How Big Can Wind Turbines Get?

This Real Engineering episode is brought to you by Skillshare and is home to thousands of classes that could teach you a new life skill over the past decade. Wind power has seen astronomical growth, rising from a global total of 24.3 megawatts in 2001 to 650,000 megawatts in 2019. Concerns in the 1990s that

wind

power could not be reliably integrated into the grid virtually have faded as we learned how to adapt our networks to handle

wind

fluctuations with the right climate infrastructure and policies. Wind can account for a substantial percentage of a country's wind energy. power generation we need look no further than denmark to see proof of this in 2019 denmark got 47 of its electricity generation from wind power which was not a single day which was the average for the whole year on one particularly windy day that denmark actually produced 140 percent of its electricity needs with wind energy and thanks to strong interconnections with its neighboring countries denmark was able to sell the vast majority of that generation to norway germany and sweden denmark is ideally positioned to benefit from wind energy, but its closest rival in Europe Ireland is isolated in the middle of the Atlantic with a relatively primitive interconnection with the United Kingdom and only one pumped hydro station in the entire country, but Ireland managed to generate 32.5 percent of its energy from of wind in 2019.

Grid operators are learning how to reliably integrate wind energy into The energy market where energy is bought and sold almost like the stock market in countries like Denmark, has evolved rapidly to adapt to wind energy , becoming faster and more responsive, using weather predictions to schedule and dispatch other power sources as needed. I'd be surprised to know. Not to mention the importance of natural gas in this equation, a fast and responsive form of fossil fuel energy that can ramp up quickly to supply power when the winds die down. Natural gas is an unsung hero in this story and it's not going anywhere until we develop it. cheap and scalable energy storage solutions, but it is undeniable that the inertia is with wind power now and with offshore wind becoming cheaper and more attractive, it will only get stronger.

Countries around the world are investing billions in wind energy technology and a fascinating trend has emerged in the past. two decades wind

turbines

continue to grow the height and average diameter of wind

turbines

have continually increased during that time, in the early 1990s the average wind turbine was approximately 27 meters in diameter, but year after year the average diameter of the wind turbine has increased continuously exceeding the limit. than it was possible to continually increase the power the turbine was capable of generating, continually reduce the cost of electricity as literal economies of scale were activated. You see, the power a wind turbine can generate depends on its ability to convert the kinetic energy of the wind. in electricity, so we can derive a very simple formula to calculate how much energy a wind turbine could generate if it were 100 deficient, starting with the kinetic energy equation, we don't want energy, we want power, which is energy per unit time, so we need to change this mass variable for a variable that defines how much mass passes through the circular area swept by a wind turbine per unit of time, for that we need the area of ​​the circle, the speed of the air passing through that area and the density of the air, if we exchange them, we now have an equation that defines the power that a 100 percent efficient wind turbine could extract from the wind.

With this equation we get a simple answer to why wind turbines continue to grow. The area figure is determined by the radius. Squared, by doubling the radius of the wind turbine blades, something that happens approximately every 10 years, we are quadrupling the maximum power that the wind turbine can generate and with that the cost of electricity for these turbines also plummets, but What size can a prototype version reach in 2019? One of the most powerful wind turbines was installed in Rotterdam. This huge wind turbine with a diameter of 220 meters is 260 meters high compared to the Eiffel Tower. A landmark that dominates the city.

It would be located at approximately 80 percent of its height, but this is not a static structure. It is an incredibly powerful dynamic machine, a single rotation of its blades is so powerful that it could keep the average UK home supplied with electricity for two days. Making these blades is no easy task, requiring incredibly expensive specialized tools. LM Wind Power which was acquired by GE in 2019 manufactured the blades and has had decades of experience pushing the limits of what is possible. Start by making two massive molds that will give the shape to the blades. This in itself is a huge engineering challenge and requires a large amount of capital investment molds.

They require precise machining, even small molds can be extremely expensive, but these blades dwarf even the wingspan of an A380. The mold must be able to create a vacuum to compress all layers of fiberglass and expel air as the plastic resin is injected. You also need to be able to apply heat to cure the resin. These are unique and expensive tools that increase the capital costs of wind turbine blades. General Electric made a big decision when it acquired lm Wind Power. The company has manufactured 228,000 wind turbine blades since then. 1978. During this time they broke numerous records, including the record for delivering the longest cargo in history, when they commissioned the world's largest aircraft, the Antonov An-255, to transport two 42-meter wind turbine blades from their facilities. of manufacturing. in China to their testing facilities in Denmark and that is often the limiting factor in the size of wind turbines.

There is currently no technology that allows turbine blades to be separated into smaller modular sections that can be assembled on site. The shovels must be transported. as a single solid piece and lifted into place by specialized halide cranes They have the largest wind turbines. It is much easier to build a wind turbine factory directly next to a port, as lm Wind did in Normandy for the Haliad this size in coils. Obstacle-filled roads and railways would be incredibly challenging and expensive, if not simply impossible, in most cases, the transportation and assembly costs requiring the purchase of specialized vessel tools and cranes also diminish the cost advantage of build bigger, all this before getting to the design challenges.

As the blades lengthen, the forces on the structure also grow. The longer the blade, the faster the tip of the blade will travel, being zero at the center of rotation and increasing with distance from the center of rotation. Longer blades will have higher tip speeds than shorter blades even if they have the same rotation speed, this is a problem the faster the tip speed the louder the noise and this is actually the main factor which limits the maximum allowable tip speeds to get around this. Larger turbines are designed to spin slower but with higher torque that higher torque requires a larger and heavier drive shaft capable of transmitting the torque to a larger and heavier gearbox capable of converting high torque, a low speed rotation at a lower torque, a higher speed rotation needed for the generator, the increased complexity needed to deal with This higher torque results in a heavier and more expensive powertrain, again reducing the advantage of increased power generation, but the design problems do not end there.

The next problem is the lateral forces that the wind exerts in parts on the wind turbine, the tower and its foundations. It must be strong enough to resist the force of the wind attempting to overturn it, this force increases with increasing blade area and the blades must also be rigid enough to resist the bending forces they experience the longer the blade. The stiffer it must be to prevent the blade from bending so much that it hits the tower. This is a major concern when storm conditions are inevitable. Some designers have proposed folding blades that rotate the nacelle so that the blades face away from the wind and collapse like the branches of a palm tree in a hurricane, this strikes me as over-engineered and simply introduces too much complexity and potential sites of failure, we may be reaching the limit of what we can achieve with fiberglass reinforced plastics for blades as large as halide mitigate this, but it is imperative to minimize the weight of the blades to reduce the forces attempting to tear the blades from the hub.

If wind turbine blades continue to grow manufacturers may have to consider switching to fiber reinforced plastics. carbon, but this is currently prohibitively expensive. After all, our goal is to reduce the cost of electricity. These complex and interrelated design limitations have led to a slow but steady rise in wind turbines. diameters as better and cheaper drivetrains become available as aerodynamic optimizations reduce blade noise as materials and manufacturing techniques improve to reduce waste allowing increasingly larger wind turbines to be cost-effectively designed manufactured transported and assembled ultimately reducing the levelized cost of electricity from wind power to the point that, fortunately, coal-fired power plants are becoming an archaic relic of the past and during the writing of this episode the use of this record-breaking Hallyat As it becomes cheaper and cheaper our ability to generate clean energy is going to skyrocket, little by little we are learning how to make the most of the resources we have at our disposal here on earth and do it in a sustainable way, which has been something I have been learning while growing the business related to this YouTube channel, we are managing to manage three channels with only four full-time employees and to achieve this, we all have to constantly learn and improve this year, we made radical changes to our task management system and methods of communication, and we receive help.

With the advice of my friend Thomas Frank, who has a fantastic productivity class on Skillshare called the Productivity Masterclass, he creates a custom system that works and will help you create a task management system that you'll actually keep on track. We have also put a lot of effort into improving our 3D animations in Blender and Cinema 4D and you will witness some of the fruits of these learnings in this video. Skillshare also has fantastic courses on multiple animation platforms. 2D animation is actually an easy skill to learn. I thought myself how to animate in a single length. weekend for the first video on this channel, you just need to take the time to learn, lifelong learning is mandatory for anyone trying to succeed in this world and no matter what you are trying to learn, Skillshare probably has a class to teach you in the new year.

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