123 meter blades, that’s insane. This means the tip of the blade travels 772 meters in a single rotation. The speed of sound is 340 meters per second, meaning if it travels more than 0.44 rotations in a second, the tips of the blades are breaking the sound barrier.
The GE Haliade X, smaller but not by a lot, maxes out at 7 rotations per minute, giving a rotor tip velocity in the vicinity of 80m/s. Generally noise considerations mean you don't aim for a tip velocity faster than that, although for a turbine that is only installed in offshore or other uninhabited locations, you might design for a higher tip velocity. Despite some advantages to higher velocity, though, considerations related to erosion caused by high speed impact of dust, water drops and ice particles become an issue long before you'd get to supersonic speeds.
> Regular turbine spotters judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the wind farm, whilst the engineers themselves operated their turbines by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
There is so much power in the wind. If you are a little late with feathering you might end up having too much momentum to be able to use a friction brake without burning it up. So a long period of steady wind followed immediately by an increase to the point where you can no longer stop the machine is quite risky: all that stands between you and certain destruction is either a lucky lull in the wind or your continued ability to feather it and that can get surprisingly hard when you are dealing with high winds. To the point that if you go 'coarse' at high RPM you end up pulling over the tower due to the extremely long arm for that force to take effect.
Never ever underestimate what the wind can do. Wind turbines will always have some latent risk (as do most other activities and constructs). For every design there is a pathological set of circumstances that should never happen. But once in a long while it does. What should surprise you is that so few of these accidents happen that they are news.
On the smaller turbines I worked on, the speed of rotation was controlled by feathering the blades as you’d expect. Braking was also achieved the same way, with the friction brake acting as a “handbrake” once the blades were slow enough.
One thing that some people don’t consider is that the direction the turbine faces is also controllable and therefore used for braking. A lot of people think the turbine is blown by the wind to face the correct direction, but there is a separate wind direction sensor and a motor to turn the turbine.
The friction brake could be applied at speed, but that was for emergencies.
I don't know about this one, but a single rotation of the turbines recently installed in the North Sea can generate enough electricity to power an average family home for a day.
If they do break the sound barrier, that's also when the efficiency drops iirc. So I guess they'll switch it to a heavier load or RPM, or apply the brakes?
Rotating blades like this should never go beyond the critical Mach number where local airflow on the blade upper surface reaches Mach 1.0 (about Mach 0.8ish). The shockwaves that form are attached to the surface and like to shift around with slight changes in conditions, which cause awful vibrations. I'd expect the blades to be braked in some way to never exceed critical Mach number.
Isn't there a great resistance to overcoming it? So basically it would stop accelerating before ever crossing it.
But, AFAIK, windmills wre immobilized when the wind gets too strong, in order to protect them. If the tech allows it, they can also be made to catch less window. Some Dutch wind mills could be rotated, and the cloth covering the arms could cover less surface. Modern windmills adapt their position automatically. Look at [0] and search for "Ten Have / Beckers".
I presume the pitch is adjustable, so unless the mechanism fails you can just relax the pitch like pointing a sailboat directly into the wind to depower the sails.
The mechanism is designed (or at least should be designed) so that if anything breaks the blades rotate to the no power position. There is a lot of engineering and redundancy that i'm only partially aware of.
I guess the real question is how bad can conditions get before the "no power position" is still too much force for the structure to withstand.
You can't escape the fact that the blades are a ton of surface area on a long lever... and if the winds are both forceful and directionally chaotic, there isn't really a "no power position" to be found.
Going back to the sailboat metaphor, it's the conditions where you douse the sails entirely. At most flying a little storm jib. Pointing upwind is just to enable doing so.
The tower catches more wind than the blades and will fail first. And the tower is built dor the force of strong winds with the blades resiting the wind.
Though they are built in rural areas and at sea so even in the worst case disaster (manufacturing flaw, not wind) nobody is hurt.
Even if pitch is adjustable the problem is very non-trivial given the size of the blades and different wind speeds and directions on different elevations. Putting the blades in no-power position along the main wind direction, but having small sidewind 200m above the surface would rotate it.
Even if that where true (note that the wind is not pushing the blade directly away, but sideways), the tip of the blade is not responsible for most of the force (since it mostly depends on the cross section area, intuitively).
In other words, wind pushing the middle of the blade could accelerate the tip, even if the tip only produces drag.
More specifically, power is Torque x Omega (rotational speed) for a rotational system
So yes, faster means more power. Torque is limited by the generator and how much power is "being pulled" from it. (which is a bad description but there you go)
This made me think that people in the West imagine East Asia like Japan or Hongkong, ie. everything is packed and very small. But China in general really is like the US (and indeed the country is of similar size): everything tends to be big. Certainly, coming from Europe, everything is huge in China.
A German company says they can transport blades of up to 100m length as a single piece [1]. For longer things I'd guess there is no option other than to manufacture them on site or near-site, as the Danes are doing for offshore projects [2].
the US Midwest has a ton of wind power, if you drive through there you have a decent chance of seeing a truck carrying a blade. pretty interesting stuff. obviously those are a lot smaller than this windmill though.
I guess it makes sense that they put them near major roadways, for easier access, but I find driving through a wind farm to be intensely distracting. The rotation of the windmills during the day, and the strobing warning beacons at the top at night, really tend to pull my eyes off the road ahead.
The blade is usually manufactured as a single fiberglass piece. With how big this thing is I imagine it's manufactured somewhere directly at the shore, and just lifted onto a boat directly from the factory.
The base is segments (shaped like calamari rings), which are big but usually can be transported by road, but the big ones probably can't pass under bridges.
How technically challenging is building(?) printing(?) these pieces? Presumably they need to withstand enormous amounts of strain. Can you produce an impromptu factory anywhere, or does this require sophisticated equipment that benefits from fixed installations?
It's a pretty complex and manual process. You need tons of space, and it's usually built with composites. It's pretty challenging to inspect them for flaws once they are built too.
Afaik, they are built in dedicated factories but usually on the same continent (at least!) as where they are going to get installed.
Depends, regular ones as a single blade since they're assembled in the factory. But there are attempts to do it differently because of the inconvenience. A swedish company make wind turbine towers out of wood that can be assembled on site: https://modvion.com/
Just to examine the common claim about wind turbines killing birds -- the number of birds killed by wind turbines is vanishingly small compared to other threats.
Not trying to pick a fight but just posting because I hear this often from my friends, re birds being happy.
The choice, if between coal-fired plants and windmills should be pretty obvious to birds. Sure we may not see them getting splashed to bits with coal-fired plants but they are silently getting ill/dying over time.
Bird death from turbines small-scale and highly predictable. Deaths from nuclear can range from zero to regional catastrophe and it's basically impossible to predict when it'll happen and how bad it'll be.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the risk profile is SO different from wind.
The worst case is worse, but nuclear disasters are so rare and reactors produce so much power that nuclear is safer than wind in terms of deaths per TWh.
As is the power generation profile. Wind/solar/tidal are important to develop, and the risk profile should include whatever peaker or storage backs up the variability in generation.
Because solar and wind are a fraction of the capex and opex, have none of the risk or security headaches, more easily distributed (meaning less grid infrastructure) and don't generate nuclear waste.
In the port of Halifax right now there are two heavy-lift semi-submersible transports carrying 12 13MW wind turbines destined for the Vineyard Wind project off Cape Cod. A photo of what the tower segments look like: https://twitter.com/BenMacLeod/status/1680629818931511296/ph...
The picture looks strange. You can see a ship through the turbine blade. That seems to be because ifisicence took a promotional picture with lettering and leaf decoration from here [1] and "cleaned it up" with some photo tool.
General Electric and Vestas both have 14 megawatt wind turbine prototypes in operation. This seems to be a prototype deployed in a large installation. It's not in the catalog yet.[2] Mingyang has been delivering some 12 megawatt units. Two years ago they announced a similar model with slightly shorter blades.[3]
You're right. That's clearer in the high-rez version.
It's a wind turbine in the fully feathered shutdown condition, with the thin edge of the blades facing forward. So the blade looks thin.
Statista records a MySE turbine with 118m blades at 16MW nameplate.[1]
At 123m blade length, this should be maybe 1 MW more. Looks like the original article, which claims power for 36,000 "homes", is using roughly 1 home = 0.5kW. In the US it's more like 1 home = 2kW.
The caption says "similar to this one" so I didn't expect much. But it's interesting to see a publication engage in what looks initially like overt copyright infringement.
Good spotting, IFLScience hasn’t been “real” science for a while since they got some traction and vitality. Their role has shifted more towards what makes headlines, which is what sells ads, which is what pays them.
In the 80s we had GROWIAN [1], which I found utterly fascinating as a kid. I have always been under the impression it proved that ultra-large turbines were a dead end. Maybe they will be rehabilitated?
EDIT: I always remembered GROWIAN as a single blade system, but apparently that was its successor Monopteros, which only ever reached the prototype stage.
> Some lessons were however learned from conceptional mistakes made in its construction, e.g., the futility of trying to reach profitable installation sizes without taking intermediate steps
> The point of view that multi-MW-yield wind turbines were technically and commercially infeasible gained some currency after the failure of the project, but was eventually superseded by technical progress. Beginning with the late 2000s, twenty-five years after Growian was decommissioned, installations with identical dimensions and yield (100 m rotor diameter, 3 MW net yield) were being produced in large numbers, a class of turbines that has continued to dominate the market and to push forward the mean net yield of newly installed turbines.
Another interesting paragraph suggests this was designed to fail:
> The partners as well as the BMFT also had political motives connected with the project. Günther Klätte, management board member of RWE, stated during a general business meeting: "We require Growian [in the general sense of large wind turbines] as a proof of failure of concept", and he noted that "the Growian is a kind of pedagogical tool to convert the anti-nuclear energy crowd to the true faith".[6] A similar statement regarding the incurred financial burdens was reported of Minister of Finance and former Minister of Research Hans Matthöfer: "We know it won't do anything for us. But we do it to demonstrate to the wind energy advocates that it doesn't work."[6] After the Green Party had derided the installation as the electricity provider's "fig leaf" on the occasion of groundbreaking in May 1981, the RWE took internal measures to make sure that publicly a position of open-mindedness towards alternative energy production was emphasized while public interest in wind energy was allayed.
> just one of these turbines should be able to produce enough electricity to power 36,000 households of three people each for one year
What is the point of adding a time component in there? They always say weird things like this that make me double take. "Wait... does one revolution power 36,000 homes for a YEAR???" What's really annoying is that they aren't even wrong, just annoying.
Confusing power and energy units seems to be a constant theme not only in reputable press, but in a lot of publications that consider energy, infographics and so on. There are also instances of correct, but confusing units, like KW/h per year when talking about power.
I don't understand it and probably never will. I think at this time readers in much of english-speaking world expect this type of errors and will mind the "correct" language, e.g. simply watts when talking about power.
I think there is a joke somewhere here about all power stations stop working exactly after one year of coming online because of people unable to imagine amount of fuel per unit of time.
Got curious what the power rating of the blade pitch control system is. Couldn't find a size reference, but KEBA [1] sells motors and drivers at the 9 kW and 22 kW levels. Nidec [2] at 26 kW.
So just controlling the pitch (presumably of a more average turbine) uses the (peak) power of heating a house in Sweden. Noted that the duty cycle is low, but still.
These are advertised as "typhoon resistant". Like all big wind turbines, the props are variable pitch, feather under excessive wind, and rotation stops.
The big trouble spot is the gearbox and its bearings.[1] These big turbines are advertised as "semi direct drive" turbines, which means they only have one stage of geared speed step-up. Large wind turbines are very slow compared to desirable generator RPMs, and the bigger the turbine, the lower the RPMs.
Bearing trouble is currently the big limitation on turbine life. Not many large wind turbine drivetrains are reaching the 25 year design life. Huge bearings and gears with off-axis loads have problems not seen in other applications. As the wind changes, stresses appear from odd angles. This causes minor bearing damage, which increases wear, which eventually causes major damage.
A new research result: [2][3] Argonne National Lab has been able to reproduce this problem in a benchtop setup. The metallurgy/lubrication problem is still not fully understood, and it's getting considerable attention.
Stuff like this is the difference between a prototype and a long-lived production product.
Truncated-pyramid floating wind turbines shouldn't have as much of a problem with this, as the loads are closer to traditional transverse and axial.
(Picture two flat-topped letter 'A's, one behind the other, with a crossbar going from the top of the front one to the top of the back one. The blades spin around this crossbar, an axle. The generator can be at one end of this axle, or in the blade hub. The whole structure is floating, moored at one corner, and can rotate to keep the blades facing into the wind as required.)
Similar wind speeds happen every afternoon in "the Slot" in the SF Bay. Maybe we should decorate the area with a similar giant windmill. It also happens to be when peak pricing is in effect.
I've been thinking along the same lines recently. The shallows just next to Emeryville seem ideal for this, and would aesthically match the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. I'm not sure if or why this hasn't been proposed yet.
I live on the coast in the East of England and can see three banks of wind turbines on a clear day. The nearest are 4 miles out to sea.
When they were first installed there was local opposition, but now no one cares about them at all. They don't ruin the horizon, they aren't an eyesore, and compared to office blocks they don't seem to be killing a large number of birds or causing any other issues with wildlife.
They want to build more, but the blockage seems to be the large increases in costs of materials and labour since the project was costed pre-COVID (likely just a play for some govt subsidies?) and also concerns about pylons to carry the power generated. I'm personally not so worried about the pylons esp given the cost of buried cabling.
Last I heard I think 25MW turbines were in some early stage of development. At least that is the biggest my former employer I recall was considering for their latest installation vessel. But I have been out of the loop for a while, so would love to hear an update.
The first 14MW was installed quite a few years ago (and it might have been upgraded to 15MW), so this is just a small-ish increase in max size. The big news, foe at least, is that it is Chinese. Siemens, Vestas and GE have some serious competition now it seems
We need to figure out how to get things to spin in space really fast - like some piezioelectrical fan blade turbine that takes advantage of the extremes in differential temps?
@Twosdai - I was talking about space generators, there is no air. So how get spin, from temperature diffs that can turn a turbine/generator?
I don't think that it's necessarily speed which is the thing that we should look for. It's how best to convert large amounts of moving air into rational motion. So a large slow moving windmill may generate more power than a smaller faster moving one.
Anybody else notice the small arrow on the base of each blade showing which way it should rotate? (Is it likely that someone would install these blades backwards?)
Fascinating article. Looks encouraging. The size of the turbine and the capacity claimed is staggering. Is anyone aware of any materials that explainn how one distributes turbines over a farm to maximize yield? Can a tribune of this scale alter localized flow to require specific distribution patterns?
> According to the corporation, just one of these turbines should be able to produce enough electricity to power 36,000 households of three people each for one year
What happens after one year? Do they collapse into the ocean and then they have to build a new one?
Insignificant on many levels. If we should care for that we should stop all fossil fuel consumption right now, stop eating meat, and most importantly, stop putting glass windows into our cute buildings.
Why are these questions always in wind turbine posts before anything els?
Folks who worry about this have an excellent outlet for their concerns: don’t have outdoor cats, and donate and work to spay and neuter feral outdoor cats. They are orders of magnitude more destructive to the bird population than wind turbines will ever be.
Looking at this source [0] they kill about as many birds in a year as we eat chickens in a week, i.e. ~1 million.
7 times as many are killed by cell towers, 80x as many by cars, and up to 1000x as many by cats. Maybe they should put cat ears on turbines and people would be fine with them.
Because ostensibly global warming and climate change is of far more existential threat than localized turbines. Wind power could possibly save all birds, at the cost of some birds. It’s similar to when a self driving car gets into an accident - all hand wringing and no looking at broader statistics.
> Why are these questions always in wind turbine posts before anything els?
Because it's better to worry about it and try to mitigate at the beginning, than wait until there is too much inertia, sunken costs, vested interests and institutional pushback. Some things become too hard to fix if you start wrong.
Bird deaths from wind turbines are essentially a rounding error, probably less than a million a year. On the other hand, cats kill billions of birds per year.
The world used about 180,000TWh of energy in 2022[0]. That requires about 21TW of generation capacity. If we assume wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 30% due to the intermittency of wind, we would need about 69TW of nameplate capacity.
If each of these turbines is rated at 16MW, we would need about 4.3 million of them.
Is there enough space?
Let's assume turbines should be spaced 10 rotor diameters apart[2]. A turbine of this size (246m diameter) would need to have about 2.5 * 2.5=6.25km^2 of dedicated space. So we will need about 27 million square kilometers of open sea space.
Coincidentally, that's the same as the total area of continental shelf in the whole world.[3]
Continental shelf depth is up to 200m.[4]
The deepest wind turbines today are in depths of 59m.[5]
What should we conclude? As long as we figure out a way of building turbines in deeper water, or perhaps floating turbines, and a way of manufacturing the required materials (hopefully without recourse to fossil fuels), the project seems just about plausible. But it would be a truly planet-scale endeavour.
You're confusing primary energy with useful energy.
What people need to realize is that if we go to renewable, electric energy, in most cases this will also involve efficiency improvements. Many fossil fuel based processes are horribly inefficient, with electricity you can often avoid doing things like "80% of our energy goes into heating up the air around whatever we're doing".
That said: Yes, we'll need a lot of wind turbines.
I don't mind being conservative for this exercise, and renewables have their own inefficiency issue: we'll need to accept the inefficiency of using electrolysis to produce the hydrogen needed to synthesize the feedstocks needed to run petrochemical processes (e.g. producing plastic), because energy production isn't the only thing that depends on fossil fuels.
There are however various companies looking to e.g. make ethylene from CO2 which, if made economically viable, simultaneously fixes previous fossil CO2 release, and further reduces the financial viability of continuing to drill for more fossil gasses.
Pick your desired percentage of wind in the future energy mix. Even if we say 25%, it's still going to need millions of turbines. And our energy demands are not shrinking.
We built about a million aircraft globally during WWII (specifically: 1939-1945). I’m not saying the average WWII airplane compares perfectly to a modern wind turbine, but the technology and industrial base we used to do this was also vastly more primitive. So yes, I’d bet that a sufficiently-motivated human society can crank out a million turbines over a multi-decade time span. You can Google the IEA “Net Zero by 2050” report to find estimates of how much offshore wind capacity there is (it’s a lot.)
It does illustrate the specific challenge of this energy transition. If a given energy technology isn’t being mass-produced in factories, it’s basically irrelevant given the scale of what we need to do.
I think they should be, but even if they aren’t, there still is the observation that a kWh of electricity often can produce more of what we really want (light, motion, compute power) than a kWh of oil (about the only thing we can efficiently convert that into is heat)
For example, Google tells me
- petrol is about 12 kWh/kg,
- the modern fiat 500 has a 47l gas tank,
- Tesla sells cars with 50kwh batteries.
Yet, that Fiat doesn’t have ten times the rang of the larger Tesla.
Energy consumption is a bad indicator of living standards. Everything that defines my living standard has become much more energy efficient during my lifetime. I have for example more light in my house than I used to and consume about 20% of the energy I used to. My induction stove uses a lot less energy than the wood fired stove my grandma had at her house. My current computer uses about a tenth of the electricity of my computer twenty years ago and does much more. An electric car uses about a third of the energy of a gas car. A heat pump uses about a fourth of the energy of a fossil furnace.
Induction stove. Electric car. Heat pump. Those are indicators of being born in privilege. What about your AC in car and hotel and home?
USA setting off nukes and Britain fire bombing Dresden are examples of energy use which is wasteful and polluting. There are always exceptions to one broad indicator, in this example energy usage.
Technology improvement typically brings more efficient use of resources and less pollution. Energy consumption, as one indicator, tracks with increased GDP and increased standard of living.
USA, and some western Europe, exported dirty manufacturing energy use and pollution outside the borders. Any nation rich or strong enough to export pollution of manufacturing will tend to show the numbers you highlight.
I recommend you read the short linked article before making strong statements.
> It would be wrong to assume that rich countries have only achieved this by offshoring manufacturing overseas – which would simply mean that other countries are consuming this energy on their behalf. Consumption-based energy use – which adjusts for the energy used to produce the goods we import and export – has also plateaued or fallen in many countries. We see this clearly in the chart for Sweden.
Can we agree that energy released and used in war fighting is wasteful? In the general view of war fighting "over there". Britain did not improve the living conditions of those in Dresden.
There are designs for floating turbines (but they still need to be anchors to the sea floor). Though I wonder if, on scale, they could be made into a flotilla that would only need a smaller amount of anchors for the whole thing, and also be towed around if needed.
I heard that the total wind power across the whole world is something like 20 times the total power humanity needs. So if we ended up doing this, we'd stealing some 5% of power from the wind, which is quite a lot. This itself could have significant climate consequences.
Solar shouldn't have this problem, instead: the amount of power we receive from the sun is ridiculously larger than what we can ever thing to consume.
I don't believe that number, wind is essentially second hand solar power and insolation is orders of magnitude larger than what we need. Do you have a source?
They have installed these in the Taiwan Strait where, in the event of war between China and Taiwan, one well-aimed missile knocks out power to 36000 homes or businesses. Obviously the first target and the juiciest targets are those that disrupt and disable the adversary's ability to produce the means and materials of conducting warfare. Therefore power generation, factories that produce munitions or that can be quickly flipped to dual purpose factories are obvious targets to neutralize. Accomplishing the destruction of your adversary's domestic ability to produce the weapons of war, food stocks for the nation, munitions, etc compromises the adversary's ability to conduct a war without needing to depend on outside assistance.
In Texas we have numerous wind farms. One of my relatives came home to find a crew at work on the neighboring property building a pad for a turbine. They had received no notice that a wind farm was to be constructed in the area and none about opportunities to object to turbine placement and as a result, while they were trying to determine who to contact about this, brand new turbines were installed on the neighboring property with the nearest one being less than 1500 feet from their home. It appears that they are now stuck with the constant whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the blades as they rotate and an electric hum, 24 hours a day and their peaceful home now has an inescapable background noise pattern.
I love wind power, I have some solar power installed on my own property and will be upgrading that. I think though that the ability to enjoy peace and quiet in your own home should not be compromised by a private utility even if they are providing clean power for public consumption.
It would be better if we could replace some older turbines with newer units like this high-capacity turbine in the article. Perhaps with larger, more pwoerful turbines we would need fewer to be installed to be able to meet our state's power consumption needs. New wind power installations should be mandated to use best-available technology so that we end up with durable, reliable, quiet power generation with a minimal footprint.
The low density of wind power actually makes it much harder for an adversary to take out a country's energy production capacity. Currently, that well-aimed missile could hit a nuclear plant and cause devastation as well as the loss of multiple gigawatts of capacity. The equivalent wind power would be spread across hundreds or thousands of turbines, spaced kilometers apart. Destroying one wouldn't have the same impact.
Missiles with integrated guidance systems are in every modern inventory. I mentioned the possibility of the loss of a single turbine to one missile and left it up to the reader to extrapolate the consequences if the one firing the missile had a large number of missiles at their disposal. Satellite data available allows one to pick high value targets with high precision.
I hope that conflict between Taiwan and China never happens. I enjoy reading about new technologies coming into production and if these nations go to war, a lot of this productive capacity will shift to production of tools for war instead of tools useful for solving problems that we have brought on ourselves over generations.
... But how many missiles would be used to take down a massive wind farm vs taking down a single nuclear reactor?
Regardless of whether the enemy has lots more missiles, they still have a finite number of them. Those missiles cost money. War is as economic as it is kinetic.
Using those missiles to disable power generation means they can't be used on other targets. Overuse of ammunition eats into stockpiles or forces early resupply, which takes time.
Very valid points. Those who have to conduct the war must consider these things - supply chain issues, production bottlenecks, existing stockpiles - and prioritize targets accordingly. Choosing between potentially causing a nuclear disaster and disabling power generation from cleaner sources is a no-brainer for me. I'd leave the reactor intact and re-evaluate the sensibility of that decision daily in case something changes. There are so many higher value targets available that would have a noticeable effect on the adversary's ability to continue waging war that those higher-value targets should get a higher priority.
It's a lot like WWII where Allied aerial bombardment campaigns tried to target oil refining, ball bearing production, railroads and critical transportation infrastructure like bridges, factories where tanks, planes, and other vehicles were manufactured, and rocket launching facilities. Those targets, if you can keep hitting them so that they never come back to full capacity will give a tangible advantage.
I'm not sure there are too many higher-priority targets than a modernized nation's capacity for generating and supplying electricity when it comes to that nation's ability to resist invasion. There's a reason modern wars involve targeting electrical infrastructure as a strategic priority...
That and industrial manufacturing (which China has motivation to keep intact), but even industrial targets are contingent upon an electrical supply.
The military can run off fossil fuel generators for only so long.
With respect to potential TW conflict the TLDR is PRCs ongoing massive distributed renewable rollout at PRC scale is very much part of strategic energy security in event of war.
Issue in TW conflict limited to TW and PRC is scale of asymnetry too large and growing - TW unable to stockpile enough survivable fire power to meaningfully degrade PRC energy production let alone long term, especially massive PRC MIC located inland. PRCs tangible advantage is her industrial base too large to be disrupted at scale and for long. For reference medium term nuclear as % of energy mix will go from 5% to 10% (2035) which is enough to ration around during war. Long term 2050+ still "only" 20-25%. Consider scale of PRC's current distributed renewable rollout efforts is enough to power all residential use this year and likely substantial % of industrial use in coming years. Hence PRC coastal nuclear still most enticing targets even if that's warcrime territory (queue blowing up 3 gorges meme). Ultimately if TW tried to hit PRC nuclear they better commit to massive preemptive strike on reactors with their entire inventory since substations/transformers (which PRC makes indigenously) can be rapidly replaced. There's no opportunity for TW to reevaluate since PRC has stockpiles to disrupt TW completely and prevent followup strikes in retaliation and TW can't be meaningfully resupplied let alone reconstruct under motivated PRC attack. And if PRC preempts, TW options even more limited. It's a matter of who can rebuild infra and out attrite, which overwhelmingly favours PRC. WW2 strategic bombing worked for US because adversaries couldnt disrupt CONUS logistics. Even that is increasingly challenged if US commits to total war with PRC in TW scenario since PRC is boostering global strike capabilities which will hopefully limit scope of war due to mutual homefront vunerability (between PRC and US at least).
c.f. "pebble drone swarms" from "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson
(in short, as I understand it: lots of cheapass drones each carrying a small rock, insignificant by itself, converging on the target from every direction, only coming together as a lethal weapon at the very last minute)
I am not sure what is your point. Do not ever construct critical infrastructure because it might be targeted in war? You say window turbine, but that could just as easily be a coal plant, hospital, car factory, legislative building, etc.
I have this problem a lot in rimworld. I solved it by running more than a single line. I feel like that's a viable solution for attacking transmission lines in the real world, too.
Transformers less so, I suppose. I'd imagine those could be hardened. Is there a reason we couldn't place them underground?
Believe it or don't, I read TFA and added a little color to the situation since most of us understand that great technology like high-capacity turbines has the potential to be useful in more locations than just offshore installations.
As time passes and we are able to make the switch from fossil fuel sources to renewable sources we will find ourselves with a requirement that we produce as much power as possible in the smallest footprint. There will always be people who don't want a turbine near their house. That's a simple fact. One of the original arguments against wind installations in California was the argument that it spoiled the view since no one wanted to see a bunch of turbines along a scenic ridge, they preferred the unmolested vistas of their childhood. Later, they focused on noise issues, which are valid concerns, and many states worked with operators and other stakeholders to design a set of guidelines or restrictions on minimal offsets from habitations.
Texas is not one of those states and so wind turbines of any size can be installed within the wind farms without taking into consideration existing habitations. Most operators solicit public input though in the case I mentioned, there is no record of any notice to affected people that the wind farm might have an impact on their use of their property or quality of life.
It is a lot like the problems we had here during the Barnett Shale boom about 15 years ago where operators bought mineral rights all over North Texas and began drilling for natural gas and then fracking those wells so they would be economical to produce. There were no restrictions in most cities and communities on offsets to housing, schools, businesses, etc and so, as the industry has done so many times in the past, they took advantage of that situation and began drilling knowing that they could deal with those problems later.
Over a course of years some communities passed regulations limiting drilling locations and other parts of the operation in a bid to prevent drilling wells just over a fence and the building of compressor stations in neighborhoods.
I think if you had a compressor station, even one with all the noise attenuating walls around it, near your own house you would also keep a wary eye on any attempts to bring other noise sources into your area that will interfere with your quiet enjoyment of your private property. The low frequency rumble from the compressor engines is not attenuated by the puffy walls and travels for large distances like ground roll on a seismic record. I am a geophysicist and for me, when the compressor starts up it is like feeling the initial part of an upsweep from a vibrator except that the upsweep never makes it to the higher frequencies. It's just a low frequency rumble that doesn't stop until the compressor engines stop.
My mind doesn't get stuck on actualities, I look at possibilities, probabilities, and consequences and for that reason I can see that something like a huge turbine installed today in an offshore generation configuration could easily be employed later as a component of an onshore generation farm.
I know that puff piece article didn't cover any of that ground since it was not designed to tell any part of that story.
