GE Unveils the World's Most Powerful Wind Turbine, 12MW

Conor20

Offshore wind turbines continue to get more and more powerful: GE Unveils the World's Most Powerful Wind Turbine

The new turbine, dubbed Haliade-X, will measure 260 meters (853 feet) tall, the company said. The blades, manufactured by LM Wind Power, will be longer than a soccer field. One 12-megawatt turbine will generate as much as 67 gigawatt hours a year, which is enough to power 5,000 households, GE said. Bigger turbines need fewer foundations and less complex grid connections than smaller units. That means a wind farm’s layout can be made more efficient, and fewer machines means less maintenance.

At 12MW, going full tilt, it would take 417 of these turbines to generate the ~5GW average daytime load of the whole Irish grid. Obviously, they'd need to be coupled with very substantial storage in the system, but an off-shore windfarm with few hundred could put a fair dent in Ireland fossil fuel import bills.

unkel

Conor20 wrote: »

Obviously, they'd need to be coupled with very substantial storage in the system

With one very large storage facility (hydro lake), it should be easy enough for this country to have 100% renewable electricity, I'd have thought? Plenty of wind and a lot of commercial solar farms (and micro solar).

If we were allowed to use the refund from Apple (for the unfair tax breaks we gave them) for this, that would be more than enough.

Calahonda52

What about the bird kill on the well documented migration route from Caribbean to Achill

Effects

Calahonda52 wrote: »

What about the bird kill on the well documented migration route from Caribbean to Achill

What about it? Have you got a link? How wide and what direction do they take?

Conor20

Conor20 wrote: »

Obviously, they'd need to be coupled with very substantial storage in the system

Compressed air subterranean caverns, electrolysed hydrogen, export to EU..

unkel

Create our own Slochteren. This time not with dino juice

We could invest the money we spend on engineers braking turbines on storage and then sell it after...double win.