Has a San Antonio inventor solved a problem of small-scale wind power? | Hacker News Reader

Has a San Antonio inventor solved a problem of small-scale wind power?

texasmonthly.com

32 pointsthelastgallon39 comments

"Marsh believes he has found a way out of this dilemma with a patent-pending “secret sauce” he declines to discuss in detail, which he says can limit the amount of voltage generated so that it never exceeds what a charge controller can handle, even as high winds spin the turbine blades rapidly."

That's not usually the problem with overspeed. It's the blades or bearings breaking and blades flying off. If you have a generator with a field winding, you can turn off the field current and not generate much. But then the blades spin too fast with no braking from the generator.

We're missing some key info here.

Sounds like regenerative braking to me.

Isn't the entire wind turbine regenerative breaking?

I suppose so. I thought this was extending the upper limit of operation.

Couldn't you just let it generate the voltage and then dissipate it as heat?

Thermal management is not an easy problem, especially for outdoor equipment.

Why not have something like the multiple gears of a bicycle, and automatically shift gears when it starts spinning too fast?

The best part is no part.

Transmissions provide a weak point where things break.

...and need maintenance, and cost more. It just seems like an engineering problem that can be avoided vs. solved.

You can essentially already do this without the moving parts with very high efficiency using fancy power electronics. Transmissions are expensive, complex, and inefficient.

The answer to wind and solar power turns out to be huge, centralized installations, not a hundred million individual installations. There is a solar farm near my house, at a power plant, that is over two miles long. Windmills are most efficient when they are huge and slow.

I see the industrial advantage of massive windmills, but "industrial" solar is generally the same panels they slap on roofs. The scale isn't due to physics, it's due to financing.

Residential solar would work great if financing was generous but stipulated the cost had to be reasonably close to grid procurement cost.

Well, and we need to scale up sodium ion cells for home storage.

Home solar with storage adds resilience to communities, and should lessen the amount of transmission infrastructure needed for EVs.

The problem with residential solar is not the panels, it's the installation, connection to the electric network which differs from house to house and having to work with the homeowners.

But I see something that is essentially local labor, so investing government funds into that labor should produce more localized GDP effects.

And I fail to see how that should inflate the cost 2-5x over grid solar. Ok, 2x I can somewhat accept, I guess. But it's not like each house in existence is a complete random topological shape never seen before.

I feel there is some ... impedence ... in the home solar business that is holding it back. I think grid solar and home solar are two separate fronts attacking the same problem, but home solar makes home owners much more aware of efficiency as well. IMO there is policy failures in home solar currently.

> Marsh believes he has found a way out of this dilemma with a patent-pending “secret sauce” he declines to discuss in detail, ...

Presumably this is not a solution that has already been applied (unsuccessfully) to the technology in this field, so any comment that starts with "If he's just ... then ..." probably doesn't advance us much.

Might be fantastic, might contain a fundamental flaw that hasn't presented yet, there's basically zero information given in TFA other than one other evidently qualified person has reviewed the design and granted the inventor the appellation of 'crafty'.

The issue I've always run in to when crunching the numbers on off-grid wind is average wind speed at any particular location. If you're within a certain distance of the Texas coast, you'll have the necessary wind, but average wind speed in the US is closer to 4mph, which isn't really enough to pull meaningful power out of a 3' diameter wind turbine. In many cases the power generated isn't enough to trigger the output relays.

If these smaller turbines don't weigh much, is there really no cheap way to build a 40-50 ft tower where's there's more wind? And is there any hope there will be in the near future?

All of the small wind turbines I have seen have been mounted on a tower, which creates its own set of headaches.

But yes the tower is a must usually.

This one looks more promising.

https://www.halcium.com/

> As of September 2021, we raised a small seed round to continue development.

They still own the domain name, so there's that.

“My truck is so badass you can feel the ground shaking.”

Such a Texas thing to say.

I had my fair share of wind turbines on my sailboat. Nothing this guy is taking about is 1) new. 2) novel. 3) revolutionary.

What he’s trying to do is white-wash and “patriot”ize a simple existing technology. Only with half a brain cell so he thinks he’s solving the worlds energy crisis.

Wind turbines are loud. The faster they spin, the louder. The faster they spin the more potential for hazardous blade separation. I once sliced right through a dinghy with one. Imagine if that was little Melody with her stuffed animal.

The future of energy is not physical force pushing propellers to drive alternators, it’s capturing (and harnessing) the power of the sun. Solar panels provide 2-3x the output, none of the physical dangers, and are quieter than an ants whisper.

Without any particular regard for this guy, it seems (to me) like the future has plenty of space for both: the US has a vast, windswept, mostly unpopulated interior where a somewhat noisy wind mill isn’t a significant concern.

Capturing some of that energy seems like a good idea to me, especially if we can use it to offset solar’s cyclical nature.

And when those windmills slow the earth's rotation, eventually tidal locking the Earth on one side, where will your precious environment be then, hmm??

(what I imagine a typical Texan must be thinking)

>where will your precious environment be then, hmm??

As a Texan I feel compelled to answer this question. You will find the environment right out there where the front fell off.

> the front fell off

Yeah, that's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.

Texas has the most installed wind power capacity of any US state.

Many days the grid runs 100% off of wind energy.

And on the days when there isn’t enough wind, ERCOT sends out mobile phone alerts threatening us with rolling blackouts if we don’t adjust our air conditioners.

Well of course! No one would be worried, if it was just one windmill!

Who do you think allows all those windmills in their pastures?

Never heard anyone complaining other than once about a company trying to not pay out for energy produced.

Wind turbines have a higher potential power density. Wind is sun energy concentrate.

Where can I find the math for this?

Vaclav Smil's book Power Density is quite good

That's even more true for oil and coal, but doesn't necessarily make them great choices.

Plus "concentrate" doesn't quite capture how there are inefficiencies in conversion: A lot of that sunlight gets wasted. A concentration of a portion of a portion.

Even more true of Nuclear but I wasn't making an argument about oil and gas versus solar.

> Plus "concentrate" doesn't quite capture how there are inefficiencies in conversion.

Jeez.

> I wasn't making an argument about oil and gas versus solar.

I know, I'm mentioned them to demonstrate how "it's indirectly from sun energy" isn't automatically positive.

> Even more true of Nuclear

That seems like a stretch from "steady irradiance like with solar power" over to "stars death-sploding." It's a good thing the stuff we use in nuclear power wasn't formed from our sun, we aren't done with it yet.

Potential and realized are different things. I could potentially run at light speed…

> Solar panels provide 2-3x the output, none of the physical dangers, and are quieter than an ants whisper.

...and stop at night. In many places wind peaks at night, which compliments solar nicely. This could be especially useful in a future where the majority of cars are EVs that charge at night.

This is where battery and storage comes into play. We aren’t limited to harnessing power the moment we need it, we can store it for later.

Yes, but if you have two intermittent sources (such as solar and wind) instead of just one you don't need as much storage for a given level of reliability, and you aren't cycling your batteries as frequently so they will last longer.

In parts of Texas they have enough wind at night that consumers get free electricity at night, which is great for EV charging.

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