Here is a great story from the Guardian about the worlds largest wind farm. Its so non stereotypical of who does what, how and why in sustainable energy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/14/windpower.energy
Archive for the 'Wind' Category
ONE of the first large cargo ships in 100 years to cross the Atlantic Ocean with the help of the wind will set off from Europe this month on a voyage that is due to make maritime history.
The MagLev wind turbine, which was first unveiled at the Wind Power Asia exhibition in Beijing, is expected take wind power technology to the next level with magnetic levitation.
Magnetic levitation is an extremely efficient system for wind energy. Here’s how it works: the vertically oriented blades of the wind turbine are suspended in the air above the base of the machine, replacing the need for ball bearings. The turbine uses “full-permanent” magnets, not electromagnets — therefore, it does not require electricty to run. The full-permanent magnet system employs neodymium (”rare earth”) magnets and there is no energy loss through friction. This also helps reduce maintenance costs and increases the lifespan of the generator.
Maglev wind turbines have several advantages over conventional wind turbines. For instance, they’re able to use winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 meters per second (m/s). Also, they could operate in winds exceeding 40 m/s. Currently, the largest conventional wind turbines in the world produce only five megawatts of power. However, one large maglev wind turbine could generate one gigawatt of clean power, enough to supply energy to 750,000 homes. It would also increase generation capacity by 20% over conventional wind turbines and decrease operational costs by 50%. If that isn’t enough, the maglev wind turbines will be operational for about 500 years!
Source: Inhabitat
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/11/26/super-powered-magnetic-wind-turbine-maglev/
I found this masters project from a UK university quite interesting. They have developed a framework for estimating the wind farm potential of a site using existing data in the public domain.
Wind Resource Prediction Project homepage
The weibull distribution is commonly used to approximate wind speed frequency distribution. Here is a good site explaining how to calculate the mean, mode and median for a Weibull distribution.
http://www.weibull.com/AccelTestWeb/weibull_distribution.htm
‘American Electric Power’ is planning to store wind power in batteries and to use them during peak demand…..
Hi all,
A piece on sustainable shipping I originally wrote for the RMIT student magazine ‘Catalyst’ in semester 1. Feedback welcome.
Christian
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Its recently been revealed that a serious source of air pollution comes from the cargo ships currently sailing the worlds oceans. I had heard this before and a claim that apparently you could trace the worlds shipping lanes by the brown haze above them but I hadn’t realized that ships actually contribute more pollution then the rest of the worlds transportation sector combined! A bit of research soon uncovered some startling statistics including this extract:
“…although emissions from road vehicles has declined sharply in recent decades, emissions from large ships have changed little while the volume of worldwide shipping has steadily increased. Those two factors have allowed pollutants from ships, estimated at 6 million metric tons in 2001, to surpass road vehicle emissions estimated at 2.2 million metric tons.
If no stringent international ship emission regulations are adopted by the International Maritime Organization, the study warns, ship emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides will soon surpass those of not just land vehicles, but all land sources, including power plants, factories and refineries.”
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