The news may not be as buzzworthy as protests and conflicts around the world, but significant investments have been made in switching humans to renewable forms of energy -- an issue that also must be resolved ASAP.
Five years after announcing a plan to become carbon neutral, Google disclosed that it has invested $990 million in the renewable sector.
Since the carbon-neutral plan was announced, the company has signed 20-year agreements with two renewable energy suppliers: NextEra in Iowa and Minco in Oklahoma. These deals will power Google datacenters in those states and promote the growth of this industry. Google will get 214.8MW from these two providers alone. The company has also invested $94 million in the Canadian Hills solar power project in Oklahoma to power datacenters in that state.
The IntegralBlade design has no glue joints in the turbine blade. The commercial version of this rotor will have a diameter of around 154m and a total sweep area of 18,600 square meters. (Source: Siemens)
More recently, Google spent $75 million to build a wind farm in Rippey, Iowa. That project will generate 50MW. Some of that energy will power a Google datacenter in Council Bluffs; the rest will be distributed to 15,000 Iowa homes. This project will feature wind turbines manufactured by Nordex USA and will be managed by RPM Access, making this an entirely American project.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the news is equally exciting. Siemens has finished a year of testing the largest swept area wind turbine ever built. The prototype tested in Høvsore, Denmark, has a 120m rotor. The commercial version, the Siemens SWT-6.0-154, will boast a 154m rotor and 75m blades and will stand 197m tall with a total sweep area of 18,600 square meters.
Longer blades mean more energy conversion, and each turbine will produce 6MW of power and 25 million kilowatt hours of electricity -- enough for 5,500 to 6,000 homes. (The Vestas V164-8.0 MW turbine is poised to beat Siemens' record in 2015.)
Siemens has put all its wind turbine expertise into these behemoths. Each uses three blades made using a single casting process called IntegralBlade, which produces blades that have no joints and are 20 percent lighter than traditional blades. The turbines are completely gearless, and with the lighter blades, they weigh 200 tons. The company says this allows for easier and cheaper installation and maintenance with less offshore infrastructure.
The first SWT-6.0-154 is being tested at a facility in Østerild, Denmark. Siemens expects this model to become the benchmark for offshore wind farms. The Danish company Dong Energy has already bought 300 of the new turbines. The companies plan to test them at Dong's UK facilities in Gunfleet Sands, starting with two 120m versions as prototypes.
The UK government likely will play a role in this project. It hopes to generate a quarter of the country's electricity using offshore power by 2020, and it has already pumped £75 billion ($120 billion) into this industry.
This is one of my pet issues and I'm so happy to see the big guys finally getting it and throwing serious support behind alternative energy. Also Apple is investing in wind turbine technology, too. Hope it's just the beginning!
Cabe, data centers use a lot of technology to lower their energy costs. Combined Heat and Power (CHP) where the heat from electricity genration is used for cooling can have a great impact. Generally some 40% of eclectricity costs in a data center go to heat rejection. There is a lot that data center operators can do to lower their elecrticity cost. All those savings go right to the bottom line.
Due to the lackluster way green energy is stored, I think the real innovation is how energy is stored in the system. The difficult part is storing the energy after creation. Demand and generation will never match up perfectly with green power. Renewable energy certificates, Green Tags, are the only way to trade in green energy. The non-tangible ticket is traded on the market. It might be required to buy them in some industries.
But I question the connection to actual energy produced. Where is it stored on the grid? Regulation areas? Ones that act just like a buffer to the grid. They do not have infinite storage. So, I am going to assume that the energy is lost somewhere in the power chain. This will require more research on my part.
I don't think green energy is ever really stored. Just like electric vehicles the battery (whether electrochemical or mechanical) is always the achilies heel of the whole idea of alternative energy. Green energy only supplies on demand (i.e. it saves by lowering the amount of carbon or nuclear energy needed).
I think that in terms of alternative energy, it will be a LONG time before we have generation capability that exceeds demand so it's not really a problem. Even if you did, such massive amounts of energy would require a whole new technology to store. Perhaps massive flywheels or hydroelectric lakes above dams (when generating electricity use the excess to pump water back up to the higher altitude storage lake).
Better yet, have wind farms generate NO electricity, just pump water up (put a bunch up near niagra falls and Hoover Dam). This would make the energy conversion more efficient as well. You used to see such things on farms all the time (way back when it was the only way to get running water out of a well that didn't involve a hand pump).
Please take a closer look at the numbers - the wind tirbine Siemens built is almost half tall as Empire State Building and probably is three times wider.
The claim is that it produces "green energy" but how "green" actually it is.
All of those European companies cannot survive withouth government programs. Is that the "green" future?
Pump storage for hydroelectricity. That is a tried and true option. However, quite a bit is lost in simple evaporation. But is any system lossless?
It's green-ish. Turbines, like most green generators, take several years to re-coup the costs i manufacturing. It takes approximately 9 months to generate the amount of energy used to create the turbine. But then it take years to get a return on the investment.
Without government subsidies, I doubt anyone would use them.
As with most technology development, there are often wrong directions taken and too much effort put into making the deficiencies acceptable. These sorts of wind turbines – horizontal axis - have major issues, few of which are mentioned much, especially not in these items. The deficiencies they have may, or not, be overcome in time, but there are much better designs of turbine that have been sidelined - a sort-of repeat of Beta v VHS thing.
The development work done to overcome the deficiencies is generally good - it adds to the body of knowledge available, as long as someone remembers to apply it in other areas of endeavour and not 'reinvent the wheel'!
Wind is actually not a great source of energy anyway - I live in NZ where we have quite a few wind farms - on a clear air day, I can see a farm on the ridge line if some hills around 50km away - often, they are not turning, even though the wind is blowing sufficiently - Why? Because there isn't the load required and the generation company didn't bid a supply price low enough to 'win' capacity. As they stand, wind farms, of the size they currently are, cannot supply base load, the wind is just not steady enough or predictable enough in most places around the world. This leaves them to provide the next layer up in load, but there needs to be 'rotating capacity' that can pick up load as the wind farm drops off or, more importantly, can quickly be dropped off as load falls.
The key to 'intermittent' alternative and 'green' energy is efficient storage. The Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme in Australia is a step in the right direction – pump water up to a lake using 'off-peak' low value electrical energy available from large base load generators and alternative energy generation that is out of sync with demand load and then let the water run through a hydro station to generate power for peak demand load. They make money from the difference in price paid and received and do quite well too.
Unless pumping can be more efficient, then I don't see this as a major solution, just a pragmatic solution for now.
In the future – and not too far either, wind turbines will probably be seen as 'not such a good idea', unless politics and silly amounts of money are used to skew matters.
And the issues with horizontal axis wind turbines? Infrasonics and their harmonics, vaguely reasonable efficiency (good enough to be interesting, but probably could not be made to be much more efficient without radical technology improvements), shadow flicker, airspace hazards and ugly.
I agree with the problem being the storage. Not wind nor solar are either constant so the storage is the key. That should be the main focus of green energy.
Wind turbines are deceptively complicated. The image included with this article caught my eye first; I was surprised to see the entire rotor assembly lifted as a whole instead of being assembled one blade at a time on the nacelle. But weight and balance means the first blade on makes the other two much more difficult.
The nacelle hides another complex mechanism - the gearbox. The rotor spins relatively slowly (even if those blade tips are really hauling!), the gearbox output shaft turns much faster to run at speeds useful to a generator.
The mass of the rotor assembly and gearbox is substantial; I'm pretty sure one could not use simple weather-vane control of pointing direction. I've seen some fascinating laser-based systems to detect air particle motion to give wind direction.
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