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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

The article is about the 13MW Haliade-X tubine, but on part of the Doggerbank (Sofia wind park) an even larger 14MW Siemens Gamesa turbine will be installed. As short as maybe 5 years ago >10MW turbines were thought of as unlikely in the near time, and look where we are now. And we still haven't hit any hard limits, meaning there is still room to grow! And as the turbines grow, so do the foundations. Most turbines are installed on a single steel tube that is driven into the ground, a monopile. A single one can be 100m long, 10m in diameter and weigh 2000 tons!

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I don't have a link but IIRC a single rotation of the largest turbines can generate enough electricity to supply an average home for a day.

edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-w...

Take a 3.6MW generator.

That is 3.6MWh per hour.

As we have 3600 seconds per hour, it’s 1kWh per second.

Say rotation is one per second, it’s 1 kWh per rotation for a 3.6MW generator.

A few kilowatthours per day for an average home?

I live in an appartment (still counts as a home) and consumed 6.6 kWh/day on average. The very large turbines don't do 1 rotation per second (wiki [0] says 5-20 rpm). So, totally doable with a 14MW wind turbine

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design

I doubt the rotation speed is 1/s, that would imply pi*220m/s at the tips or 2488 km/hour! Based on animations, it looks more like 1 rotation per 20 or 30 seconds. 20-30kWh seems very reasonable for a house's consumption.

The average electricity consumption of a UK home is 8 to 10 kWh per day (or 330-400 W if you will).

whats the expected lifetime on one of those? does it grow or diminish with size,i.e. do bigger ones last longer?

it does seem that maintenance on the bigger ones is more complicated and requires more sophisticated gear ,not to mention difficulties of operating in North Sea

Yes, but you need fewer of them for the same generating capacity.

So instead of having to maintain 10 1.4MW turbines, you only need to maintain 1 14MW turbine.

Like in Palm Springs where they are replacing 460 wind turbines with 11 for the same energy production.

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