If erected on a farm, it provides both fertilizer and fuel for the farm, and any surplus for neighboring farms. Since the requirements for both inputs are wholly predictable, the value proposition is ironclad.
A great advantage of this use is that it is extremely tolerant of intermittent supply; when wind is slack, you just leave off production; and produced ammonia is, exactly, storage, for as many barrels as you care to bother filling.
There have been several recent projects demonstrating practical small-scale catalytic production of ammonia. An amazing thing about ammonia as fertilizer is that saturated aqueous solution may be injected behind a plow disc and be taken up by soil bacteria so quickly that no odor can be detected, following behind the plow. Injecting ammonia while plowing probably produces much less runoff to waterways than the much more frequently seen surface spraying.
It is just sad, that nytimes is happy to convert meters into feets, football fields and Empire State Buildings, but doesn't want to show metric numbers in a footnote, so I wouldn't need to find a converter to make sense of those numbers.
Should English language newspapers from countries that aren’t America have footnotes in feet so that Americans - a plurality of native English speakers - don’t have to do some basic math?
Probably just easier to remember that 3.3 ft. is a meter. Plenty of Americans do it everyday when they read articles that reference the metric system...
Yes, I believe. They should. Why to force a lot of people to do math, when it is could be done in a jiffy on a server side? Isn't there a javascript library, which makes such footnotes all by itself? If not then why not to write one?
In French newspapers it is probably doesn't worth it, because the total majority of readers are familiar with the metric system. But English readers are divided on two camps, one is more familiar with the metric system, other with the imperial one. What on Earth prevent English writers from satisfying both camps?
> Probably just easier to remember that 3.3 ft. is a meter.
Yes, I mostly divide by three to convert. But it gives a conversion error in a second digit.
> Plenty of Americans do it everyday when they read articles that reference the metric system...
Do they enjoy it? Or may be they would be happy to have all references to the metric system converted?
It seems for me (as an onlooker from outside) that it is an ongoing war between imperial and metric systems, and each writer belongs to one of camps, and will do anything to win or at least to make life uncomfortable to an opposing camp. It seems stupid also.
I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of days in the year (at least Temelín in Czechia)
The power of a wind turbine scales linearly with the swept area. The swept area scales as the square of the height.
Furthermore, wind turbine power also scales with the third power of wind speed, and wind speed goes up with height (though not linearly).
So you can see why the physics of the problem are strongly incentivizing size increases.
"The equation for wind power(P) is given by P= 0.5 * ρ * A * Cp * V^3 * Ng * Nb where, ρ= Air density in kg/m3, A = Rotor swept area (m2).Cp = Coefficient of performance V = wind velocity (m/s)Ng = generator efficiency Nb = gear box bearing efficiency."
http://www.ijsrp.org/research_paper_feb2012/ijsrp-feb-2012-0...
Area, A, is equal to pi * r^2. As you increase your radius (length of the wind turbine rotor) it grows exponentially due to it being squared.
The consistency of the wind offshore, plus the higher speeds, is what is driving offshore due to the Velocity of the wind contributing to the power output being cubed.
Also see: https://mmpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Swept-Area-Provi...
Some turbines do not use a gearbox, so replace that with the efficiencies of magnetic gearboxes also called "direct drive" turbines.
There are some other advantages to wind power as well compared to gas power, such as being able to respond more quickly to grid power dynamics such as voltage droop and frequency response.
Regardless even if some of the power is being thrown away because the grid doesn't need it, the fuel is at zero cost. It does bring up interesting maintenance and other questions. As far as I understand, you can have the wind turbine locked to prevent spinning and do that for say 50% of the wind park. So that should prevent the excessive wear and tear on the electrical components, and minimize things like loads on the foundation and structure itself.
4 MW class onshore turbines first introduced in 2017 are just now starting to hit their stride and be installed at large scale.
