China's floating dual-rotor wind turbine is so sturdy it can operate during hurricanes

[Northy]

I am a bit surprised there is no cable fortifying 2 sides in the middle. It seems liek this construction is at the risk of bending or breaking due to this shape

Upside down metal triangles are the new stone arch. xD

 

[passingposeidon]

Not sure why they need 2 rotors as a single rotor will point into the wind anyway. There are existing projects that are (slightly) bigger. The Green Volt windfarm about to be installed in the middle of the North Sea has 35 floating turbines each generating more power than this. Total output will be 560MW.

Green Volt is miles off being installed. It was only consented recently, it will be years until anything is going in the water. There are a handful of floating offshore wind farms, very few are in operation and they are all using conventional fixed bottom offshore turbines, but adapted to float. This model from Mingyang is completely unique. I should say that all of these projects are incredibly cool. Kincardine is doing some super exciting things. So is Hywind Scotland. I think it's one of the most exciting spaces right now as there is no real consensus on optimum design.

 

[passingposeidon]

I have my doubts how well they'd really hold up to 150MPH winds. But this is still pretty cool, and the conventional turbines must be locked down in something like 60MPH winds so this is still a huge improvement.

For your consideration, here's some video from western Iowa (about 200 miles west of me) of a tornado going through a wind farm and shredding the hell out of a wind turbine. They had radar on their vehicle and measured 318MPH winds from this tornado though which is pretty close to highest tornado winds measured (the record is 321MPH, also measured by radar.) Of course this is well above what even this new one is designed to handle too. Luckily EF5s like this are under 1% of all tornadoes, and the 150MPH+ ones are under 5%, so a wind turbine that could operate in 150MPH winds could even be left running during most severe weather:

I think the question we have to ask is how would other power generation sources cope under the same stress. In this case, a few turbines were destroyed but they represented only a portion of 1 wind farm, so the real output loss was relatively small even given the extremely circumstances. Conversely, if you put a tornado like this into say, a combined cycle gas turbine, it's possible that there is meaningful downtime for 100% of the facility.

 

[mbrowne5061]

The hurricane one I assume

Yeah. I am highly skeptical of it ~operating~ in Cat 5 hurricanes. I can see it ~surviving~ a cat 5 storm by angling its blades for the least amount of lift, but operating (generating power)? I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[PurpaFur]

"MingYang also equipped the platform with a sophisticated single-point mooring system for enhanced stability."
It still needs to be anchored.

Just use a longer anchor?

 

[Endymio]

The usual sad 'western' copium about anything good coming out of China

The value of the human mind lies in its ability to infer, interpret, and extrapolate. Given China's past record, anyone not automatically skeptical of grandiose claims needs their head examined.

Still, you raise a valid point. MingYang Energy is the one making the claim, so the onus is on them to provide evidence. Have they? None of these are in actual operation yet, nor have they been tested in anything approaching hurricane-force winds. MingYang tested a 1:10 scale mockup (for the record, that's 1 / 1,000 the mass and volume) in a wind tunnel back in 2020, but that's it. I'll also note that, should you purchase some of these, the 30-Day Amazon return policy on them will have long expired before the first hurricane strikes.