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Energy Investing
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Re: Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn't Be Happening. You construct something that looks like a giant inverted pendulum... ------- That's how you cut costs and become cost competitive with hydrocarbons, by cutting corners, cutting on steel, cutting on cement, pushing against material strength limits. On the other hand the deformation of the beam/tower and the corresponding stresses increase with the cube of the height. Wind speed increases with height and applied force with the square of blades/height etc etc. I am sure the engineers know these things, but costs are costs... --------------- Wind turbines continue to grow in size and power, with average nameplate capacity of newly installed wind turbines at 3 MW—up 9% from 2020. In 2011, no turbines employed blades that were 115 meters in diameter or larger, but in 2021, 89% of newly installed turbines featured such rotors. And proposed projects indicate that total turbine height will continue to rise. Lower wind turbine pricing has pushed down installed project costs over the last decade. Wind turbine prices averaged $800–$950 per kilowatt (kW) in 2021. The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010. Lower installation costs lead to energy produced at a lower cost, with the average levelized cost of energy for utility-scale wind power down to $32/MW-hours in 2021. |
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