Future Renewables Eco, a wind farm investment company, goes bust, in spite of all the subsidies. What will it be like when subsidies are withdrawn?
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OT: Chickens coming home to roost?
Sep 29, 2021
2 Replies
The current crop of turbines etc, cannot handle the big changes inwind speed and gustiness, hence they are not very efficient and sometimes have to be stopped. I have heard that some are under development that can cope better, one is a vertical design. I cannot see how it works though, unless its like a centrifugal fan in reverse? Brian
Darrieus or Savonious rotor.
They were all the rage in the first 1970's Opec induced oil crisis. The
*BIG* difficulty is that all their weight is on a vertical bearing and there is a large systematic unbalanced torque from the prevailing wind.
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Essentially it is a pair (or sometimes three) of flexible aeroplane wings attached to a vertical shaft. The snag is that the main bearing has to take all the weight and will typically see a very strong sideways torque from the structure under wind loading.
In the interests of DIY the canonical Savonious rotor can be made by sawing a 45 gallon drum in half and shifting them sideways by about 2/3 of their diameter then attaching them to a central pole.
They make exquisite dynamic wind sculptures but are not easy to scale up for high power generation (or you would see more of them).
You sometimes see one atop the odd physics, earth sciences or engineering building at various universities. Sometimes just as a municipal ornament in a windy location. They can be very pretty.
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