Wind turbines growing taller and more powerful

[Scorpio]

Wind turbines growing taller and more powerful

Some of the newest machines come with blades as long as a football field that can generate 50 times more electricity than wind power turbines built decades ago. Designers are also developing ones that float, fly, or sit in the ocean or on rooftops.



By Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

July 24, 2011

Wind turbines are getting really big — some with blades as long as a football field — and more powerful, often generating 50 times more electricity than the first generation of wind power machines built in the 1980s.

But scientists are also studying how to harness the wind in different ways that could help allay concerns that today's turbines are unattractive, noisy and sometimes even dangerous.

Already in the works: Turbines that float and turbines that fly. Turbines without blades and turbines with blades fat enough to fit a double-decker bus inside.

They won't just be on hillsides either. Some will be in the ocean, while others will be on rooftops and light poles. A few will even be in the sky.

One design was inspired by the humble bumblebee.

Sabri Sansoy, an MIT graduate and former rocket engineer, has built a 19-foot-tall prototype whose blades, rather than spin in a circle, move in a figure-eight motion like the insect's wings. Sansoy hopes the design will generate more electricity than turbines of similar size.

"I've been called everything from brilliant to a nincompoop over this," said Sansoy, whose Marina del Rey company Green Wavelength is looking to commercialize the technology.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,7458534.story

[SilverJeep]

I'm so glad they're making improvements. I hope one day they're a more realistic energy source. Still in its infant stage.

The enviro's still don't understand that you can have an entire moutainside full of windmills with unlimited wind and you can't make not one windmill. ...takes oil.

[__hoot__]

Biggest nowdays are the 300 footers that put out about 2 megawatts at full output, if and when the wind blows. I helped build a 1000 megawatt coal plant on Lake Michigan, Few greenies understand that it will take 1000 of those 300 foot wind mills stinking up the landscape to equal the output consistantly of that one coal plant.