Link: https://www.ecoticias.com/en/floating-turbine-china-s1500-hovers/21848/

The S1500 floating turbine’s operating altitude is 4,921 feet above ground level, where wind speed moves about three times faster than at the surface. The advantage of this altitude (also referred to as vertical slice) can result in a power output up to 27 times higher than a conventional ground-based wind turbine of similar capacity.

The capacity to generate one megawatt of electrical power (MW) with the S1500 system is comparable in size to what small wind power turbines normally generate (a conventional 328-foot-tall wind turbine), while the footprint of the S1500 system is significantly smaller. This amazing power density shows the efficiency benefits of being able to access high altitude wind power resources by new and innovative airborne platforms.

Cool. How do they perform maintenance?

Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the manual.

Does it have batteries on board? How does it connect the power to the grid? O_o

Just throw a dart at it and wait for it to come down.

I read an article about it a while ago, and that said it'd be tethered to the ground, and power would be transfered through the tether.

If it's tethered, the tether can winch it down to ladder truck range.

That or helicopter.

How come the 131 foot altitude in the headline is never mentioned in the article? These turbine operates at 4,921 feet, a number that makes a lot more sense when you convert it to metric, 1.5 km. The article is littered with these odd imperial measurements that should have just been left as nice round metric numbers, or least re-rounded after conversion. 130 feet would have read better, but the original number was 40 m.

is it 131ft long? 🤔

These are a massive liability every storm. You have to winch them down and get them into a blisteringly massive hangar that can hold them. Then get them set back up after. Every. Single. Storm.

Furthermore, you don't save on land use, as you need the massive, expensive hangar for each right at their base.

Ground-based wind-turbines just feather their blades and lock their gearbox. Very simple.

I'd love to see the weight of a five thousand foot cable.

Still better than coal

at least 2 breeding heifers

It's obviously attached with wires. It can't just float around and generate energy.

You say obviously but I don't see how tethering a loose object with 5000ft of live wire is "obviously" safe

The wind at 32,000 ft is 200 times stronger than the wind at the surface?

Ummm... 10 knots * 200 = 2000 knots. I don't think so lol.

A lot of strange numbers in this article that bring its accuracy into question.

No mention of the weight of a 1 and 1/2 km wire that is also suitable to anchor this thing in place. Or are they going to float batteries and bring them down to discharge?

Through a HV cable run to the ground, along with the cable to anchor it.

We're surrounded by live wire all the time. They're insulated, it's fine.

they gonna use magsafe connectors for wireless transmission, duh.

That'd be my guess as well. How big must that winch be to wind in 4000 feet, though?

Helicopter would be far too dangerous, I reckon.

African or European heifers?

How many big macs are thos?

If only there was a giant cable it was tethered to that could also carry electricity.

I'm thinking it's about consistency. 10kts 10% of the time vs average 150kts 100% of the time (the math is a little off but we're in hypothetical estimates already)

Maybe it means the kinetic energy of the wind, which I believe scales against its velocity-squared?

Ummm… 10 knots * 200 = 2000 knots. I don’t think so lol.

First of all, kinetic energy scales with the square of an objects velocity.

Second, since we're talking about a continuous stream of fluid instead of a single object, increasing the air speed not only increases the enegy per unit mass of air, but also the number of units of air per second that pass through the turbine. Which means that the amount of energy extracted scales by the cube of the wind speed.

https://kpenergy.in/blog/calculating-power-output-of-wind-turbines

So, more like going from 10 knots to 60.

Posting them around rich people's private airfields would improve their footprint even further.

2"Ø UHMWPE rope has a breaking strength of ~375000lbs weighs 94lbs per 100' so about 4700lbs for 5000'

That said I have know idea if 2"Ø is the correct diameter rope to anchor one of these balloons.

Source: RightRope.com

edit: I was originally planning on adding in the weight of a high voltage transmission cable, but I'm on my phone and feeling lazy, maybe some one else will feel more inspired than I.

Didn't think about the possibility of a kinetic energy unit, thanks for the insight

I can't be arsed to dig up the equation, but it may mean that the wind has 200 times more usable energy, which I think is a cube function of its speed. Wouldn't be 2000 knots in that case

If you’re adding two strand #2 AWG wire it’s about a half pound per foot so another 2500lbs which means the floating windmill has to support 7200
lbs in addition to the weight of itself.

From the article the turbine unit weighs 2204lbs so that's ~9400 lbs total. Omni calculator says you need 348,436 standard 11" party balloons or 3,979,252 litres of helium to get off the ground and 423,779 party balloons to reach 1.5km altitude.

Oh. That makes it better.

It can’t weigh 2,204lbs if it floats it should weigh approximately -7,200lbs if it’s going to carry the cable and rope.

I'm assuming that's the weight of the turbine without helium in the balloon.

So it would be even lighter if you filled it with hydrogen?

Could you not add wings for additional lift?

It'd be interesting to see the cost efficiency of that versus traditional wind turbines over the expected lifespan of both.

Yes it's odd to see an article about electricity generation technology that doesn't even have a speculative 'levelised cost of energy' as they call it. That is lifecycle expected average $/MWh.

I guess its a very early prototype. and maybe China doesn't care to much about LCOE.

Our houses has loads of live wires, we know how to do it safely nowadays.

I am guessing that the 131 feet come from the size of the turbine (60m x 40m x 40m)... The article is extremely poorly written

Lot's of birds will be shredded

Probably because the article was AI generated, if I had to guess.

Which would be the way to go, since no humans are on board and it’s probably not made out of s aluminum doped cotton.

You’re starting to sound like a chatbot now, MagSafe connectors aren’t wireless. That’s the point!

(I know you’re probably not a chatbot)

Playing with https://telecom.samm.com/cable-reel-calculator, it seems like you could probably fit a reel or two on a trailer?

I seem to remember the current wind turbines need some specialized trucks for maintenance too, this doesn't seem like it's need much more - but I'm not an engineer!

Have data to prove that? Because existing wind turbines hardly kill any birds. That's oil lobby shit leaking through.

These are a massive liability every storm. You have to winch them down and get them into a blisteringly massive hangar that can hold them. Then get them set back up after. Every. Single. Storm.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/utility-scale/texas-hailstorm-damages-thousands-of-solar-panels-at-350-mw-farm/

Is anyone else getting aeon flux vibs?

You know, I was skeptical that birds even got up that high.

Turns out this thing is actually far too low.

Incidentally, also why the other wind turbine bird death stories are largely horseshit.

Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.

It's not that hard to comprehend both measurement systems. Both are valid and it's up to the author to choose how they want to express their figures. You can send them a complaint if you want, but complaining about their measurements here isn't going to change anything.