World's Latest 8MW Windmills Now Make Jumbo Jets Look Tiny | Hacker News Reader

World's Latest 8MW Windmills Now Make Jumbo Jets Look Tiny

bloomberg.com

29 pointsOsiris3011 comments

Turbines. Wind. Turbines. They're not being used to mill grain.

Beyond that, does anybody know what the practical limit is to a wind turbine's size?

At some point the blades would poke up through thinner parts of the atmosphere and it would be pointless, so let's say under six miles?

>The 80-meter blades of the MHI Vestas V164 make the machine almost as high as the Times Square Tower in New York, and are so large that they were “a nightmare” to transport on narrow country roads, Jens Tommerup, chief executive officer of the venture, said in an interview.

That is understatement. Transporting the blades took 40% of the budget back in the late 00s IIRC.

Super curious about this. Do you have a source? Any idea what equipment is needed to build these blades? I wonder at what point it becomes cheaper to move the equipment instead of the finished blades and build them on site. Or take a hard look at airships again http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/a-new-generatio...

I will try to find. It was in peak oil/the oil drum years. The user was a guy called Jerome a Paris - investment banker that specialized/s in making wind farms happen. He made a breakdown of the costs withing a project.

I think he had profile both in eurotrib and dailykos. Sadly my inability to formulate a coherent google search fails me now.

Google gives me zillions of hits on "cost of windfarm is transporting the blades". The first I looked at is http://windpower.sandia.gov/other/031428.pdf, which computes costs of transport in the 6-7% range.

The second I opened is http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/61063.pdf. From a quick glance, it has transport costs at around 10% of capital costs.

Of course, transport prices can go up a lot by increasing transport distance or by changing location. Tops of mountains or densely populated areas may be way more expensive.

I do not rule out that transport costs in some cases are way higher, but I don't think it is generaLily true.

And that Jerome de Paris text may be on http://www.theoildrum.com/user/Jerome%20a%20Paris.

That was 8-10 years ago. The industry now is more mature. With pipelines of projects and know how and economy of scale. Back then everything was invented on the fly/ad-hoc and so on.

It used to be about $10k/mile for the hardest routes in the US - where they would have to literally widen t-junctions, increase bridge height clearance etc.

I also got most of my info back in the day by "Jerome A Paris" thread on Eurotribune - sadly that forums is no longer active now.

Ugh, another of those weird faux-scrollbar things at the top of the article.

You mean the progress indicator?

Bloomberg's site design has felt all over the map lately. Like an A/B testing gone really weird.

I initially read this as "BMW Windmills".

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