Why We Need To Rethink Wind Turbines. Go to brilliant.org/Undecided/ and get 20% off your subscription and a 30 day free trial with Brilliant.org! Wind turbines have a “big” problem. As in, they’re really big: bigger than you might think. One of the latest wind turbine designs sports a swept area of about 10 American football fields. This is generally desirable, especially for offshore wind turbines. More height and larger diameters mean more energy captured with fewer towers. But as you can probably imagine, this makes producing, transporting, and installing these things a colossal undertaking. And as wind turbine manufacturers have competed against each other, the push to maximize size has ended up undermining quality.
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So what wind turbine advancement has you most excited? Go to brilliant.org/Undecided/ and get 20% off your subscription and a 30 day free trial with Brilliant.org! If you liked this, check out Why Do American Homes Suck? kzhead.info/sun/fqiRmreopoGHoIk/bejne.html
I was excited to see timber based wind turbines being developed although I've seen no updates from that idea. Any fully recyclable wind turbine will be revolutionary
I have been studying floating cities of the future for years , at first I was considering wind power in my designs for about 4% of the energy mix , but I found I could reduce electrical consumption by about 5% during the day and 7.5% during the night just by underrunning LED lighting (using 4 LED's to do the job of one) and going to superconducting electrical trunk lines. That seemed to likely be a lot less headaches .
In 2012, ARPA-e gave an award to Advanced Magnetics Lab for its 10 MW direct drive superconducting nacelle that only weighed 150 tons and was less than 15' tall. This nacelle, combined with a lattice frame tower and a two piece blade 90 m long would be optimal for logistics and should be deployed all up and down Highway 25, five rows deep on both sides of the road. Once the superconducting tech, tower and blades have matured, only then should they be deployed offshore where to O&M would be outrageous for an evolving tech.
The towers are steel and recyclable. Engineers are working on recycling the blades. They will figure it out
Would it be possible to create carbon fiber turbines?
The 2010 DeepWater Horizon spill took years to cleanup after it leaked over 200 million gallons of oil into the water. BP paid more than 70 billion dollars fixing it. Wind turbine manufacturers absolutely should be held accountable, but realistically even a wine turbine collapsing completely can't compare with the damage and cost of an oil spill.
Just a tibdit. BP paid not for "fixing it". The largest part of the payment was to cover the expected taxes lost in the spill. Government and courts pretend to care for the environment, but it's only about the tax money. Respevtfully
BP has huge oil ponds cover sq Miles of ocean floor - and killing everything under than and close to them, sans some microbes
To boot with what others have said, many of the materials used for the turbines are either new to the degree being used or the combos of them are so we have know clue what damage they could cause. At one time cola had cocaine and some makeup had nuclear material. Oh. And smoking was good for us. I want everyone to try things to make things better overall. But never forget about the unexpected consequences.
@@aaronblackford981 so… the materials being used in wind turbine blades are all pretty common and well understood in terms of materials performance and challenges associated with waste. This video does outline some new and interesting, innovative ways to combine them to be more effective but they are fundamentally still the same products. All of the examples you mentioned are still being produced today, but they’ve been modified in most cases to make them less harmful. Cola no longer contains actual coca, or at least none of the addictive compounds. Cigarettes now have filters to reduce the amount of tar going into smokers’ lungs. Makeup is now pretty rigorously tested in western countries to ensure toxins are not present. There’s no such thing as perfection, just different degrees of imperfect and we must try to choose the least harmful options and then continue to improve any shortcomings that are found.
@@paleggett1897 not to mention the hundreds of square miles / kilometres of land in slurry ponds that exist in Saskatchewan and Alberta for the tar sands, which are a giant scar on the land which will exist for hundreds if not thousands of years. The petroleum industry seems to be oh so concerned about the number of birds killed by wind turbines, neglecting to mention the tens of thousands that die when landing on these slurry ponds.
"The wind turbine has an area of 10 football fields" proving once again that America will measure in virtually anything other than the metric system
I'm sure the use of football fields can be confusing. So for anyone who's confused, that's about five furlongs by 14 rods..
gridiron or football?
It's actually to give Americans a visual representation so we can approximate based on something familiar. It's not really meant to be a measurement, so much as a comparison for the average person to comprehend.
@@Grellibe we would never make a comparison like that here in Denmark 🤔
@@skodbolle It's about 1,500 large pizza boxes by 50 large pizza boxes. When I put it that way, it sounds off. The turbine blades I've seen in texas were only about 150 large pizza boxes by 20 large pizza boxes.
The problem is clearly measuring equipment in US Customary football fields rather than metric football fields.
soccer-to-'em baby....
NIST has a standard metric football field that they actually convert to imperial units for the downwind calibration tree
This isn't a regular (American) football field it's a Canadian
@@thejuggernautofspades9453 So you're saying we can... Blame Canada!
I don't even know how big a football field is and never interested with it and don't really want to know.
Thank you for the subtitles! I know it's a fair amount of extra work, but your dedication to accessibility is greatly appreciated 👍
These not only help the hard of hearing but also speakers of English as a second language, and also those who are new to the area of technology you're discussing and not familiar with all the terminology. They're a great resource. :)
I used to work as a reliability engineer. I don't consider something that fails before commissioning isn't unreliable. It's a fundamental failure of the design process. Usually I would say it's a fundamentally flawed design, but in this case it was most likely flawed or completely absent analysis. It's extremely straightforward to make a structure self standing. The engineers simply weren't given enough time to actually calculate how much material they needed.
During the Siemens part I immediately thought about an engineer being ignored by the management.
The fact they do not use guide wires is confusing to me. The amount of force on that one pole. The wind catching those blades has to put hundreds of tons of horizontal force against the poles. The pole doesn’t simply hold the turbines up in the air, they also have to stop them from blowing over. If guide wires are used they would probably allow for the pole to be made smaller and cheaper. The only problem I see is the guide wires would have to be fairly low on the pole so the blades didn’t hit them. I’m sure even wires halfway up the pole is better than none at all.
@@ohioplayer-bl9em The wires would have to clear the massive blades which is made harder because the turbine heads spin to catch the wind from any side. The guy wires would be limited to a certain hight to clear blades.
@@ohioplayer-bl9em lol you don't know what youre talking about
Airships make more sense to me for transporting bigger and bigger turbine blades, rather than 3D printing. It seems like the perfect solution. Turbine blades are constructed as lightly as possible and with airships size is no longer a constraint. Plus airships is one of the cheapest modes of transport. The only downside is weather sensitivity and that it's comparatively slow. But when a trip that needs a year of planning is the alternative, those downsides hardly seem to matter.
Where do you put wind turbines? Where there is a high average wind speed. What you don't want when you fly airships: wind. Weather delays will be very high. You will need to pay airship and crew for weeks, when the job could be done in days with trucks and cranes. I don't think airships can lift hundreds of tonnes of tower.
@@niconico3907 When do you build wind parks? When the wind isn't blowing. In the industry we already have to account for significant wind days- days when it's too windy to operate safely- especially if (when) construction slips and pushes into windier winter months. There's also something to be said for cable stays to moor to the monstrous concrete and steel foundations you've already built to accommodate the completed turbines.
Main problem is there essentially aren't any (yet). Blimps are inadequate. This century's airships all seem to be perennially in the prototype testing phase.
@@Digital-DanI have had ideas about nuclear supermassive hot air balloons with Jet thrusters to aid them pick up and move loads. But.the problems about using, steering them in any kind of wind remain. The ideal would constructing an enormous VTOL wing with rotatable thrusters and collapsible hot air pockets. That way it could lift heavy items to adequate altitude. Then collapse the balloons and rotate the thrusters. The thrusters could aid in manoevering while providing lift when landing. It's all science fiction still of course.
Sorry but not. Biggest (or better, longer) cargo plane ever built is 85 meter long, clearly not enough to transport current-date standard wind turbine blade. Moreover, such a huge plane needs an airfiled that normally is not side to side to any windfarm. So eventually, you need road transport anyway.
As a wind technician for 4 years for Vestas, I've led many main component teams and commissioning projects of many turbines. Our site here in Indiana has 329 turbines with two more phase build outs in the planning. As the site QSE and TapRoot certified accident investigator, I've had my fair share of accident investigations. The problem with the critical turbine failures of towers collapsing that happen across the induatry boils down to the particular construction company/crews erecting them. Massive bolt connections on massive tower flanges with massive hydraulic torque equipment that all has to be done by 3-5 man teams per tower cause issuestl that lead to the same mistakes any industry face: complacency, lack of care from being tired, or ignorance. The main component failures such as blades, main bearings, gearboxes, and generators of most often the cause of QC issues from respective manufacturers. It is rare to find serial defects but it does happen. I've personally been involved with a massive blade repair project and gear box replacement project due to serial defect. They take a long time to fully correct and are very expensive. The problem is that most don't show until close to or after the component is out of warranty.
If the problem doesn't appear until near or after the warranty is over, sounds like the flaw is by design.
so we basically need military precision. maube we should use the miltary to produce them
@@evancombs5159 warranty for the main component items I listed are all 5+ years for items that weigh at a minimum of 20,000 pounds for a generator and up to 64,000 pounds for a gearbox. They literally operate 24/7 for all but 1-3 days a year when they're down for service. There's no warranty in any industry that guarantees quality on massive moving parts that is better. The fact that there's a 5 year warranty on these components is amazing to me. Can't even get that on most cars and they're far easier/cheaper to maintain, build, QC, and repair. I should reiterate that serial defects, at least for Vestas turbines, are EXTREMELY rare. I was fortunate enough to experience the only because the wind farm here in Indiana is both a halo site and a pilot site. That means because we're good at our production numbers and have a customer that is fully bought in, we get the newest hot off the prototype models and get to work through all the issues before that go up anywhere else in the world besides Denmark.
@@PazLeBonmilspec standards are most often the bare minimum that private sector uses. Milspec is actually bottom of the bottom for quality in all reality. There's few electrical and mechanical engineers that accept milspec on billion dollar projects. Milspec (government spec) gets you the unusable space rockets. Private sector got us reusable rockets for space launches. Just an easy example but there's TONS out there. Even guns here in America for example, private sector firearms are far superior to milspec ones because they use the milspec as the base and design from there into something of actual high quality.
@@sootynukkels8366 I knew there was a reason government fears armed citizens and government works so hard to disarm citizens.
Best changes I heard were -Using materials enabling recyclability -Changing project objectives to include durability and other long-term needs, while decreasing focus on sheer # of units produced. Thanks Matt!!
Its all about. Greed/ quick profits. Simples. Environmental claims are a , dirty, smoke screen. / Dirty greenwashing
The problem with going smaller is the amount of power produced is directionally proportional to the swept blade area. Also when the turbine is taller it receives more laminar flow which also increases its efficiency/ production.
The myriad turbine is a cool idea to make a turbine with smaller parts, but I see a few flaws with the design, especially in northern weather conditions… First off, the pipe frame holding the turbines is extremely prone to birds building their nests on it. It’s an issue because they often get hit by the blades when they fly off… This is a problem that early wind turbines that used similar structures for their pole encountered. The turbine frame is also extremely likely to accumulate ice in winter, which would make the whole tower suffer a lot more stress than it might have been initially designed for not only because of the weight of the ice, but also because of the higher wind drag with the ice acting sort of like a sail. Finally, having multiple turbines this close to one another in front of such a structure is extremely likely to create turbulence between the blades, which would make a lot of noise. This is quite undesirable for a wind turbine installed close to people’s houses like they showed in one of their graphics. Maybe they accounted for all of those things and the idea is interesting, but we definitely need to keep those challenges in mind.
You missed the *#1* disadvantage... the myriad turbine contraption is ugly.
I dont find normal wind turbines any prettier, just more 'normal'@@DemPilafian
@@CaptainBlueTech The open lattice structures of the 1970s wind turbines are hideous, but the sleek tubular wind turbines of today are majestic.
@@DemPilafian I am of that opinion as well, but I wanted to keep my arguments as objective as possible…
@@DemPilafian I actually design latticed and monopole telecommunication towers as my day job, and you can definitely get a cheaper and equally strong latticed tower made. Making it bird resistant, now.... that's not something I've had to design for.
Deep drilling geo thermal, is the technology we need to be investing in.
And OTEC
And fusion, and small nuclear, and waves and solar and.. Maybe you see the argument.
@@ahrontverschleisser3620 An upside to ocean surface temperature rise!
Good stuff Matt! I'm a wind turbine engineer and that title is perhaps a bit clickbaity. Advancements in the industry are rarely sexy or revolutionary. Large diameter 3-blade HAWTs are pretty well established to be optimal right now, and improvements tend to be incremental material or manufacturing tweaks. Cost pressure means blades are anything but high tech. They're still mostly cheap fiberglass and balsa wood/foam. Carbon is rarely even worth the cost despite being well established and having superior properties, neverminded things like additive manufacturing or Myriad's crazy design. Keystone Towers is probably the most exciting new tech in the (onshore) industry right now. Reliability is a chronically underappreciated metric in may engineering disciplines. Investors just care about ROI, and LCOE is taken as THE metric to reduce in the wind industry. Risk reduction is harder to quantify and optimize and sell to wind farm owner/operators . With so much price pressure and competition, problems with cheaper model turbines were bound to happen. Rock bottom prices mean balancing on the edge of barely good enough to stay together. Maybe that's not a bad thing. If you can save 2% on cost but 1% of turbines will have a defect causing it to catastrophically fail, you still come out ahead, and doesn't mean we need to rethink anything.
Our little but big window to the ingenuity of humans from all over the world, all from the comforts of our homes. Thank you very much, Matt.
I have been working in Wind Energy for 10 years now, both in the field hands on and in back office support roles. This video is solid and well researched and explains the issues well. Seal of approval 👍. 3d printing of any sort being a major part of wind turbines is a long way off though.
If the money spent on solar panels and wind energy had gone towards new nucleqr power plants and safe disposal of nuclear waste our energy problems would have been solved 5 times over 20 years ago.
@@zteaxon7787 could say the same for oil and natural gas discovery, capture, refinement, and distribution
@@zteaxon7787 but you would have run out of uranium pretty soon.
@@zteaxon7787 Thats a fact Jack.👍
@@zteaxon7787 Problem being, there is NO safe disposal of nuclear waste.... And Nuclear is prohibitively expensive.. Look how much rooftop solar has added to the grid in Australia, I get there needs to be different solutions for different regions but, Nuclear is NOT the answer in it's current state....
I would like to see the theoretical power per square meter of swept area for multiblade versus conventional wind turbines.
Surely it will be the same value. Formula for wind turbines is Watts=1/2*sweep area*air density*wind speed^3*efficiency. Although, such close blades might cause might turbulence interfere with the air speed on each blade. The economics of it will probably be the deciding factor. Perhaps longer life due to smaller stronger blades, perhaps cost more due to more motors and maintenance.
Doesn't rotating mass bleed away power on those huge blades? @@AORD72
@@AORD72 the salient measure is levelised cost of energy. Multiple generators with moving parts and copper wraps might suck up the other savings, or they might not. The bean counters will let us know.
@@AORD72 My money is on it being worse. About the only advantage I see is simpler logistics allowing for potentially quicker deployment.
@@AORD72 r² sweep area scaling makes the number of smaller blades needed kinda silly.
As a Wind Technician I cant imagine the headache of maintaining the Myriad multi rotor design. Just imagine maintaining your car if instead of having one engine and transmission, it had ten... Every bearing needs grease, every gearbox needs oil. From a practical human perspective I don't see it working out. Technicians complain about ergonomics between working on Vestas and GE towers. I hope they test it out for 2-4 years before trying a utility scale project.
I don't see it getting past a single prototype per company. It screams of marketing to the less informed (solar roadways, water from air in deserts, ...).
I agree, that is the key challenge with the multi-rotor design. Essentially it would have to have a catwalk for technician access, which represents all sorts of challenges.
I don't think they will even get to the full scale prototype before the company dies.
To be fair, the car analogy is kind of silly because there are electric car designs with a linear engine per wheel that work very well. That's how many modern high speed trains operate as well.
Theoretically each smaller unit could be easier individually to work on, like a bunch of go-karts vs a car/truck/semi (depending on scaling factor) you might have to work on 20x more things but those things would each be easier to work on, Plus you can potentially bring only a few bades offline for maintenance instead of the whole turbine (depending on what your doing) meaning you can potentially schedule maintenance more frequently as the opportunity cost for doing so would be lower. Additionally because your working on seperate things you could have more people/crews on 1 spread over the smaller individual units to speed things up.
all the wind puns blew me away 👍
😂
I love the fact that skybam is shown building the colosseum (or at least a Roman circus).
I really ❤ the puns in your videos & quality video footage in the background! Keep them coming!
Love the music from 2:40 on. Greate to see you grow! Keep going 😊
I really like the idea of the tower with multiple smaller blades and generators. And this story hits home for me, I live right between a GE and Siemens factory, am looking at one while writing this lol.
😂 That's funny that you happen to be sandwiched between them.
@@UndecidedMF a GE - @Dan-Simms - Siemens array? Now the modeling gets extremely difficult!
I don't see the multi generator set up being of much value. From an engineering and physics standpoint it seems to add a weight and complexity for a less efficient paradigm. Makes me think a bit about solar roadways or dehumidifiers for water in the desert.
@@UndecidedMF No, just no. Wind turbines scale exponentially with size. You need 100 1m blades to cover the same area as a 1 10m blade. This is why smaller is alot worse.
@@barongerhardtI wonder if efficiency gets better once you factor in economics. If they are worse, but much cheaper, maybe they're better overall.
The Myriad Wind turbines looks to me like the right way to go; Higher volume of individual parts -> scale of manufacturing, easier transport to destination site, option to swap out faulty components.
Matt, I've been watching your channel and others investigating forward looking energy matters. I've yet to stumble on any YT video that explains the massive semiconductor switching needed to make all this possible. Changing voltages, phases, and synchronizing to the grid. (I'm so old I can remember that the first germanium transistors were of such low power capabilities that many car radios still needed vacuum tubes for the audio output.)
good to see GE is still in the game, they have been an interesting company to watch through the numerous boom bust near death experiences they have been through.
Always a pleasure to hear you Matt. You've got a knack to make even serious science topics come alive every few minutes with puns and witty observations!
Another thing that seriously needs to be discussed is the blades. Being made of fiberglass, they are extremely hard to recycle. In Texas, there are huge graveyards of turbine blades. This is something that needs to be addressed.
This has been addressed and there is active recycling. Fibreglass is inert so there is no pollution problem anyway.
And kills birds.
Oil and coal power kills more birds per watt than wind 9_9
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Cats kill birds more than blades of wind turbines. And they not produce any electricity.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Sure. And fossil fuels kill everyone and everything. Your point?
Thank you for this video on the current state of wind turbines! It seems like the current paradigm of building bigger is approaching its limit, and the technology needs to innovate for further progress.
For years our family has been talking about why not take EoL blades, cutting them down into small but large groupings of turbines. This looks great - well done! We into boats and the DB noise of small singular vessel turbines has really improved; so thats a big bonus for wildlife. It looks easier to maintain or repair too. Multi rotor turbines look like to be the future. Well done!
Large scale 3d printing is cool, but wind turbines are perhaps the worst possible usecase - high wind environments do not seem like they would combine well with a printhead held in place by guidewires.
The concept of using a crane with cables and winches to build a giant concrete 3D printer is actually really cool, and much more versatile than the ones they are making prototype 3d printed houses with. Assuming the technology is precise enough, I could see it being used in many applications outside of wind turbines in the future
Am I the only person wondering how it would cope with any wind at all?
I thought the idea of using a crane was a bit surprising. I'd have expected the printer to start on the ground and raise itself up the tower as it went, then when complete climb back down so it can be disassembled and removed at ground level. They could simultaneously assembly as many towers as they have printers, without having an expensive crane waiting around for each tower.
@@kaneworsnop1007 Look up The Arecibo Observatory. It had a giant, heavy mirror that was held up by cables (extremely thick cables) and the only reason it isn't still around is due to major storm damage. Multiple storms in fact, one storm damaged a critical cable and before they could fix it another storm caused even more damage leading to a situation where it was deemed to dangerous to fix. These crane based 3D printers should be exponentially lighter allowing them to be safely controlled with much smaller and lighter cranes/cables. I'm sure there's also been some lessons learned in the many years since The Arecibo Observatory was first constructed.
Great stuff, Matt. Keep going!
Robert Murray Smith has done a whole lot of thinking on wind turbines, btw. We gotta support & have more creators like that
The airline industry has overall developed an integration of design/ manufacturing over a half century Wind turbines has only been doing that for 2 decades, most of that in the last decade
So wind turbines have two decades ignoring lessons learned and paid for by aerospace and airlines? I wonder if subsidies and government incentives have anything to do with such poor management and knowledge transfer
@@ricardokowalski1579 Airline and areospace industries had their own problems with faulty materials. The price pressure in the wind turbine market is significant and over the last decade, much of the civil engineering capacity in the field has gone toward minimizing the construction and material cost.
@@joergsonnenberger6836 why yes they did. As you correctly pointed out. Those lessons were ALREADY available to the windmill designers. Why did they ignore these costly and hard won lessons? How was price an issue if they were ample subsidies? As for the "civil engineering", the lessons from offshore oil and gas are extensive and available. Why ignore those lessons AS WELL?
@@ricardokowalski1579 Have you considered that the civil engineers are no morons? Offshore oil rigs are completely different beats when it comes to load profiles compared to wind turbines. They age very different, they are made from entirely different materials, they are subjected to much less dynamic loads. Even existing radio towers are not comparable because they can't alter the load actively as a wind turbine can by rotating the blades out of the wind. I don't know were you are from, but in my part of the world utility scale wind turbines haven't been subsidized directly for a long time. They get a fixed price for the generated electricity and therefore any reduction in the price of the construction directly affects the bottom line.
@@joergsonnenberger6836 the subsidies are applied at the energy sale price, not at the structure The problem is not the load profile, it's the installation, maintenance and service costs. And NO, they use the very same materials for the platforms, foundations and risers Why would you talk about radio towers? Why would you avoid the airline and aerospace part?
At Risø research site, near Roskilde in Denmark, there has been test wind turbines with several smaller turbines in one, for 10 years or so.
I have a feeling that whole video is addressed to things like 10y in the past. Totally missed the point with current challenges in wind industry
Thanks for the informative exploration of wind turbines. I've lived off grid for over 15 years and during that time tried using a residential sized wind turbine. That was a mistake compared to using solar. However, I would like to reiterate that centralized production of electricity is only of benefit to the large power companies, not to individuals. There should be more focus on decentralized production of power, giving users a pathway to autonomy instead of continuing energy dependence and the whims of power company rate hikes. Oh, I enjoyed all the little puns you threw in.
NY state had a wind turbine collapse as well. Never did hear about the cause of it. The one I am referring to happened in 2016 in the Town of Fenner and I know one collapsed in NYC in 2019.
I look at those folded columns and my first thought is, “duh”. One of two possibilities…The engineers were pressed to hold down costs so they skimped on the material used in the column. There’s absolutely no way the engineers with their complex computer modeling didn’t know better…or…the column was outsourced to the lowest bidder who chose to ignore speciations in order to make a profit.
I would guess a combination of pushing for too low of a safety factor with catastrophic screw up by the construction team or major manufacturing defect (bad weld, missing/not-properly torqued bolts, ...).
Wind turbine tower break when they lose control of the rotor speed. If there is a lot of wind, and they can't reduce the angle of attack of the blades, the rotor will overspeed, the rotor will push too much on the tower, the blades will bend too much, and strike the tower, wich will break it. Nothing to do with the quality of the tower.
@@niconico3907 You hit on like 5 engineering failures. Maybe one of those happening could be excused but all of them pushes on an extreme of incompetence and blatant disregard for safety.
@@barongerhardt in the world there was 906 000 MW of wind energy capacity at the end of 2022. On the few failures that were around 2MW each. Lets say 10MW failure. Which is 0.001% catastrophic failure rate. Not bad in my view.
@@niconico3907 And what were there causes? Where they freak accidents of unknowable events, deliberate sabotage, or did someone screw up? Under spec requirements, design was inadequate, or manufacture/construction failed to follow design? How ever rare, I don't accept the wind turbine failed because the wind blew any more than I accept patients die because they were given the wrong medication.
These industrial and provider-scale solutions seem to be running into a similar type of problem set to what we're seeing with reactors - intensive reliance on bespoke manufacturing, extreme cost outlay and capital requirement and seemingly much higher risk if the device fails (years to fix, same problems building and shipping parts, etc.). The multi-rotor thing looks more viable, albeit much uglier. Personally I'm more interested in small to medium sized units which require less capital outlay and will probably become more popular with small communities or individuals in windy areas. The closer we can get to automation and standardised parts with factory line production the better, SMRs are expected to utilise the same cost savings to raise their viability. With the Boomers retiring capital availability is going to see a sharp decline so smaller means not just "better" but I think will also mean "possible at all" now; perhaps a variation on that large multi-blade thing where it can be expanded and added to over time? Where you can add more turbines as demand grows?
ultimately you hit the nail on the head. If homeowners were able to install a small less than 50 pound unit on their own roof then wind becomes a game changer. If a small wind turbine was sold at every Home Depot, Lowes and Walmart things change. Why generate a ton of electricity in a far away wind farm, when you can just offset a little of what is being used nearby?
@@jamisonmunn9215 I disagree. Wind turbines and e.g. solar scale differently. For solar, the output scales linear in the area and the only difference between utility scale roof top and home installations are economy of scale for parts. Wind turbines on the other hand scale with the area covered by the rotor, meaning that increasing the length of the rotor by 20% will roughly result in 40% more potential energy to be harvested. This is limited on land by limits on the sound emissions, but even when restricting the speed of the tip of the rotors, the added size helps to shift the wind profile toward lower speeds. The vertical turbine designs at this point are mostly toys and far from mattering in the real world. At this point, a few wind turbines near every village are much more effective than a 100 small case turbines on each house in the same village.
@@joergsonnenberger6836 i dont doubt anything you are saying. These giant wind turbines have multiple giant problems though; massive size, huge costs and insane maintenance. Also a 1,000 turbine order from one of these big turbine manufacturers would take them more than a year to deliver. Meanwhile if Home Depot sold 1,000 of the small ones in year they would kick that company out of the store for wasting their time with a product that doesn't sell.
@@jamisonmunn9215 You are seriously underestimating the dimension of the modern wind turbines. Home installations are typically in the low kW range. A modern on-shore wind turbine typically will have between 3 and 6 MW, offshore turbines are now build with over 30MW. So a factor of 1000 is literally still in favor of the big turbines. For a 1kW home turbine, you typically pay more than 2000USD. For the big turbines, a rule of thumb for the whole project including grid connection is 1 million USD for MW of power. As such, it is much cheaper. Maintenance scales as well.
@@joergsonnenberger6836 I'm not under estimating anything and everything you are saying is exactly illustrating my point. The video outlined multiple problems and I have stated a few more and if they were so profitable why is every wind company losing money? That is the root of all the issues. When your lot size is 100 or 1,000 you cannot work out the bugs you cannot drive efficiencies and you can tell that from the video. What is the first thing they are doing when they want to get more efficient, they simply gp bigger. Every one of these companies are losing money because there are no economies of scale. How come every startup the video talks about not one is making turbines how they are currently being made?
10:16 the size of that hot-end :O "What's the flow rate on that bad boy?" "All of it. Bring trucks "
During a recent trip on I-10 from Houston to El Paso I noticed once you get past San Antonio there are 100's of these massive wind turbines. Some spinning quickly, some hardly turning at all and some idle while all fairly close to one another. I wondered why that is. Oddly enough the majority of wind energy produced in West Texas is done by Florida Power and Light Company. Thank you for an interesting video.
Wind is NOT CONSTANT. SHOCKING, huh?
@@traybern A bunch of wind turbines next to each other, some spinning, some not. That's not due to wind not constantly blowing. The most likely actual reason is because of the energy storage issue. If the turbines are generating more energy than the grid can handle they have to turn off the turbines to avoid overloading the grid. Ideally we'd store the extra energy to be used when the wind isn't blowing but grid storage solutions are just starting to take off. Of course even once we have storage solutions it would still be possible to be generating more power than we need (storage full) or can transfer (the power lines can only handle so much current so even if we needed more power elsewhere, if the lines weren't sufficient we'd still have to shut down the turbines and use a different power source closer to the load).
@@grn1 BULLSHIT! All you need to do is switch OFF the WIRES FEEDING the power lines! NOT to mention CUT the gas flow to the EXISTING power generating turbines!
I can't believe we haven't figured out how to utilize kites for generating wind power. The size of these large towers & blades of modern windmills is crazy. Fabric & cables would cost a fraction of what windmills cost.
Yes it is mind boggling to me too. Maybe it is hard for somebody to imagine that software controlling a kite can be done right. Maybe it is hard to imagine that a non-rigid piece of cloth can harvest a lot of energy, and it has somehow stuck in our heads that if a sail is old-school, low-tech and therefore has to be inferior to the twentieth century tech. I don't know.
They have tried this. See makani power for instance. Engineers are concerned with long term reliability of kites, and people buying power generators are risk averse. They need an investor like Elon Musk willing to think more long term and make it happen.
They have done a lot of work. OK for something small but not really gone anywhere.
Google's X labs tried for about 10 years, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makani_(company), patents are open source if you want to give it a go
@@pn2543 Thanks for the link.
Back in 2017 as I drove on I-10 through Texas a vehicle passed us carrying just one turbine blade. I. wish i could figure out how to paste a few of the photos I took as it passed because it really gives you a glimpse as to how HUGE these components are.
Thanks again for your wonderful and educational content!
Vertical wind turbines could be a better solution if the blades and assembly can be assembled on site. The design is better since the c.g. of the rotor is in the center of the column and the generator can be place on the ground which reduces the p Delta moments. This setup is cheaper.
Yes..
Energy generated per unit of material is going to be far less. If you just want the generator at ground level you can use a vertical shaft in the existing designs. In practice there are several problems.
Show me a working Vertical axis wind turbine in the 10MW range. There is none because the efficiency is too low, the stresses on the blades and drive train are too high. The economics don't add up. The vertical axis turbine design is so old, many companies would build them if it was good.
With all due respect, I feel that the issues with current wind turbines have been grossly exaggerated in this piece. The issues with the Siemens Gamesa Turbines is something which is unfortunate but inevitable in modern industry. The same has happened with certain Boeing and Airbus models of aircraft. Periodically car manufacturers do recalls of certain car models owing to defects discovered after production. This is bound to happen with any product including wind turbines. Also the number of failed wind turbines which have failed and/or toppled over is statistically insignificant when taken in context of the thousands upon thousands of wind turbines of wind turbines which are in operation around the world. That is not to say that further innovation is not desirable or warranted. But neither is it true that current technology is not mature and cannot continue to be deployed at scale or that we ought to wait until some new technology fixes current issues.
Yea... I think he's being too serious. You are right, most *profitable* industries have similar problems. And well, as a fan of renewable energy all I can say is... you mean wind power is profitable???
@kevinhasker Yes, both solar and wind are now cost competitive with coal and oil.
If renewables are cost competitive, why isn't the us going full steam towards replacing coal? Coal has no advantage and too many disadvantages (acid rain, worker endangerment). We can convert to an electric economy and get rid of the toxic fossil fuel companies in a couple decades.
@@Anuchan it is. US coal use is down nearly 60% in the last 15 years and rapidly trending towards near-zero. It just doesn't happen overnight
@@Anuchan not only do we not yet have the appropriate electrical grid infrastructure for that, many of us do not have the extra money to just go out and buy an electric vehicle with a big and expensive battery in it. Not only that but there aren't nearly enough charging stations for such an undertaking (yet). Trust me I really look forward to the idea of most everyone using electric vehicles, but we are not nearly close to that yet.
14:20 That seemed like a very specific and very personal information, Matt.
That looks RIDICULOUS and I love it
Hey can you do a show on go-anywhere geothermal? Companies like Eavor (see KZhead channel) have a solution that is at the start of the s-curve, and it's rolling out in Germany right now. Nobody's going to want wind or large-scale solar with this available, and the environmental impact is wayyyyy less.
Of all the things you featured in the video, the Myriad system is the most promising and practical. All those on-site manufacturing methods are very early stage and are unlikely to have any real impact in the next 10 years. It's is VERY hard to manufacture in uncontrolled environments like you would find at wind sites. Desert, mountains, ocean - all are radically different and all have an effect on the machines and materials. This is one of the issues 3D home printing companies are facing as well. When it's 35º on one homesite and 105º on another, your materials just don't behave the same way and you have to make adjustments which introduces uncertainty in the final product. The same is 100% true for on-site wind component manufacturing. The one place you don't want uncertainty is in wind generator components - as Siemens has learned.
I feel like for areas with decent to good sun, what should be built are very large sand batteries that are heated both directly and indirectly by the sun. A rough concept: You have an outer borosilicate or ceramic glass structure and inside you have a metal structure (preferably Al) that holds the sand or what not. You paint the inside metal structure ultra black on the outside and paint the top of the sand ultra black. You pull a vacuum on the enclosed structure. You also have some Solar panel arrays that are directly connected to resistive heating wires that wrap around the copper tubing that coils in the center of the sand (no need of batteries, controllers, etc just direct current to the resistive wire system). Also point some solar reflectors at the tank. So the inside metal tank is heated both directly by the sun and indirectly by Solar panels--with the copper tubing being heated directly by the Solar panels. The combination of the vacuum insulation and sheer thermal mass will ensure that once up to temp, it will remain more or less constant, even over night, through cloudy days, etc. It will take awhile to get up to working temp, but once there, it should be relatively stabilized. At night time, cover it with an IR reflector to help with this process (or coat it with specialized coating to do the same thing). Anyways, once it is up to working temp, run water through the copper tubing to generate steam to power generators. It is very low maintenance, low complexity, relatively low cost. Though the large borosilicate glass dome might be a challenge and be fairly expensive (and somewhat fragile). The generators would be the only moving parts, but easy to get to and work on if/when needed (unlike the generators in a giant wind turbine).
Hey Matt. Thanks for your serie. I love every episode. How about something on "triboelectric nanogenerators"
I'd like to see things go smaller and more localized. Things can be more cost effective and stable, IMO. We see that happening with SMRs and there have been other videos looking at other wind generators that are smaller and may be more residential intended.
Sure, they would nicely substitute "residential localized" coal/gas power plants
Wind scales very well by going bigger. Double the length of the blades and get quadruple the power. The reverse is costly. Going from 100m blades to 10m and you lose 99% of the energy capture potential.
@@naytonthunderIf you think about it, my home and almost every other one in my neighborhood has a “residential localized” gas power plant - but for heat, not electricity. As for smaller, localized electric generation, solar has tremendous advantages there. Solar panels (with battery backup) can be installed in all sorts of buildings, and scale from tiny to covering an entire lot. Wind turbines are harder to install, and small turbines don’t have much output. This just turns into a cost thing, and solar will be far cheaper than wind for most localized sites.
@@barongerhardt I guess I can understand that but then what's the cost of all the machines and logistics to get it to where it needs to be and then to power people's homes? Its time a factor and do people have a problem with a huge windmill in a field. Those things need to be considered as well, I feel.
What about airborne wind turbines ☁️
In Scotland, we put turbines on hilltops and mountains, not only do they get the wind which is accelerated by the slope of the mountain but the also catch the wind flowing high up. This means that masts are still of the short type.
I really appreciate your content. Thanks
And that is why one does not throw out the quality control teams.
I like the idea of the Myriad wind turbine array, but ultimately, I like the idea of smaller energy generation for our homes. Whether it be solar, wind, humidity (like one of Matt's recent videos), I like the independence of "personalized" electricity generation, with the grid as a backup.
Did you buy a wind turbine already?
Great video as always. Thanks.
I always feel more educated after watching these videos !!
I'm really excited about the wind turbine projects with towers made of wood or the tower being more skelton like. This reduces the amount of steel needed for a wind turbine significantly but still providing enough stability for the nacelle and rotorblade. Really curious how these innovations turn out. The MRWT also looks very interesting i gotta say (and btw loved that milk shake analogy ;)). Really looking forward to seeing all those new innovations arise and I really hope these can help solve our energy problem!
Cut down some more trees, splendid idea. Make sure any bird’s nesting get cut down too.
The towers are already pretty well optimised
@@marktapey7678 You realise wood is carbon neutral don't ya?
Open lattice towers have a problem with birds sitting or nesting on them. The GE tower design had a fabric cover for this reason. I don't think they built one. It was supposed to be a 'take parts out of a conex' and bolt them together tower.
@@endofradio3507 They probably don't, maybe they even think it's better to use crazy amounts of coal to fire the blast furnaces to produce steel :)
If you're not breaking things, then you're not pushing hard enough on the limits. Also, turbine size is dictated by economics. The day that we reach the point when increasing size doesn't decrease the overall cost (which some suggest is already here) is when production volume of that least cost turbine increases... further decreasing the cost per unit.
this is a horrible attitude to take when talking about the built environment. testing and caution is the name of the game, not a race to the bottom and leaving wreckage on the way, like tech companies usually do
Problem is what they are breaking is us. It’s a joke and people sucker for it in mass.
@@gibdopaminepls If we're talking about bridges then I would agree with you. But we're talking about wind turbines that fall over in a field with nobody around. You could make the towers with steel so thick that none ever fall over, but then you've wasted a lot of money on extra steel. On the other hand, if thinner steel means 1 in 1,000 fall over, and the cost of replacing that one fallen turbine is less than the extra steel cost, then stick with the thinner steel.
@@marktapey7678 What are you talking about?
@@dc14522 Its all a huge joke and you’re falling for it. Start to finish these are some of the dirtiest ways to make power and do not live even close to as long as they claim. That’s a fact jack. Go across the pond and ask why their cheep green energy is so damn expensive.
really glad this channel exists :)
I’m interested to see an update on the status of home wind generator options and how far we are from that making sense to implement as a supplement to solar.
Automated onsite construction will be a game changer. I totally support the we are big enough idea. As with anything like this which is a staple of a system. It's about both quality and quantity. Let's build more, with the durability to last decades not just years.
I don't know about how much automation is going to factor in, but the best idea in the video was onsite manufacturing of large components. Modular mobile manufacturing units is also interesting.
Oh yeah as like onsite manufacturing will be able to fix the quality problems and the 20-year typical lifetime of these units, What a utopian idea.
@@tomgroover1839 It solves, or greatly reduces, the supply chain and transportation issues. If all houses had to be made by one of a handful companies in their centralized factories, they would have similar issues. Quality can be largely made up by quantity. Depending on what you mean by 20-year life, that too.
I love the look of the new world wind "trees" for domestic production
You should also have a look at Wind Catching Systems, somewhat similar to Myriad, but larger and for offshore wind.
As a home builder, I can certainly agree that a custom build will always cost a lot more than something that is donw in a production line. It is money well spent sometimes, if you can figure out a good innovation in the process and then roll that into the next round of mass produced turbines or houses
The causes for these wind-turbine failures must of course be addressed. Nonetheless, when a wind-turbine fails the damages are very localized and short-lived, and extremely smaller in comparison to accidents involving oil (economic, social and environmental).
It doesn't matter at what pace the components are printed or whether the new types of wind turbines produce even more power, because the main problem is the limited capacity of power collection due to the outdated grid lines. Therefore, a rethink and modernization must take place there for the time being so that renewable energies can continue to develop - as desired.
Or we can stop focusing on grid-scale projects and switch to more robust community based ideas.
@@snowstrobe I don't think people focus enough on energy *independence*. Heck my university used to have (short term) black outs routinely. They put in solar this year and we've only had one very short one.
@@snowstrobe they pretty much banned that in the UK. can't be eating into gas profits, you see...
The grid is always being added to as demand grows.
@@AORD72 That's why 15000 projects in the U.S. are waiting to be connected to the grid, and all of the largest wind turbine manufacturers have suspended all activities.
This myriad idea works great along the highway and in and on top of valley area where it makes since
Your prevention are concise and interesting. I wander if the best solution is a turbine on each estate or street in conjunction with Solar and batteries
Not only can we get the big birds we can now get those pesky little Basterds as well.!!😉
I think cheaper solar is the solution to wind power's problems.
Solar is indeed getting cheaper and this is clearly a good thing. But there are places in the north where a lot of energy is needed for heating during winter, when availability of solar power is weakest. Wind and solar complement each other nicely in their seasonal profiles and should both grow a lot, or someone should come up with a way to make seasonal storage feasible in large scale.
@@AndreasEisele Good answer, but I was just being a wise-ass.
Same thing happened in the 90s in the telecom space. Manufacturers were under so much pressure to deliver more speed, features and lower cost. This was to capture market share. Results were more software bugs and failures which added to the operational burden among common carriers. With the massive shift towards high speed data and more mission critical applications building and managing huge networks was not for the faint of heart. Plus the size and interconnection complexity far outpaced testing and testing methodology.
hey, I made MRWT's in space engineers. I didn't have a choice mind you- but I found it was best for maintenance and output.
After 10-15 years they take them down and create a massive waste management problem. Currently over 100 million lbs of dead windturbine blades are filling landfills and littering the countryside. Our company has the recycling solution to this problem. We are not yet in production but hope to be by early 2024.
Every source I see online indicates that wind turbine blades last 20-25 years. I am disappointed.
Yup, but a waste management problem that fades in comparison to the waste produced by using fossil fuels, where fracking contaminated areas or huge coal mines ruin the countryside on a MUCH bigger scale. with wind turbine blades, you can basically burn them in cement plants and recycle the fibres in building materials, or just build a well controlles landfill, since they dont severely endanger the groundwater
@@Frostbiker Disappointed by some random KZhead comment? Anyone who lives near a wind turbine will attest that these things last 20 years _at the very least._ I'm not sure about the lifespan of offshore turbines but they're said to be 85-95% recyclable. It's the opposite of disappointing.
100 million pounds is tiny amount. You sure you have that right? That's equal to only 1600 rail cars or 16,000 shipping containers. Or about 25,000 cars in scrap yards.
@Frostbiker go to a wind farm and look at the piles of scrap ones. They originally said they would last 15 years but now they find they last about 7 and half of that off shore. The oldest wind farm in canada is in Alberta and it is 20 years old. It was shut down for 3 years and they are trying to get enough money to take them down.
The problem, as always, is the profit motive.
Yes. Cry me a river for the multi billion dollar companies that struggle to innovate and unleash faulty products on the market...
Yeah, but I've never seen a group of non-profits or volunteers produce and install a single wind turbine. Reality is we all want to make money as money is simply a proxy for other goods and services and somehow thinking making profits is a bad thing is just juvenile.
Yup, always makes us focus on the wrong things... and waste resources.
Really thought provoking video 🤔 It's clear the idea for wind turbines is windwall and all of the other variations for one reason, everything can be produced under controlled conditions and 60⁰ offset blades so it becomes a whole series of ducted fans and power will not be an issue. The power nacelle is double ended with a turbine on each end. The keys are Portability- 20' shipping containers Containers are also the battery banks and control circuits Simplicity- simple fasteners made for extended reuse and material safety +50% for stability and reliability. Operation- the tower head must be capable of being lowered by powered and unpowered systems and power rotated to lock direction, controlled by a aerometer giving wind speeds and direction so the system will automatically feather itself by turning side on to the wind in extreme conditions. Because these turbines aren't huge, they're man replaceable and maintainable without ascending a tower. So like an led taillight, if one goes out, the others keep going. If a fault is detected, the turbine spring brakes would be released to stop all movement until repairs. Think "IKEA" Power Solutions 🤣😂👍 Inexpensive, simple, modular, scalable and for some applications, portable by using the containers as the gravity base😎
I’m not one of those people who believes that big wind turbines kills that many birds…but that multi-blade design looks like an absolute avian-shredder!
This is why I will always support Hydro and Nuclear Power over Wind Turbines
Wow, brilliant Sherlock
Depends on what you mean by hydro; on a river, dams often by their very existence disrupt ecosystems up and down stream
I haven't been inspired to feel hope for the future after watching one of these videos in a really long time.
Yes, it is *such* a bad sign when an industry has problems because they want to be more profitable, that's all this is. Great news indeed.
Matt , I would love to see a report by you regarding my hypothesis that in fact wind turbines are in fact accelerating climate change not reducing it, due to the conservation of energy rule. One turbine not so much, but as we are now extracting Gigawatts of energy globally from one of the major mechanisms that determine's weather ie WIND as we are in fact affecting its strength. Yes it renews but interim weakened wind will not be able to do its usual task re weather.
How to fix wind turbines? Build nuclear power instead... Ruining nature for energy is not an option in my informed opinion...
I don't think it's an either or scenario (wind or nuclear), but both. They both have pros and cons that impact the environment ... it's about finding better ways to do both to minimize those issues.
@@UndecidedMF I disagree very much! I have seen the destruction of nature caused by wind power plants and it is totally unnecessary when we have better solutions. Wind energy is a dead end, just wait and see...
Awesome & eye opening video!
Can you do a write up on what happens to the old turbines and solar panels, where they go etc after their time of use. cheers
There’s a company that I’ve been looking into called Borrum Energy that claims they are sourcing up to 85% of the materials to make their small to medium sized wind turbines in Canada. The units are built and assembled in Canada as well. These other technologies are cool but, as an off grid home owner, that’s what really gets me excited, domestically sourced energy generation
Why should I pay 5 times the prices because you're my neighbor? But the dude across the street is cheaper and better?
Will you please fully explain through video on wind mill testing at lab and formulas as apply at lab test.
Insightful, ty
Matt is my hero! Awesome channel! 🎉😊
Excellent discussion.
Very informative video!!
Glad you liked it
Once again, Matt, a wonderful miracle of puns galore! :D
Always a brilliant presentation. Congratulations.
Glad you enjoyed it!
For me, the biggest problem of wind power is that they are not that good at a local level, say on your home compared to solar and that might not matter that much for now, but it's a given that as renewable energy gets better and cheaper and battery tech continues to improve, more of us are going to want to generate more of our energy at a local level on our homes and reports are going around that solar is going to be cheaper than all the alternatives, so much so that it become cheaper to not be on the grid any more. The solar industry is already bigger than wind, I suspect over the next decade or so, that gap is going to widen a lot unless the wind industry finds a solution to generate enough energy that's useful without the need for them to be massive and low noise enough that many of us wouldn't have a problem using them on our homes. The advancement of solar is likely going to keep advancing that it could be everywhere and blend into a lot of buildings without impacting the visual makeup, I don't see wind power competing with that in the long run as the advancement of tech continues, most of us are going to want to go gridless so we have full control over the energy we use and what we pay, which will end up more or less being free in the long run.
Nice video, thanks for sharing it :)
Great video, thank you for keeping us up to date on the developments in this area, love your videos!
Thanks! Glad you're enjoying them.
Misuse of a comma.
The size of the HAWT is the desire or marketing of the biggest bang for the buck. Filling the tower with dozens of VAWTs that can add up to close to or the same output. You still get power from VAWTs lower to the ground and lower wind speeds. No issues with rapidly changing directions or high speeds. Any breakdowns, unless it's a tower failure, doesn't result in a complete shutdown. You can just swap the VAWT that's down leaving the rest of the tower still operational.
Hi Matt, some simple physics - power is proportional to radius to the power of 4, so doubling the radius provides 16 times more power. That’s why they make them as big as possible, on the edge of what is structural possible. They are structurally complex and a lot can go wrong.
Another benefit of the multi turbine unit is, if there is an issue with a regular turbine, it's down, production is zero. With one of these, a unit fails, it still has most of it's output capabilities, it drops to what 90 % output instead of zero.. You just repair / replace the bad component and it's back to 100 percent, This is huge for ROI.