Offshore looks like the next big expansion area for the wind industry. Conventional ideas extended to offshore tasks will mount turbines on towers anchored to the ocean floor in not much more than 30-m depths. Floating turbines, however, would allow placing them farther from shore but will probably be expensive. Inventor Doug Selsam suggests an…
Scratch the tower. Let the turbines float
Norway’s StatoilHydro and its new division Hywind have towed and anchored a floating 2.3-MW wind turbine to a spot about 10 km off the southwest coast of Norway. A 100-m buoyancy section of the tower keeps the rest of the unit floating upright. It’s anchored to the seabed with cables. The turbine can be placed…
Turbine works 1,000 ft up without a tower
Instead of waiting for fickle winds to come to MARS (Magenn’s Air Rotor System) it goes to the wind. It is a 50 by 120-ft lighter-than-air device from Magenn Power LLC, Washington, D.C., that floats 600 to 1,000 feet up to catch wind currents present almost everywhere. MARS rotates to generate up to 100 kW/h,…