Insane New Turbine Promises CHEAP Unlimited Energy

This strange looking turbine caught my attention as I was scrolling through the news. It is by a company called TouchWind and used a single large blade. Not only that, but it tilts up and down depending on the wind speeds. The idea is for it to be used in offshore settings, with some incredible plans for how it could work. They are aiming to significantly reduce the costs of off shore wind energy, and maybe one day to compete with onshore wind and solar energy. To get to the bottom of this turbine, I spoke with engineers at TouchWind, as well as industry experts.

Sources:

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:45 - System Overview
3:50 - The Big Idea
6:30 - Will It Work?
9:20 - Cost Predictions

#Engineering #Breakthrough #Wind

[mavigogun]

Projects that haven't been built are infinitely less costly than stuff that exists in the real world. True fact.

[RiverMersey]

Define "one"!
As a non-engineer, I'd say that design is an asymmetrical duel-blade rotor
Plus, everything looks great in CGI - do we have a real-life model?

[EPeltzer]

One of the most exciting aspects of this design is ease of assembly and maintenance. Being able to attach and assemble the entire rotor and generator near the surface of the water is huge. And then being able to just pull it down again to work on it. But now you say they are looking at more conventional flotation platforms. It would be a pity to lose disability to rotate it up and down for service.

[norfolkflyingboyz]

Your description of how an auto gyro works is incorrect. The blades operate like a wing. They do not draw it up from below.

[amzarnacht]

A - How does it self-orient if it's offset from its point of anchor?
B - How does it sustain high waves with the turbine in a vertical orientation? That's going to be a LOT of vertical movement shoving and jerking on the generator body.
C - The could increase the power generation by putting wave energy accumulators along the anchoring structure.

[kazedcat]

The most interisting is their tensigrity column design. That is the design that could save a lot of cost.

[erlannalan]

Damn, got to promote AMD congrats broo.

[a]

There is 1000 of these companies making CGI videos and harvesting government money and then they run, away with the money... Until they have demonstrated it works with actual full scale windmill consider it to be a scam, because the chance is 99% that it is.

[viviancrompton]

One interesting aspect with this design is that high wind loads will be putting the tower in tension, rather than pushing it sideways with a cantilever force, so you can have a much more lightweight tower structure, as steel is excellent at resisting tension but needs a lot more engineering to resist a cantilevering force.

[HunterCadre]

Really appreciate that you reached out to an expert! These sort of videos become way more interesting when there's a bit of qualified discussion and not just promo material

[Pystro]

I'm dubious about the claim that reducing the wind wake can "suck in" fast air from above the wind farm. The slow air still has to go somewhere, contrary to what the graphic at 8:58 suggests. At best you can spread it out to 5 times as wide and 1/5th as high as the blade disk of the wind turbine or so. Yes, it will help in the case where the next turbine downwind is _exactly_ in the path of another turbine, but now it will actually reduce wind speeds when the next turbine is within that 5 blade disk wide wake, making wake problems 5 times as likely to happen. And after 5 consecutive turbines have sucked in and spread out the wake, you're back to about the same wake height as before.
But maybe this is just a cost saving measure as well. 5 times as likely wake effects of 1/5th the strength will reduce the _maximum_ dynamic load from wake turbulence to 1/5th. I just wonder if wake turbulence adds that much of a load compared to natural air turbulence in rough seas.

[gerryp]

I’m old enough to remember them saying with Hydro-electric power they’ll be producing so much they will not be charging you for using it. Reality is the energy companies will charge the highest price they can to get profit for their shareholders regardless of the production costs.

[franks]

It’s an asymmetrical 2 blade rotor, add a gimbal at bottom to point away from the direction of wind and use on land or water.

[alanwhiplington]

The sea is a harsh mistress. Weather conditions can be extreme and need not be frequent to be destructive. What would happen if a spinning rotor were knocked down and hit the water? I suspect the rotors would need to be cheap enough to be considered occasionally disposable.

[zazugee]

as someone who did math/homework estimating wind turbine prodution on my location, i want to correct some stuff i noticed on wind frequency
it's not that majority of power is produced on slow winds, it's the wind speed frequency, low winds could be just junk energy and won't give much, anything below 10~5m/s range is junk energy production, definitly high winds are better for energy production, but because they have less frequency then they can't rely on them for constant energy production, but some wind farms definity will disconnect some percentage of the wind farm to keep the energy stable, but above a certain speed most wind turbines that are optimized to spin at certain high frequency mid-range speeds won't be efficient and could spin out of control, so they are disabled
so this wind turbine design looks promising in theory, but as pointed out, it's yet have to be seen if the design can handle sea water, swells and waves.

[criticalevent]

Being able to handle high winds without using brakes or computer pitch control would eliminate most of the catastrophic failures we've seen on 3 blade turbines and all of the downtime we see when these systems need to be serviced.

[davidking]

First impressions - looks a good idea - interested in updates.

[plinble]

Floating wind has so much potential and there's so much work to be done. A stormy sea is tremendous at smashing stuff up and this was the end of wave power snakes.

[terrytytula]

As someone who has been at sea in rough weather, I can tell you that after a good storm, this turbine will be nothing more than a pile of junk washed up on a shore.

[charlescole-pv]

Jam packed with a lot of very innovative ideas. I hope it works out & they produce 1, 000s of them.