tagged w/ Wind Turbines
-
By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, April 30, 2012 11:18 EDT
What if your source of electricity also gave you clean drinking water?
That’s the promise of new technology developed by the French engineering firm Eole Water, first conceived in the late 90s by a man who collected water from his air conditioner. He reasoned that if an air conditioner could help him accumulate water, so could other types of machines, so he set about merging the production of electricity and water.
Today, that dream is alive and well. Eole’s turbines are currently undergoing rigorous tests in Abu Dhabi following months of development and fine tuning in France. The company says that each turbine is capable of producing up to 1,000 liters of clean drinking water per day, or about 62 per hour, simply by filtering moisture out of the air and funneling it to a storage tank below.
Thibault Janin, Eole’s director of marketing, told CNN reporter Eoghan Macguire that the turbines can cost up to $790,000, and that the company is targeting poor, water-starved regions like Africa, South America and Indonesia first.
“We have just started the commercial aspect of this product but the price is not that expensive when you compare it with the long term solution that it gives,” he reportedly said.
Over 884 million people struggle for or go without access to clean water on a daily basis, according to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. The director warned recently that the world faces a growing potential for water being used as a “weapon” unless rapid improvements in technology can mitigate the growth of drought weary communities.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/30/breakthrough-wind-turbine-produces-drinking-water/
This video is from Eole Water, published to YouTube on April 24, 2012.
"Now 'This' is Coool as Hell!!!" =)By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, April 30, 2012 11:18 EDT
What if your source of... more
-
-
KB723
-
added this
-
1 month ago
- |
-
By EDDIE BARNES
Published on Sunday 22 April 2012 00:00
US TYCOON Donald Trump will warn the Scottish Parliament this week that his plans to build a luxury hotel alongside his Aberdeenshire golf course will be axed if ministers back a series of “insane” wind turbines nearby.
The billionaire property developer will appear at Holyrood on Wednesday to attack the Scottish Government’s renewable energy proposals, accusing Alex Salmond of “destroying” the country’s natural heritage.
His championship golf course, ten miles north of Aberdeen, is scheduled to open as planned in July, but the entrepreneur’s senior representative said additional plans for a major hotel and housing development could not “co-exist” with an offshore wind farm planned for the coastal waters nearby.
George Sorial, vice president of The Trump Organisation, said: “If there is an industrial power plant on the shore line, the concept of having a luxury hotel and resort is simply incompatible. The two can’t co-exist.”
Sorial’s comments throw fresh doubt on the 500-hectare development, along with the job hopes of the thousands of workers which the Trump Organisation claims will be needed to build the entire project.
However, Trump was accused of “showbiz bluster” by environmental campaigners last night, as they produced a poll showing that 71 per cent of Scots back wind power as part of the country’s energy mix. The Scottish Government is committed to sourcing all of the country’s electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020. Trump’s dispute centres on plans to construct 11 new “next-generation” wind turbines, that will be clearly seen from his development.
The American billionaire will give evidence this week to Holyrood’s economy and energy committee. He is also expected to renew his attack on both Salmond and former first minister Lord McConnell, claiming he was given assurances that the windfarm development would not go ahead. Both Salmond and McConnell, who lost power at the 2007 Holyrood elections, deny any such guarantees.
Trump is expected to speak both inside and outside parliament on Wednesday as anti-wind farm protesters gather to rally against the Scottish Government’s plans to increase the number of turbines both on land and at sea. Trump has turned on Salmond over the push, claiming the move will do more damage “than any event in Scotland’s history”.
Both Salmond and McConnell have said the matter of the Aberdeenshire wind farm proposal, known as the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre, is now a matter for the planning authorities to decide. However, Sorial said that it was “disingenuous and ridiculous” for Salmond to claim he was not backing the wind farm programme off the north-east coast. “Everybody in Aberdeen knows that Alex Salmond is the driving force behind the EWDC application,” he said.
He added: “A lot of people won’t agree with us and a lot of people may feel uncomfortable agreeing with us but on this issue we were misled.
He went on: “It wasn’t until we built the course that the application went in. We knew the proposals were out there but we were always led to believe they wouldn’t get anywhere.”
Last month, Trump claimed he had been assured by McConnell there would be no wind turbines over-looking his course.
He said: “Jack McConnell and his administration said, ‘We really want you to spend your money in Scotland. We will not build the windmills.’ ... I said: ‘Do I have your word?’ They said: ‘You have our word.’”
However, McConnell hit back last night. He said: “Mr Trump was treated with the same respect and courtesy that I and my government treated all potential inward investors. It is a pity that he doesn’t return that courtesy now.”
Meanwhile, Trump flew into the former Soviet republic of Georgia yesterday to expand his global real estate empire, lending his name to a glitzy tower on the Black Sea coast. Unveiling a $250 million (£155m) residential high-rise planned for the Georgian coastal resort town of Batumi, Trump said the country had become a prime destination for foreign investment.
• http://snh.gov.uk/docs/B961030.pdf|Click here for a map of current and proposed windfarm projects in Scotland|Windfarm map}By EDDIE BARNES
Published on Sunday 22 April 2012 00:00
US TYCOON Donald Trump... more
-
-
Los Angeles Times
Breaking news
.
Federal agency bars Edison from restarting San Onofre plant
Los Angeles Times | March 27, 2012 | 2:52 p.m.
.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, citing serious concerns about equipment failures at the San Onofre nuclear plant, on Tuesday barred plant operator Southern California Edison from restarting the plant until the problems are thoroughly understood and fixed.
.Los Angeles Times
Breaking news
.
Federal agency bars Edison from restarting... more
-
-
Los Angeles Times...
.
U.S. probes golden eagles' deaths at DWP wind farm
The toll makes the Pine Tree site in the Tehachapi Mountains among the deadliest in California's wind farm industry. Activists say birds' behavior should be studied before erecting more sites.
.
PHOTO:
Wind turbines in operation in the Tehachapi Pass. The flight behavior and size of golden eagles make it difficult for them to maneuver through turbine blades.
(Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times / July 13, 2011)
.
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times
February 16, 2012
.
Two more golden eagles have been found dead at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains, for a total of eight carcasses of the federally protected raptors found at the site.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to determine the cause of death of the two golden eagles found Sunday at the Pine Tree wind farm, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and 15 miles northeast of Mojave, said Lois Grunwald, a spokeswoman for the agency.
The agency has determined that the six golden eagles found dead earlier at the 2-year-old wind farm in Kern County were struck by blades from some of the 90 turbines spread across 8,000 acres at the site.
Those deaths give Pine Tree one of the highest avian mortality rates in California's wind farm industry. The death rate per turbine at the $425-million facility is three times higher than at California's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, where about 67 golden eagles die each year. However, the Altamont Pass facility has 5,000 wind turbines — 55 times as many as Pine Tree.
The flight behavior and size of golden eagles make it difficult for them to maneuver through forests of wind turbine blades spinning as fast as 200 mph — especially when the birds are distracted by the sight of squirrels and other prey. Golden Eagles are about 40 inches tall and weigh about 14 pounds,
The DWP is developing a avian and bat protection plan that "will include measures for mitigating risks to golden eagles," utility spokesman Brooks Baker said.
Critics say the problem is fundamental. "The increasing golden eagle mortality at Pine Tree clearly points to wind turbines built in the wrong location," said Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. The utility needs to redesign its 250-megawatt Pine Tree network and Kern County needs to put a moratorium on construction of nearby wind farms to prevent deaths, Anderson said.
Garry George, renewable energy project director for Audubon California, said the best solution is to devote years of research into golden eagles' behavior in an area before deciding where to erect turbines. "If you don't ... you wind up with a Pine Tree," George said.
Killing golden eagles is illegal under federal law, but so far, federal authorities have not prosecuted any wind farm operators for violations.
A prosecution in the Pine Tree case could force the booming alternative energy industry to revise its approach at a time when Kern County is drafting boundary maps for wind resource areas for dozens of proposed wind projects designed to generate electricity for Los Angeles County.
A year ago, the Kern County Board of Supervisors adopted a renewable energy goal of having 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy production by 2015. Los Angeles has a renewable energy goal of 35% by 2020.
A coalition of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Defenders of Wildlife recently sued Kern County to block construction of the proposed North Sky River and Jawbone wind energy projects, which would operate on 13,535 acres of mountainous terrain adjacent to Pine Tree.
According to the lawsuit, the projects would have an unacceptable effect on protected bat and avian species, including the golden eagle and the rare and protected California condor, and on an important avian migratory corridor.
.Los Angeles Times...
.
U.S. probes golden eagles' deaths at DWP wind farm... more
-
-
Residents of a West Bank village with no electricity have been helped out of the darkness by unlikely benefactors – a group of Israelis who installed solar panels and wind turbines to illuminate the Palestinians' makeshift homes. The villagers of Susya live in tents and caves with power lines darting right above their dwellings, connecting a nearby Jewish settlement to the power grid while bypassing them entirely. It was this lack of basic services that drew the physicists from Comet-ME, a group of pro-peace Israeli scientists and activists, to this dusty, desolate area. Now the entire village of 300 people has access to power that is reliable, free and green. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/your-details/43054-israeli-scientistsactivists-bring-green-power-to-west-bank-village-susya-south-hebron-mountains-Residents of a West Bank village with no electricity have been helped out of the... more
-
-
worrg
-
added this
-
4 months ago
- |
-
With anti-government zeal in America high and US lawmakers unable to reach a consensus on the size and scope of the federal budget, uncertainty is rampant in the US wind energy community.
http://bit.ly/rZm29PWith anti-government zeal in America high and US lawmakers unable to reach a consensus... more
-
-
– The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused the nation’s 21,600 windmills to generate so much power that utilities such as EON AG and RWE AG (RWE) had to pay consumers to take it off the grid.– The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused... more
-
-
– The United Kingdom has, this week, been tail whipped by Hurricane Katia.
Following the devastation across the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S the damage done here pales into insignificance, although it’s sad to report that there were 2 fatalities here and much structural damage, caused by the Hurricane.– The United Kingdom has, this week, been tail whipped by Hurricane Katia.... more
-
-
- Dale Vince, the founder and sole shareholder of Britain’s largest green energy company, is a one-time hippie dropout whose business nous has impressed the Prime Minister- Dale Vince, the founder and sole shareholder of Britain’s largest green energy... more
-
-
Bridges are generally exposed to the elements, meaning they generally get a nice dose of sunlight often coupled with some fairly strong crosswinds. For these reasons this “Solar Wind” bridge design would seem to make a lot of sense. The proposed bridge would harness solar energy through a grid of solar cells embedded in the road surface, while wind turbines integrated into the spaces between the bridge’s pillars would be used to generate electricity from the crosswinds.
The brainchild of Italian designers Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino, the Solar Wind concept was designed for the Solar Park Works – Solar Highway competition that asked entrants to modernize sections of a decommissioned elevated highway stretching between Bagnera and Scilla in Italy.
The road surface would replace traditional asphalt with 20 km (12.4 miles) of “solar roadways” consisting of a dense grid of solar cells coated with a transparent and durable plastic coating providing 11.2 million kWh per year. The designers say this system, combined with the 26 wind turbines integrated underneath the bridge generating 36 million kWh per year, would provide enough electricity to power approximately 15,000 homes.
In addition to the “solar roadways,” the top surface of the bridge would also include a “green promenade” along its length comprising solar greenhouses for growing local produce. Drivers would be able to stop along the bridge to buy some fresh fruit and veggies while enjoying panoramic bridge views (an idea which strikes us as "a bridge too far" for this concept).
The Solar Wind entry was awarded second prize in the Solar Park Works – Solar Highway competition and the design clearly has merit. The integration of wind turbines into the underside of high altitude bridge exposed to constant strong winds seems like a particularly good idea – given that this could be achieved from a structural engineering point of view. Let's hope someone will see the concept and run with it.
http://www.gizmag.com/solar-wind-bridge-concept/17771/Bridges are generally exposed to the elements, meaning they generally get a nice dose... more
-
-
The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
By JUSTIN GILLIS
PART ONE…
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.
They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.
The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.
Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.
Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.
The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.
Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.
But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.
Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.
One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”
But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.
“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”
As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.
“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
CONTINUED…The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning... more
-
-
Jellyfish a model of efficiency
John Dabiri, a bioengineer at Caltech, is exploring how jellyfish propulsion can inform wave and wind technology.
By Lori Kozlowski, Los Angeles Times
November 6, 2010
John Dabiri, assistant professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech who won a MacArthur Award this year, is fascinated by jellyfish. He believes jellyfish propulsion can inform engineering, which in turn can inform efficiency in wave and wind technology. He recently spoke with The Times.
Is your background in engineering or biology or both?
I was trained as a mechanical engineer, and I always thought I'd end up working in the auto industry because I'm from the Midwest, and that's what a lot of people do there. But when I went to college, one of my professors suggested I come out to do a summer internship with a professor [at Caltech]. I started to understand that we can learn a lot from animal systems and apply that to different engineering technologies.
What's the connection between engineering and jellyfish?
At the end of the day, when you look at fluid flows, whether it's air or water or blood, they can all be described by the same equations. The math and the physics don't really care whether you're talking about an airplane, a jellyfish or the human heart. So you can start to understand, for example, what makes a jellyfish efficient, and then use that information to design submarines that are more efficient, or diagnose when the heart is no longer performing efficiently. It all goes back to the fluid dynamics.
Tell us some of what you've learned about how jellyfish move.
For a long time, people thought of jellyfish swimming as like jet propulsion — like a rocket that shoots out exhaust and goes the other way. But it's a bit more subtle than that. They create vortex rings, like the smoke rings you might create with a cigar. And those doughnut-shaped swirls of water are an efficient way of propulsion because [the animals] can basically push off of those doughnuts of water.
What we wanted to understand was how do they form these swirling currents, and whether then we could build underwater vehicles that could also create these same type of water currents while they propelled themselves.
What is it about jellyfish that you were drawn to?
At the beginning, it was just their simplicity. They're about the simplest things you can think of — it looks like they are just kind of floating around.
It turns out they do have these interesting fluid dynamics, but we only learned this after we started measuring their fluid flow, using different visualization techniques. The problem when you try to study water flow is that it's pretty much transparent. You can, as a simple thing, just put dye — food coloring — in the water around the animals. The animals will swim through, and then you'll be able to see the water currents they create while they're swimming.
Do you get in the water with the jellyfish or just add dye to a tank and observe?
A little bit of both. With the smaller animals, you can do this in the lab. But grad students in my lab and my collaborators will go out to the field to Croatia or to the Atlantic in Woods Hole [Oceanographic Institution] in Massachusetts, and go scuba diving with them.
Which species?
The moon jelly — that's the most common one. You see them in the aquarium; they are sort of white-colored. They don't sting humans very much, and they're very plentiful, so it's pretty easy to find them. Then there's one called the lion's mane — which has a reddish color with really long tentacles. Those are the two main species we looked at because they are easy to access and the sting isn't horrible.
To inform engineering, would your research only work with jellyfish?
These vortex rings show up in other animals. So you could have picked a trout, let's say, or a shark.
They have more complicated wake flow patterns: The shape of their fins and the way they move is just more complicated. With a trout or a shark, as it's flapping its tail, it's creating these vortex rings, but they are sort of linked up into more complicated chains. So if you were to do that dye experiment — if you could do it with a shark — it would be messier, and harder to interpret what you were seeing.
What's the next phase of your research?
The bigger picture for our lab is a field of what we call bio-inspired engineering — we study different biological systems and try to understand what they do well and what they aren't able to do well, then apply that knowledge to engineering systems.
Recently, we've been doing work in wind energy to find an alternative to the very large propeller-style windmills. These require lots of land, because you have to space them far apart so the wakes of the turbines don't interact with one another. And these days there's more and more opposition just because people don't want to see them in their backyards. There are issues potentially with birds. And so on.
There is another technology out there for wind energy generation — instead of using these large wind turbine structures, they rotate around a vertical axis. They are smaller structures, so they are maybe 30 feet tall instead of 300 feet.
We've been interested in how many of these smaller structures could be situated very close together in order to generate as much power as you get from the very large ones. We were able to learn something about this from how fish school.
Fish like trout or tuna or mackerel will often swim in groups in pretty regular patterns. One of the leading hypotheses for why they do this is that the individual fish can interact with the vortices that are being shed by the tails of their neighbors and go from point A to point B using less energy as a group than if they were going individually through the water.
We tested a mathematical model to describe what arrangement of the fish in a school works for this energy savings — except instead of fish, we had these wind turbines. We did a field demonstration this summer out in Lancaster, and were able to show that using this bio-inspired design for this wind farm, we could actually perform much better than existing technologies that are out there.
The systems don't need to be identical for you to learn from them.
This interview was edited for clarity and space from a longer discussion.Jellyfish a model of efficiency
John Dabiri, a bioengineer at Caltech, is exploring... more
-
-
A new study published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research has found that a wind turbine's color can impact how many insects it attracts, a finding that could help reduce the number of birds and bats that become entangled in the blades while searching for their dinner.
Find out which colors were the most dangerous: http://ow.ly/36fnFA new study published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research has found that a... more
-
-
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39324391/ns/us_news-environment/
Whopper of a wind farm opens off Britain
World's largest offshore project has 100 turbines — so far
Image: Wind turbines in Thames estuary
Stefan Wermuth / Reuters
Photo: A boat powering through the Thames estuary on Thursday provides perspective of just how big the wind turbines there are.
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 9/23/2010 11:59:42 AM ET
LONDON — The world's largest offshore wind farm had its grand opening Thursday — and its location on the estuary of the Thames River makes it a showcase for Britain's push to move beyond fossil fuels.
So far, 100 wind turbines have been planted in waters up to 80 feet deep across the estuary in southern England. The idea is to produce enough electricity, 300 megawatts, to power the equivalent of 200,000 homes.
Each turbine is nearly as tall as a 40-story building and the blades are at least 65 feet above the water for clearance with vessels. No turbine is closer than 1,600 feet to another and the entire "farm" covers an area of 22 square miles.
Up to 341 turbines will be installed over the next four years.
With Thursday's opening, which tops a 91-turbine farm off Denmark, Britain now has more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world combined.
"We are in a unique position to become a world leader in this industry," British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said in a statement before he attended the grand opening. "We are an island nation and I firmly believe we should be harnessing our wind, wave and tidal resources to the maximum."
Britain now gets three percent of its electricity from renewables but aims to get 15 percent by 2020. As part of that, the government this year awarded licenses to wind farm developers in a program that could deliver up to 32 gigawatts of generation capacity and require investment of more than $117 billion.
Critics of the $1.4 billion wind farm include some nearby residents who object to the sight of the giant towers, some visible from shore. The farm starts about seven miles from shore.
Environmental groups tend to back wind power as long as projects are not in areas of significant bird flight paths.
The new wind farm met that standard. It's an "important stride forward," said Craig Bennett of the British chapter of Friends of the Earth.
But the group also wants Britain to guarantee funding of at least $3 billion a year for the recently created and government-funded Green Investment Bank, which aims to boost private-sector spending on low-carbon technology.
"I know that there is still more to do to bring forward the large sums of investment we want to see in low-carbon energy in the U.K.," Huhne said, "and we as government are committed to playing our part."
One embarrassment to the government is that only 20 percent of the investment in the new wind farm has gone to British firms. The farm is owned and operated by Swedish energy company Vattenfall, and the largest chunk of expenditure has been to Denmark's Vestas for the wind turbines.
Global interest
The promised vast expansion of Britain's offshore wind resources is proving to be a powerful lure for companies not normally associated with renewables but keen to generate eco-friendly and reliable sources of revenue.
Engineers, consultants and oil rig makers around the world are setting up new divisions and partnerships in order to get a foothold in the market, which offers secure returns to those building and running the turbines.
"It's attractive for a lot of companies that are looking for contracts," said Ian Simm, chief executive of green fund firm Impax Asset Management, which has holdings in companies such as Vestas.
"The fundamental point that makes it attractive is scale and government commitment, and the fact that industrial companies can learn the facts of success in one offshore environment and be able to transfer the majority, if not all, of those skills to other countries," he said.
However, clearer statements from the government on renewables incentives are still needed to support wind farm developers and really kick-start the market, according to Sarwjit Sambhi, managing director of power generation at Centrica, which has won the rights to develop up to 4.2 gigawatts of offshore windpower in the Irish Sea.
"There is a general theme across this in that we haven't passed the tipping point yet where the industry is confident enough that there is a long-term pipeline of projects."
Britain's potential
The Offshore Valuation Group, made up of government and industry organizations, estimates if Britain were to develop just 29 percent of its potential offshore resource, this could deliver 169 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 and turn Britain into a net exporter of electricity.
This would involve installing 7.2 gigawatts a year — roughly equivalent to 1,000 7.5 megawatt turbines — with fixed offshore wind accounting for 5.4 gigawatts of the average annual build rate needed.
The supply chain needed for this would have annual revenues of nearly $100 billion in 2050 and employ around 145,000 people directly, according to the Offshore Valuation report.
As a result shipbuilders and companies that specialize in making oil rigs are also entering the wind market.
SeaEnergy Executive Chairman Steve Remp, who has worked in the offshore oil and gas market for 30 years, expects the market for equipment vessels to take off at the beginning of 2012.
"I foresee a sizeable industry evolving that calls on the engineering expertise in working offshore in deep water," he said.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39324391/ns/us_news-environment/
Whopper of a wind... more
-
-
In the UK the majority of the green technology development news comes from Scotland or council plans in Wales (recycling food waste and houses made from plastics). Currently, the latest news comes from a collaboration with Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) and Mitsibushi Heavy industries, who plan to develop carbon capture and off shore wind turbines.
It is reported by the BBC the combination of the two companies in projects will increase employment over five years and could create 1,000 new jobs. "Up to 100 new highly skilled jobs will be created immediately at SSE's centre of engineering excellence in Glasgow."-BBC
Yesterday there was news on the BBC site from the MOD who stated wind turbines would not affect their training areas in the Scottish coastline. "The MoD has said the military and wind farms could "co-exist" following news of a Norwegian firm's search for an offshore test site."-BBCIn the UK the majority of the green technology development news comes from Scotland or... more
-
-
Each year there are more inventions that are created to eventually eliminate the world’s need for nonrenewable resources. One of the latest concepts is the Turbine Light concept. The Turbine Light is an idea to light up the highways by using wind-generated energy instead of electricity.
The Turbine Lights work by using the air from the cars as they pass the light poles on the highway. Of course, the concept would work much easier if the lights were in a position where wind gusts are normally and naturally high.
Although the concept is smart and innovative, there are some minor considerations. One question is whether or not a passing car would be able to generate enough wind to produce the energy the lights need.
Recently the concept was entered into a Greener gadgets competition that was searching for new ways to save the planet. If this concept were to work it could greatly change the infrastructure and possibly lead to more innovative ideas about transportation. There is a growing demand for alternative energy uses and the two most promising energy forces are the sun and the wind. With the Turbine Lights, the wind is used.
Via Ubergizmo
Tags: Concepts, Design, Technology News
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/turbine-light-concept-to-light-up-highways-08-02-2010/?utm_source=feedburnerEach year there are more inventions that are created to eventually eliminate the... more
-
-
The Ontario governments announcement last week of a $7 billion 'manufacturing' investment deal with Samsung has been met with a large amount of criticism and scorn. Many people are wondering why a back room agreement had to be utilized to hook the South Korean giant. With all the government bailouts and corporate malfeasance that has littered the business landscape of late, how could a 'subsidy incentive' program - provided for a foreign conglomerate - bode well for the liberals? ----> http://wp.me/pC6Bw-lhThe Ontario governments announcement last week of a $7 billion... more
-
-
A recent New York Times article reveals that some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. And the world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast. The Times says these elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.A recent New York Times article reveals that some of the greenest technologies of the... more
-
-
-
China knows renewable energy is the economy of the future and is cashing in on it by wanting our stimulus money to manufacture wind turbines in China and sell them to America to set up wind farms.
If China is willing to make turbines, where are our great corporations that need income?
Hello. Any corporation out there? Maybe GE will answer.China knows renewable energy is the economy of the future and is cashing in on it by... more
-
