Wind power is one of the biggest sources of clean energy in the world today. And while wind power has seen steady growth over the years as the technology has advanced, a new proposal might be able to blow away our expectations of just how much power we can generate from our wind.
Blades Bigger Than Two Football Fields?
According to the LA times, a research team that’s drawn members from four universities and two national laboratories is putting its heads together to design the biggest wind turbine we have ever seen. The initial designs, which have been tested in digital simulations, have blades that are 652.2 feet in length, and the towers supporting them 1,574 feet tall… which is a little over a third of a mile in height. Not only that, but the turbines will have two blades each, and the blades will be segmented in such a way as to catch the biggest amount of wind possible.
The term for this design is extreme scale, and it’s certainly an appropriate one.
How Much Power Will These Flower Towers Generate?
The goal of this massive wind turbine is, of course, to generate more power from a single structure. A single one of these huge turbines could generate as much as 50 megawatts of power, which is the size of a small power plant. To put that in perspective, that’s 20 times as much power as the current, average wind turbine.
That seems like a pretty snazzy goal, but the research for one of these titanic towers is just stepping out of the realm of the theoretical, and into the realm of the physical. The team has until 2019 to build a 1/10 scale model of a completed windmill, and to test it, in order to be able to move forward with the project. They’re just now getting started on this proof of concept, but as of this moment everything looks like it’s progressing smoothly. Whether that will continue to be the case, or the project will see an unfortunate wind change, remains to be seen.
