses the heat to generate steam. Algorithms automatically track and focus the sun’s rays, according to a .
The gas turbine is a new design — GE unveiled it last month — and the company says the plant will be 69 percent efficient, more than double the efficiency rate of other natural gas power plants. The technology is designed for countries that use 50 hertz electricity, Technology Review points out — the US uses 60 hertz, so it’s not clear whether this could work on our soil.
GE is set to break ground later this year and the plant should be operational by 2015, the company says.
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Attractive Italian Viaduct Has Wind Turbines Built In
The concept would use the space between an existing viaduct in southern Italy to install 26 wind turbines, which designers Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino say could provide 36 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year.
The design team conceived the Solar Wind project for a contest that aims to repurpose some old, unused viaducts near Calabria, a region in the toe of Italy. It would cost about $55 million to demolish the viaducts, so town officials for proposals that would re-use them in an environmentally friendly way. The wind turbine bridge took second place.
The proposal also includes a solar-paneled roadway to provide another 11.2 million kilowatt hours, Colarossi and colleagues say. It turns the entire viaduct into a park, with spaces to pull over and take in the view off the Italian coast. Travelers could stop and buy fresh produce grown in solar-powered greenhouses located along the bridge. The whole roadway would be covered in a dense grid of solar cells coated in a thin, transparent plastic, the designers say.
All in all, the system would be capable of generating 40 million kWh each year, enough to power 15,000 homes.
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Nanotube-Tethered Flying Wind Turbines Could Harvest Energy At 30,000 Feet
Future could spin with greater gusto in the faster winds found at high altitudes, and send power back to Earth via nanotube tether cables. Swarms of energy-harvesting kites, or balloons could stay aloft for a year, and could be reeled in during storms or for maintenance.
This vision, outlined by a researcher at NASA, recently sparked the first federally funded research effort into airborne wind farms. In a bureaucratic infinite loop you just have to love, it’s a study of what it would take to actually study the value of these ideas.
NASA aerospace engineer Mark Moore says it’s worth examining how flying wind farms would work, and how tethered turbines would affect airspace, for instance. Each wind turbine could have a two-mile protected no-fly zone, causing headaches for airliners and of the future. But, while it could cause air traffic jams, an airborne farm would not take up any ground resources or cause any pollution, Moore points out.
Plus, wind is more consistent and its velocity is higher at higher altitudes, and the power goes up with the cube of that velocity. You can get between eight and 27 times the power production at 2,000 feet above ground, Moore says.
Offshore flying wind farms would present the fewest airspace problems, but then you would have to bring the energy from the ocean to power plants on land. In other words, it’s a big research problem. Several small companies are studying the concept, like the Italian startup , which proposes a pair of tethered balloons flying at 2,600 feet. Each balloon has a sail, creating an antagonistic relationship — the balloon with an open sail moves downwind and draws the other balloon upwind, and then the motion reverses. The sails’ movement is transmitted to the ground via the tether, and it can be used to spin a turbine to generate electricity.
But Moore says flying wind turbines involve so many factors — technology, geography, competition for airspace — that the federal government should assume a greater role.
“We’re trying to create a level playing field of understanding, where all of the concepts and approaches can be compared,” he said.
Moore will use $100,000 in federal funds to complete his pre-study study.
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Wind-, Solar-, and Hydrogen-Powered Ferry to Lady Liberty to be Completed in April
The 1,400-horsepower New York Hornblower Hybrid, capable of carrying 600 passengers, will be equipped with hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels and wind turbines. A proton exchange membrane fuel cell will turn hydrogen into electricity, though the Hornblower will also house Tier 2 diesel engines. According to the press release, these should only be used to cover “additional energy needs,” whatever those are.
Developers also plan to include as many eco-friendly materials as possible in the construction of the vessel, including recycled glass countertops, LED lighting, and aluminum wall coverings in place of wallpaper. With entire football stadiums planning to produce their own energy, one boat may not seem like much, but it is a step towards Statue Cruises’ goal of eliminating emissions entirely from its ferry services.
[Enhanced Online News via Engadget]
Solar Wind Could Replace Solar, Wind as Renewable Energy Source
A solar wind power satellite, or a Dyson-Harrop satellite, after the scientists who invented it, would provide 100 billion times as much power as the Earth currently uses, as Discovery News points out. Researchers from Washington State University published a paper describing the system in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
It involves a .4-inch-wide copper wire pointed at the sun, and attached to a solar sail. The wire — which can range in length from 980 feet to more than half a mile — would generate a magnetic field that would capture electrons from the solar wind. The particles would be funneled into a spherical receiver, which produces a current.
Some of this electricity would be used to power the electron-harvesting magnetic field. The rest would power an infrared laser beam, which would be pointed at collectors on space stations, power bases or Earth. Satellites could be placed anywhere in the solar system, and networks of satellites could combine to generate terawatts of power, .
The system would be cheaper than installing solar panels in space, because copper is cheaper than photovoltaic cells, according to .
The main problem is getting all this energy back to the planet. Satellites would have to sail tens of millions of miles away from Earth in order to capture enough power, but even the most powerful laser beams would scatter over such great distances. The laser would spread to thousands of miles wide, according to John Mankins, president of solar power consulting firm Artemis Innovation. He is quoted in saying you would need "stupendously huge optics, such as a virtually perfect lens between maybe 10 to 100 kilometers (6.2 to 62 miles) across," to capture the laser.
Researchers would have to design a more focused laser before solar wind satellites could be deployed, acknowledges to Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a co-author of the paper.
Still, the idea seems worth exploring — the solar wind is a vast source of energy, so why not try to capture some of it? If it could solve the world’s energy problems for good, it's worth a closer look.
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World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Opens Today in Britain
With the opening of this farm, Britain’s capacity to produce wind power will increase by 30 percent. At full capacity, the farm is projected to power 200,000 homes, bringing the nation one step closer to its of producing 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Currently it produces 3 percent.
Additional turbines will be added over a four-year period, bringing the planned total for the farm to 341. But with other projects in the works, the farm may not be the world's largest for long.
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