This reminds me of an excellent series of lectures I once attended about how you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator, you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper, and you can't have practical electric lighting without inventing a whole lot of power generation and distribution technology, or efficient vacuum pumps.
Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.
Before there was technology for power generation and distribution at scale, "you can use electricity to make light" was a mere curio. Fit to be showcased at fairs, but not something that could be put to practical use.
The first arc lights were made in early 19th century - not long after the invention of voltaic pile made electric power readily obtainable in a lab. But it wasn't until late 19th century that arc lights began to be used as street lights. Why?
Because dynamos and alternators didn't exist in early 19th century. They only became usable for industrial power generation in the late 19th century.
Only when both power generators and arc lights were viable, electric lighting became practical. And electric lighting becoming practical has, in turn, caused electric power to be deployed at an ever-increasing scales, and spurned further investment into electric light, generators and transmission line technology. The invention of incandecent lights fit for household use and the war of the currents were both downstream from better power generation technology.
Well also, at least in the US, electric lighting had to be better than gas before it took off. My 1905 house still has pipes for gas lighting in the ceilings.
Sure, but it starts with the impractical version to kick off the other side.
The hearthstone house demonstrated the value of a central power source homes could draw from. The electric lights at the time were not much better than candles in terms of output, but it generated interest enough to get more people on board.
Now, electric lighting is present everywhere, and a practical solution for all but mass agriculture (where the sun remains more efficient).
> you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator
There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator. Skyscrapers have more to do with steel framing technology than peoplemoving. Regardless, elevators have existed from 200BC and you can see one in the movie Gladiator
>you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Streetcars operated for 20+ years at speeds up to 30mph with no wipers. You would just open one half of the windshield. Or use water-repellent glass coatings (similar to today)
I live in China, and the only building I know that has more than six floors but no elevator is in Chongqing, because it has another walk-in entry in the middle. The vertical distance between the entry and the destination is still fewer than six floors.
>There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator
Citation needed. Chinese building codes require elevators for any residential building taller than 6 stories [0]. Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have similar regulations. Unless you're implying that elevators are frequently broken in these countries? Perhaps in poor, rural parts of China, but I'm doubtful this is the case in a wealthy country like Singapore. Indeed, local regulations in both Singapore [1] and Hong Kong [2] require validated monthly maintenance schedules of elevators.
I know nothing about this, however, today's codes are not the same as yesterday's codes. From what I understand, plenty of very tall housing blocks were built for factory workers and their families, which now get retrofitted with an elevator, or, as we say in the UK, a lift.
This enables people to stay in their own homes in old age. The lift is external to the building, making it relatively easy to install. The balconies, presumably built for mostly clothes-drying purposes in ye-olden-days, provide the access.
I don't know if this goes to 10-20 storeys, I am just chiming in because, yes, there were many high rise buildings without lifts and our ever-inventive Chinese friends have worked out a solution.
In sunny Scotland we have what non-Scottish people call 'apartment blocks' (closes) and some of these go up six storeys with no lifts. Moving house into one of these is fun, as you can imagine. You can get your steps in carrying 25Kg+ for half of your steps, to feel like you have just completed some type of marathon. On the positive side, you are unlikely to be robbed of everything, once you have moved in.
As for fire, this means lots of doors. You might have four doors to work with, two sets on the ground floor and two more on your own floor. These doors make the effort truly Herculean since you can't wedge them all open.
More generally, what amazes me about lifts in the UK is that there is a general lack of redundancy. Recently I had to go across the country by train with a bicycle and two massive rucksacks full of stuff. There were four connecting trains I needed to get. This would have been 'easy enough' if the lifts had been working. They were not working. Had there been two lifts per station then one could be out for maintenance, but no.
Pulleys and cranes will easily do everything you need for construction. Elevators aren't even that good for construction, because so much needs to be built to get them working.
Here is my armchair engineering design. The blades are already wings so they get bolted on and become the wings of the plane and can rotate (or add canards if that's too hard). The engines are at the back.
But then how does it get back home? Attach some 70m blades as wings.
What about the asymmetry of the blades? You can't have two blades from the same wind turbine as one would have the leading edge facing backwards. Every second wind turbine would have to rotate in the opposite direction for this to work.
It would probably work as well as da Vinci's helicopter but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I would love to see the math on how fast you'd need to spin the blades to lift the engine capable of spinning them. In normal operation they spin quite slowly, but due to their lengths the tips reach some ludicrous speeds.
My last name is Kvick (Swedish for quick) and I was delighted to see a variation on it used for something so cool as those diagrams. Please make it a thing.
In height, they have a 24m limit because it’s a common threshold in airports from which special studies must be done. Funny thing: The A380 was 24.1m (its other dimensions also required extra studies, let alone the catering difficulties related to its huge passenger count).
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
seems silly to embrace the design of a plane that is made to move 2 static length blades when even longer blades have been shown to continue the trend of cheaper MW.
the article mentions that 3d printing is a no-go due to the facility needed to print the blade in -- seems like it'd be better to pursue an unfolding container factory with a printer in it and how to transport that thing with conventional craft than to go all-in on a new unproven airframe made for very specific parts.
plus that way the length of the product isn't set in stone, either.
I say this as a total layman -- i'm just taking the articles stated reason for no 3d printing and running with it.
What is the full lifecycle plan for the turbine? Is this special airplane to land in the same dirt field that's now a housing development? Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields? How exactly will a new blade arrive on-site in 2050?
You're coming up with some pretty flimsy reasons that this can't work, and that you believe the people funding, designing, and building these systems haven't contemplated -- such as 'trees'.
You've reminded me of my favorite letter to the editor I've ever come across.
A while back, we had a whiteout on the highway by the local airport. Someone wrote in to propose - in apparent seriousness - planting trees at the end of the runway to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
Yes. These trees aren't flimsy obstacles for airplanes. Long term infra funding is very often cut if there isn't an immediate problem. Look around the US and you see power infra literally falling down and sparking wildfires from lack of maintenance.
Being about 10,000 kilometres from the US, I can't conveniently look around there.
I expect these guys had 'trees' on their risk register, and have suggested to the site owners to purchase a chainsaw / rent an excavator for a day or two.
Either way, I'm pretty confident on a project the size we're talking here - somewhere upwards of USD $5 billion? - they've probably spent a couple of afternoons pondering logistics.
Nobody is putting wind turbines near housing developments. Wind turbines are noisy up close (you don't want your house next door), and they build to a lower safety standard on the assumption that even in the worst case failure nobody is close enough to be hurt (they still build to a high enough standard that I'm not aware of any failure that could kill someone if they had be there, despite tens of thousands in the world)
They put them in farm fields, you just rent the whole field for the year from the farmer, land the planes, and next year it is framed again. (the farmer will likely be allowed to plant hay in the field and work with you to cut that)
> they still build to a high enough standard that I'm not aware of any failure that could kill someone if they had be there
There is a bunch of very energetic windturbine collapses captured on video. In each case someone standing at the wrong spot could have been crushed by falling debris. (Altough i also must admit an overspeeding turbine looks so plainly obviously deadly that anyone with a healthy dose of self preservation would evacuate the danger zone. At least in the cases where we have video of the collapse. There might be a bias to that of course, because nobody would think of filming an unexpected sudden collapse.)
A particularly well documented one is the Hornslet wind turbine collapse.
There is also a widely shared very dramatic video with horses running away from the turbine just before it collapses. But because i can’t figure out where it happened, and if it even happened, i’m reluctant to include here.
I wonder how big is the danger zone. The blades seem to come off all at the same time, some to the sides, some up/down. There's quite a lot of kinetic energy there...
Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields?
That seems like the logical solution. Given the complexities involved overall, a step for "don't build over this patch of dirt" seems relatively achievable.
Why not use a series of cargo drones and lift it with ropes? These blades are pretty damn aerodynamic (they are not much different from an airplane wing).
They are lift-producing devices; but I wonder how the inability to change the lift according to flight regime with leading and trailing edge devices would affect the viability of the solution.
Build two windmills that spin opposite directions.
I wish I could source it, it someone told a story of a contract no one could meet for dropping in either some heavy equipment to a site or maybe windmill parts? It was a small site and it seemed impossible to land them take off... The winning bidder for the contract just landed the plane then abandoned it. Not sure what else you'd do if your blades are your plane!
It's common to abandon mining equipment at the bottom of the mine, or have tunnel boring machines dig their own tomb. The machines are often custom made, and removal would cost more than their EOL value.
Finally the use case for the "airship renaissance" I've been hearing about for the last 25 years.
Seriously, some kind of VTOL craft that could deploy the blades directly to the site seems necessary. Then there's ground transport from some airport out into the hinterlands.
> Blimps and airships can carry the weight, but they bring a laundry list of complications. They’re too slow, need an expensive hangar to shield them from bad weather, require helium—which is currently scarce—and struggle to land when it’s windy. “And by the way, wind farms tend to be windy,” he says.
Fully landing the craft and anchoring it flat before un/loading limits how efficiently it can work to move cargo, especially in all the situations where a zeppelin/blimp is compelling because there's a lack of infrastructure.
Conceptually, you don't need to fully land the craft. If you lower the payload by cable, those cables are your anchor line. Then you adjust buoyancy until you're no longer straining against the cables, cut anchor, and float away.
you don't need to vent it if you can compress it. 1 cubic meter of helium replaced with 1 cubic meter of air raises the weight of the craft by ~1.5 kg. That means we need to be able to reduce our helium volume by 50,000 m^3. If (optimistically) we can pressurize the helium to 2 atmospheres, then we only need a 100,000 m^3 envelope. Which is huge, but half the size of the Hindenburg. Realistically, we'd probably get worse compression than that, but it's within an order of magnitude of feasible.
> If (optimistically) we can pressurize the helium to 2 atmospheres
It's been a long time since my physics classes, but wouldn't the require 4864 megajoules of energy [0] while raising the temperature of the gas from something like 20C -> 113C?
Spreading that energy-use over 15 minutes, maybe 5 megawatts dedicated to compression.
Well, while it's hard to transport a 130 meter long windmill blade on a street... the 60 tons of water you'd need to replace it as ballast weight, that's two semi trucks worth. Easy to get to even the most remote sites, you need heavy machinery (and thus, roads) there anyway to build a foundation capable of supporting a 200m high tower.
The big question is why not build the turbines offshore?
The article briefly mentions this, and that the off-shore blades are over twice the length of the blades this airplane is designed for, but it doesn't look at all at the economics of either option.
Offshore is not a problem, they build a factory on the coast and put it on a boat.
On shore is a problem - there is a lot of the world where people live that isn't close to a sea. Iowa has more than 6000 despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest sea. (most aren't even close to the Mississippi river)
70 meters is not actually the limit as this article suggests, I know the Duluth/Superior port receives 80 meter blades which are then trucked out and I think they plan on going bigger but don't recall the details. Saw some of the trucks hauling those 80 meter blades last year when I was there, it was impressive.
Edit: Reading about it some, the blades I saw might not have been 80m, it looks like the 80m blades might have gone right onto a train. I was told by the person I was with that they were 80m, I didn't measure.
Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.
Alternative, can you make a turbine blade that can be an (inefficient) wing when bolted to a fuselage and engine? Effectively fly the blade there, using it as a lifting surface area.
I thought about this as well. The blades are asymmetric so you can't use two as wings unless the wind farm orders half of their turbines to rotate in the opposite direction.
It's a fairly straightforward physics question, and Gemini Pro thinks the thrust to weight ratio is too low, by more than an order of magnitude, even before adding the weight of the frame and propulsion system.
Straightforward physics suggests the lift is a function of how fast you spin them. I'm sure with a fast enough spin you could get enough lift. Maybe rocket engines on the tips?
Still subsonic speeds can produce a lot of lift. I mean jet aircraft weighing 200 tons lift off at about 160 mph. But googling wing tip thrust, jet engines are probably more practical than rockets.
Doing some pixel counting suggests a nacelle diameter of approximately 152 inches, which is close to the 155 inches of the A350's Trent XWB or the smaller of the various 777 engines (in particular, not the largest GE90).
My grandfather in law used to love discussing the difficulties of transporting giant turbine blades. Always reminded me of the sheer difficulty with large solutions that are often not immediately obvious.
At that stage just build symmetrical sets of turbines and fly them wings out in pairs mounted to some host fuselage with wing mounts.
Also that's how ornithopters got invented.
the bigger questing is anyway where this could safely land and start, when it's of no need for sea transport to begin with.
Same question remains for that plane. How to do the last miles from the airport.
If the route is long enough you can usually find an autobahn and a river wide enough to get 100m blades around.
There seem little use for planes in that size class that doesn't add costs.
> 5000 years ago early Brits transported a 7 ton stone 450 miles from Scotland to Stonehenge.
You are probably thinking of the stone named “the Altar stone”. If we are talking about the same it is about 6 tonne, 5m by 1m by 0.5m. We of course don’t know how exactly it was moved but it is probably safe to assume to have been “a big deal”. Like a large group of people working hard for a prolonged time to make it happen kinda project.
In comparision I was thinking how would the same feat look today. The stone would nicely fit on a flatbed truck and a single driver could easily drive it from where it was quaried to Stonehenge in two days. (And they would need two days only because of limits on driver hours. If you have two drivers to swap halfway then it would be much closer to half a day.)
Now obviously it is not a big revealation that we are better at logistics than our neolitic anchestors. But thinking it through put it to me into perspective how much better we are at it. What was once a huge undertaking we made it now mundane and everyday stuff. So mundane in fact that we had to make laws stopping people from doing it too recklesly without taking enough rest! Now imagine what those original stone transporters would think of that. Crazy.
I'm curious why they went with fixed-wing aircraft and not airships for this purpose. Wouldn't an airship work much better for delivering blades to e.g. the top of a mountain ridge? Or is the plan to fly the blades to the nearest flat area and then drive the rest of the way, without having to worry about tunnels and overpasses.
> Blimps and airships can carry the weight, but they bring a laundry list of complications. They’re too slow, need an expensive hangar to shield them from bad weather, require helium—which is currently scarce—and struggle to land when it’s windy. “And by the way, wind farms tend to be windy,” he says.
How difficult would it be to come up with a design for a blade that can be made and transported in segments and assembled full length on site?
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/8/1112
> Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
> While blade segmentation poses serious challenges, the wide variety of possibilities and the potential benefits are bound to lead to further developments in this field. Furthermore, segmentation appears most likely to be cost effective for very large, offshore turbines or on-shore turbines with promising conditions, but accessibility issues.
> During flight, the hold is only pressurized to about the level of the peak of Mt. Everest, to save energy.
Everest's peak is about 29,000 feet above sea level. I imagine this thing flies at, what, 40,000 or so? Why bother pressurizing the cargo hold at all if people can't breathe anyway? You have all the headaches of compression but none of the advantages. Am I missing something?
I don't know, but at a random guess, with such immense cargo volume, there could be a danger of implosion during an emergency descent if the hold was unpressurized and the inflow rate was not sufficient. It may have been cheaper to pressurize than have rapid inflow.
they shouldn't be flying very far, and thus won't even make it to 40k feet before heading down. If you are going more than 500 miles (i made that up but it is a good number to start with) build a new factory. Iowa has kept one factory busy for more than a decade transporting less distance than that.
They're giant single-piece layered composite structures. Crafting the blade onsite means you have to build then unbuild a giant plant next to each wind farm.
> Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.
I assumed this was already being done for the massive offshore models. Setup some kind of minimal plant on shore so you minimize transportation to the boats.
1) I was curious why they can't just attach two partial blades onsite to make a longer one, and the article makes some attempt to address it, so, to save you from reading the whole thing:
>Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
>“It comes down to the stress engineering of the components,” Arent says. Blades could one day be 3D-printed on-site, which could negate the need for an airplane, but that research is still in early stages, he says. (Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.)
2) I'm also curious if anyone has done the numbers on how long it takes these large turbines to pay back the energy cost of flying them there? You would have to a) find out how much more energy they make from the same footprint compared to smaller wind turbines, and b) how much more energy it takes to fly them there compared to transporting the smaller ones (and I'd be curious about a smaller plane vs ones that can be transported on the ground).
The energy content of the max fuel load of a 747 is something like 2.5 gWh. The specifics of the site matter an awful in how fast that pays back.
So like if the extra generation were 1 megawatt with a capacity factor of 30%, you are looking at 7500 hours, less than a year, to yield that much energy.
That's a lot of assumptions, but the delivery flights probably average less fuel than that, and one of the benefits of size is that the capacity factor goes up.
This reminds me of an excellent series of lectures I once attended about how you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator, you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper, and you can't have practical electric lighting without inventing a whole lot of power generation and distribution technology, or efficient vacuum pumps.
Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.
> you can't have practical electric lighting without inventing a whole lot of power generation and distribution technology
Didn’t lighting cause power generation and distribution?
Before there was technology for power generation and distribution at scale, "you can use electricity to make light" was a mere curio. Fit to be showcased at fairs, but not something that could be put to practical use.
The first arc lights were made in early 19th century - not long after the invention of voltaic pile made electric power readily obtainable in a lab. But it wasn't until late 19th century that arc lights began to be used as street lights. Why?
Because dynamos and alternators didn't exist in early 19th century. They only became usable for industrial power generation in the late 19th century.
Only when both power generators and arc lights were viable, electric lighting became practical. And electric lighting becoming practical has, in turn, caused electric power to be deployed at an ever-increasing scales, and spurned further investment into electric light, generators and transmission line technology. The invention of incandecent lights fit for household use and the war of the currents were both downstream from better power generation technology.
Well also, at least in the US, electric lighting had to be better than gas before it took off. My 1905 house still has pipes for gas lighting in the ceilings.
> The first arc lights were made in early 19th century
Possible objection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera_light#Fringe_interpret...
That was good for a chuckle
Sure, but it starts with the impractical version to kick off the other side.
The hearthstone house demonstrated the value of a central power source homes could draw from. The electric lights at the time were not much better than candles in terms of output, but it generated interest enough to get more people on board.
Now, electric lighting is present everywhere, and a practical solution for all but mass agriculture (where the sun remains more efficient).
You need to be able to distribute power to an area more than once
> you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator
There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator. Skyscrapers have more to do with steel framing technology than peoplemoving. Regardless, elevators have existed from 200BC and you can see one in the movie Gladiator
>you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Streetcars operated for 20+ years at speeds up to 30mph with no wipers. You would just open one half of the windshield. Or use water-repellent glass coatings (similar to today)
I really doubt there are many apartments even close to 20 floors without an elevator.
I've traveled a lot and stayed in many old buildings in Asia, but I've never seen one with more than 6-7 floors without an elevator.
I live in China, and the only building I know that has more than six floors but no elevator is in Chongqing, because it has another walk-in entry in the middle. The vertical distance between the entry and the destination is still fewer than six floors.
>There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator
Citation needed. Chinese building codes require elevators for any residential building taller than 6 stories [0]. Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have similar regulations. Unless you're implying that elevators are frequently broken in these countries? Perhaps in poor, rural parts of China, but I'm doubtful this is the case in a wealthy country like Singapore. Indeed, local regulations in both Singapore [1] and Hong Kong [2] require validated monthly maintenance schedules of elevators.
[0] https://codeofchina.com/standard/GB50096-2011.html
[1] https://www1.bca.gov.sg/regulatory-info/lifts-escalators/lif...
[2] https://bestpractice.emsd.gov.hk/en/lift-and-escalator-insta...
Even the USSR required elevators for buildings 6+ stories. (Which is why Khrushchyovkas were all 5 stories.)
I know nothing about this, however, today's codes are not the same as yesterday's codes. From what I understand, plenty of very tall housing blocks were built for factory workers and their families, which now get retrofitted with an elevator, or, as we say in the UK, a lift.
This enables people to stay in their own homes in old age. The lift is external to the building, making it relatively easy to install. The balconies, presumably built for mostly clothes-drying purposes in ye-olden-days, provide the access.
I don't know if this goes to 10-20 storeys, I am just chiming in because, yes, there were many high rise buildings without lifts and our ever-inventive Chinese friends have worked out a solution.
In sunny Scotland we have what non-Scottish people call 'apartment blocks' (closes) and some of these go up six storeys with no lifts. Moving house into one of these is fun, as you can imagine. You can get your steps in carrying 25Kg+ for half of your steps, to feel like you have just completed some type of marathon. On the positive side, you are unlikely to be robbed of everything, once you have moved in.
As for fire, this means lots of doors. You might have four doors to work with, two sets on the ground floor and two more on your own floor. These doors make the effort truly Herculean since you can't wedge them all open.
More generally, what amazes me about lifts in the UK is that there is a general lack of redundancy. Recently I had to go across the country by train with a bicycle and two massive rucksacks full of stuff. There were four connecting trains I needed to get. This would have been 'easy enough' if the lifts had been working. They were not working. Had there been two lifts per station then one could be out for maintenance, but no.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/776b6a4e79677a6333566d54/share.ht...
I would bet most of those skyscrapers at least used some sort of elevator in their construction, even if there's only stairs for the occupants.
Streetcars aren't really what I would think of as a "practical" automobile today since you can only take them on predefined routes.
Pulleys and cranes will easily do everything you need for construction. Elevators aren't even that good for construction, because so much needs to be built to get them working.
Where is the line between “a pulley and a platform” and “an elevator”?
I guess it’s the ability to arrest a sudden drop.
Imagine living on the 20th floor or higher and having a broken ankle.
> you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Sure, but remember that some wipers were "hand activated".
Which in turn reminds me of the excellent series Connections, by James Burke.
It's science and inventions all the way down ;-)
Were we not getting airships for this purpose? The ones with a butt?
A diagram comparing it to the 747s and oil tankers mentioned in the text would have been appreciated.
OK, looked it up. 108m v 72m. Kvikk diagram, pretty much to scale:
Here is my armchair engineering design. The blades are already wings so they get bolted on and become the wings of the plane and can rotate (or add canards if that's too hard). The engines are at the back.
But then how does it get back home? Attach some 70m blades as wings.What about the asymmetry of the blades? You can't have two blades from the same wind turbine as one would have the leading edge facing backwards. Every second wind turbine would have to rotate in the opposite direction for this to work.
It would probably work as well as da Vinci's helicopter but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Another problem is that the blade are twisted like propeller rather than straight like a wing.
Which then leads to.... Why not a giant helicopter? Then you don't need to worry about the symmetry.
I would love to see the math on how fast you'd need to spin the blades to lift the engine capable of spinning them. In normal operation they spin quite slowly, but due to their lengths the tips reach some ludicrous speeds.
Or two helicopters carrying the suspended ends of the blade.
(what is a kvikk diagram - google isn’t helping here)
wild guess: a distorted "quick"
Brain glitch. I’d just read this - https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250909-kvikk-lunsj-the-...
I hope you'll have just coined a new diagram name: Kvikk = simple ASCII diagram that trivially illuminates a technical matter =)
bonus points that mainstream LLM’s can trivially train on them and produce them. =)
Kool and thx. 72 and 108 divide cleanly by 9, so it’s pretty dang accurate too.
My last name is Kvick (Swedish for quick) and I was delighted to see a variation on it used for something so cool as those diagrams. Please make it a thing.
Fun. Will try. Perhaps we will hear from some of these people sharing a cognate surname:
I at least know that there's a Norwegian chocolate bar called Kvikk and a Danish kitchen design company called Kvik.
In Dutch (which I happen to be fluent in) Kwiek is sometimes used in writing but I've never heard it spoken.
In height, they have a 24m limit because it’s a common threshold in airports from which special studies must be done. Funny thing: The A380 was 24.1m (its other dimensions also required extra studies, let alone the catering difficulties related to its huge passenger count).
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
seems silly to embrace the design of a plane that is made to move 2 static length blades when even longer blades have been shown to continue the trend of cheaper MW.
the article mentions that 3d printing is a no-go due to the facility needed to print the blade in -- seems like it'd be better to pursue an unfolding container factory with a printer in it and how to transport that thing with conventional craft than to go all-in on a new unproven airframe made for very specific parts.
plus that way the length of the product isn't set in stone, either.
I say this as a total layman -- i'm just taking the articles stated reason for no 3d printing and running with it.
Maybe the idea is: gain expertise in making, loading, flying, and landing 100m planes this year, and try 150m planes next year.
“It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."
https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule
They should call it Blade Runner
You're gonna build the world's largest airframe from scratch in... (checks notes)... five years?
Built by a company that has never built an aircraft too. That seems... unlikely.
Seems like if this idea really makes sense, it's exactly the kind of thing the EU would subsidize Airbus to do.
Especially since Airbus already has experience making the Beluga and Boeing the Dreamlifter.
Not only that, we will train people to land this thing on a dirt track, because why not?
What is the full lifecycle plan for the turbine? Is this special airplane to land in the same dirt field that's now a housing development? Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields? How exactly will a new blade arrive on-site in 2050?
They plan to be able to land the planes in a short distance over rough fields according to the article.
Rough fields tend to grow rough trees.
You're coming up with some pretty flimsy reasons that this can't work, and that you believe the people funding, designing, and building these systems haven't contemplated -- such as 'trees'.
You've reminded me of my favorite letter to the editor I've ever come across.
A while back, we had a whiteout on the highway by the local airport. Someone wrote in to propose - in apparent seriousness - planting trees at the end of the runway to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
Yes. These trees aren't flimsy obstacles for airplanes. Long term infra funding is very often cut if there isn't an immediate problem. Look around the US and you see power infra literally falling down and sparking wildfires from lack of maintenance.
Being about 10,000 kilometres from the US, I can't conveniently look around there.
I expect these guys had 'trees' on their risk register, and have suggested to the site owners to purchase a chainsaw / rent an excavator for a day or two.
Either way, I'm pretty confident on a project the size we're talking here - somewhere upwards of USD $5 billion? - they've probably spent a couple of afternoons pondering logistics.
It doesn't really need to be maintained, it's an active construction site for the time it'll be needed?
Not in the timespan relevant here
Nobody is putting wind turbines near housing developments. Wind turbines are noisy up close (you don't want your house next door), and they build to a lower safety standard on the assumption that even in the worst case failure nobody is close enough to be hurt (they still build to a high enough standard that I'm not aware of any failure that could kill someone if they had be there, despite tens of thousands in the world)
They put them in farm fields, you just rent the whole field for the year from the farmer, land the planes, and next year it is framed again. (the farmer will likely be allowed to plant hay in the field and work with you to cut that)
> they still build to a high enough standard that I'm not aware of any failure that could kill someone if they had be there
There is a bunch of very energetic windturbine collapses captured on video. In each case someone standing at the wrong spot could have been crushed by falling debris. (Altough i also must admit an overspeeding turbine looks so plainly obviously deadly that anyone with a healthy dose of self preservation would evacuate the danger zone. At least in the cases where we have video of the collapse. There might be a bias to that of course, because nobody would think of filming an unexpected sudden collapse.)
A particularly well documented one is the Hornslet wind turbine collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornslet_wind-turbine_collap...
https://youtu.be/jvHBUSSAzyw?si=NDpN-ZgXqPrTavvk
There was this one in Oklahoma: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-turbine-collapses-on-calm-d...
This i believe happened in Italy: https://youtu.be/af9Mm5nkNAQ?si=wajCXTCpN19z9okJ
Just a few days ago there was a collapse in Perth: https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/5330408/blades-perth-av...
There is also a widely shared very dramatic video with horses running away from the turbine just before it collapses. But because i can’t figure out where it happened, and if it even happened, i’m reluctant to include here.
> would evacuate the danger zone
I wonder how big is the danger zone. The blades seem to come off all at the same time, some to the sides, some up/down. There's quite a lot of kinetic energy there...
> Wind turbines are noisy up close...
Citation needed. I toured a wind farm a few months ago, and they were barely audible at ground level.
The noise isn't loud - but it is constant and annoying to listen to all day.
Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields?
That seems like the logical solution. Given the complexities involved overall, a step for "don't build over this patch of dirt" seems relatively achievable.
Why not use a series of cargo drones and lift it with ropes? These blades are pretty damn aerodynamic (they are not much different from an airplane wing).
Genius idea - use the blades as the wings for the plane. They're close enough in shape. :)
Genius-er idea(?) - use the blades to make a helicopter that flies to the site and drives back.
> They're close enough in shape.
They are lift-producing devices; but I wonder how the inability to change the lift according to flight regime with leading and trailing edge devices would affect the viability of the solution.
How do you fly back?
You don't.
The rest of the plane is the pillar of course.
with one wing pushing up, the other down it will be a fun flight.
Build two windmills that spin opposite directions.
I wish I could source it, it someone told a story of a contract no one could meet for dropping in either some heavy equipment to a site or maybe windmill parts? It was a small site and it seemed impossible to land them take off... The winning bidder for the contract just landed the plane then abandoned it. Not sure what else you'd do if your blades are your plane!
It's common to abandon mining equipment at the bottom of the mine, or have tunnel boring machines dig their own tomb. The machines are often custom made, and removal would cost more than their EOL value.
https://www.untappedcities.com/the-200-ton-tunnel-boring-mac...
Finally the use case for the "airship renaissance" I've been hearing about for the last 25 years.
Seriously, some kind of VTOL craft that could deploy the blades directly to the site seems necessary. Then there's ground transport from some airport out into the hinterlands.
> Blimps and airships can carry the weight, but they bring a laundry list of complications. They’re too slow, need an expensive hangar to shield them from bad weather, require helium—which is currently scarce—and struggle to land when it’s windy. “And by the way, wind farms tend to be windy,” he says.
Can you make unmanned hydrogen filled versions?
There's still a problem for generic cargo handling: The moment you start to release the cargo, the now-excessively-buoyant vehicle rises away.
You tie it down before you unload. You probably also need to load ballast on for the return trip.
Fully landing the craft and anchoring it flat before un/loading limits how efficiently it can work to move cargo, especially in all the situations where a zeppelin/blimp is compelling because there's a lack of infrastructure.
Conceptually, you don't need to fully land the craft. If you lower the payload by cable, those cables are your anchor line. Then you adjust buoyancy until you're no longer straining against the cables, cut anchor, and float away.
Can an airship compensate for 60-75 tonnes of buoyancy change? Releasing helium sounds expensive.
you don't need to vent it if you can compress it. 1 cubic meter of helium replaced with 1 cubic meter of air raises the weight of the craft by ~1.5 kg. That means we need to be able to reduce our helium volume by 50,000 m^3. If (optimistically) we can pressurize the helium to 2 atmospheres, then we only need a 100,000 m^3 envelope. Which is huge, but half the size of the Hindenburg. Realistically, we'd probably get worse compression than that, but it's within an order of magnitude of feasible.
> If (optimistically) we can pressurize the helium to 2 atmospheres
It's been a long time since my physics classes, but wouldn't the require 4864 megajoules of energy [0] while raising the temperature of the gas from something like 20C -> 113C?
Spreading that energy-use over 15 minutes, maybe 5 megawatts dedicated to compression.
[0] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
P.S.: Same tool but this link that pre-fills the input boxes with numbers.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
You could load ballast (maybe water) as you unload the cargo.
Looks like the ballpark of $100k per metric ton, definitely not something you want to vent if you can help it.
You can compress the lifting gas (at the cost of energy and equipment weight of course) before unloading to remain ~neutrally bouyant.
Well, while it's hard to transport a 130 meter long windmill blade on a street... the 60 tons of water you'd need to replace it as ballast weight, that's two semi trucks worth. Easy to get to even the most remote sites, you need heavy machinery (and thus, roads) there anyway to build a foundation capable of supporting a 200m high tower.
The Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane comes to mind. The range of ~300km would seem to be a limiting factor.
The big question is why not build the turbines offshore?
The article briefly mentions this, and that the off-shore blades are over twice the length of the blades this airplane is designed for, but it doesn't look at all at the economics of either option.
Offshore is not a problem, they build a factory on the coast and put it on a boat.
On shore is a problem - there is a lot of the world where people live that isn't close to a sea. Iowa has more than 6000 despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest sea. (most aren't even close to the Mississippi river)
70 meters is not actually the limit as this article suggests, I know the Duluth/Superior port receives 80 meter blades which are then trucked out and I think they plan on going bigger but don't recall the details. Saw some of the trucks hauling those 80 meter blades last year when I was there, it was impressive.
Edit: Reading about it some, the blades I saw might not have been 80m, it looks like the 80m blades might have gone right onto a train. I was told by the person I was with that they were 80m, I didn't measure.
Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.
Alternative, can you make a turbine blade that can be an (inefficient) wing when bolted to a fuselage and engine? Effectively fly the blade there, using it as a lifting surface area.
I thought about this as well. The blades are asymmetric so you can't use two as wings unless the wind farm orders half of their turbines to rotate in the opposite direction.
How do you get your plane back? Or would you just dispose of it like a rocket booster? :)
The carrier host fuselage would need huge controls surfaces anyways, could just use them as normal wings when flying for itself with way less drag.
Or just do self mounting Multicopter using the big wing as lift surface for the long haul.
They already use propellers for mounting anyway, its wild out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1gUm_W1z28
Why is that sad? That's way outside LLM training sets.
It's a fairly straightforward physics question, and Gemini Pro thinks the thrust to weight ratio is too low, by more than an order of magnitude, even before adding the weight of the frame and propulsion system.
Straightforward physics suggests the lift is a function of how fast you spin them. I'm sure with a fast enough spin you could get enough lift. Maybe rocket engines on the tips?
The tips need to stay subsonic. A bigger rotor must turn slower. AFAIK the tips of current wind turbines are already close to this limit.
Still subsonic speeds can produce a lot of lift. I mean jet aircraft weighing 200 tons lift off at about 160 mph. But googling wing tip thrust, jet engines are probably more practical than rockets.
Computer says no
How are they going to do last mile(s) delivery then?
> onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max.
Interestingly, that is the length of Falcon 9 as well. Spacex has used 44 wheeled trailers to transport it.
Noted: Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade
Strange how an article from IEEE (who should be interested of exact measurements) opens with the size unit "more than a football field".
Many articles and news broadcasts do this, even though a football field size is not standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-coherent_units_of_...
Doing some pixel counting suggests a nacelle diameter of approximately 152 inches, which is close to the 155 inches of the A350's Trent XWB or the smaller of the various 777 engines (in particular, not the largest GE90).
Ok, hear me out. How powerful of a battery would we need to turn the blades and nacelle into a helicopter?
And just think. Once it arrives on site, you have a big ass grid storage battery to install!
My grandfather in law used to love discussing the difficulties of transporting giant turbine blades. Always reminded me of the sheer difficulty with large solutions that are often not immediately obvious.
Why don't they just transport the blades standing up ?
This is actually the current practice: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1371626/gallery-bla...
On the ground? Well, you're welcome to count the number of overpasses you'd have to clear or circumvent somehow.
They tip over from inertia or a small wind gust.
too dangerous - they might get struck by lightning
I guess this is easier than setting up a production facility in the target country...
That diagram is just weird.
At that stage just build symmetrical sets of turbines and fly them wings out in pairs mounted to some host fuselage with wing mounts. Also that's how ornithopters got invented.
Overall some serious Cargolifter vibes.
Turbines have lots of wing twist and far thicker roots than is desirable for planes.
And how do you fly it back?
The desireable thing here is that they can fly, not that it's optimal.
also you could just drive, lol this thing:
https://mitxela.com/projects/turbine_transport_transformer
the bigger questing is anyway where this could safely land and start, when it's of no need for sea transport to begin with.
Same question remains for that plane. How to do the last miles from the airport. If the route is long enough you can usually find an autobahn and a river wide enough to get 100m blades around.
There seem little use for planes in that size class that doesn't add costs.
If you read the source material, it's designed to fly from a minimally prepared airstrip.
Here is where airship makes economical sense.
5000 years ago early Brits transported a 7 ton stone 450 miles from Scotland to Stonehenge.
"I'm having trouble moving my turbine blade" sounds like a First World problem !
> 5000 years ago early Brits transported a 7 ton stone 450 miles from Scotland to Stonehenge.
You are probably thinking of the stone named “the Altar stone”. If we are talking about the same it is about 6 tonne, 5m by 1m by 0.5m. We of course don’t know how exactly it was moved but it is probably safe to assume to have been “a big deal”. Like a large group of people working hard for a prolonged time to make it happen kinda project.
In comparision I was thinking how would the same feat look today. The stone would nicely fit on a flatbed truck and a single driver could easily drive it from where it was quaried to Stonehenge in two days. (And they would need two days only because of limits on driver hours. If you have two drivers to swap halfway then it would be much closer to half a day.)
Now obviously it is not a big revealation that we are better at logistics than our neolitic anchestors. But thinking it through put it to me into perspective how much better we are at it. What was once a huge undertaking we made it now mundane and everyday stuff. So mundane in fact that we had to make laws stopping people from doing it too recklesly without taking enough rest! Now imagine what those original stone transporters would think of that. Crazy.
that was downhill though
yep - they were lucky the stone they wanted was up north
The final paragraphs read like stories from the war.
"Yeah we hope to survive despite..."
Bad times.
I'm curious why they went with fixed-wing aircraft and not airships for this purpose. Wouldn't an airship work much better for delivering blades to e.g. the top of a mountain ridge? Or is the plan to fly the blades to the nearest flat area and then drive the rest of the way, without having to worry about tunnels and overpasses.
> Blimps and airships can carry the weight, but they bring a laundry list of complications. They’re too slow, need an expensive hangar to shield them from bad weather, require helium—which is currently scarce—and struggle to land when it’s windy. “And by the way, wind farms tend to be windy,” he says.
How difficult would it be to come up with a design for a blade that can be made and transported in segments and assembled full length on site? https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/8/1112
> Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
Counter, from the linked paper
> While blade segmentation poses serious challenges, the wide variety of possibilities and the potential benefits are bound to lead to further developments in this field. Furthermore, segmentation appears most likely to be cost effective for very large, offshore turbines or on-shore turbines with promising conditions, but accessibility issues.
I kind of liked the original headline better.
> During flight, the hold is only pressurized to about the level of the peak of Mt. Everest, to save energy.
Everest's peak is about 29,000 feet above sea level. I imagine this thing flies at, what, 40,000 or so? Why bother pressurizing the cargo hold at all if people can't breathe anyway? You have all the headaches of compression but none of the advantages. Am I missing something?
I don't know, but at a random guess, with such immense cargo volume, there could be a danger of implosion during an emergency descent if the hold was unpressurized and the inflow rate was not sufficient. It may have been cheaper to pressurize than have rapid inflow.
they shouldn't be flying very far, and thus won't even make it to 40k feet before heading down. If you are going more than 500 miles (i made that up but it is a good number to start with) build a new factory. Iowa has kept one factory busy for more than a decade transporting less distance than that.
Surprising no one, the military is also showing interest in WindRunner too. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2480857-how-the-us-mili...
I enjoyed the last submission on WindRunner. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690182
craft the blades onsite?
They're giant single-piece layered composite structures. Crafting the blade onsite means you have to build then unbuild a giant plant next to each wind farm.
You could transport your plant in a huge airpl.. nevermind.
> Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.
I assumed this was already being done for the massive offshore models. Setup some kind of minimal plant on shore so you minimize transportation to the boats.
1) I was curious why they can't just attach two partial blades onsite to make a longer one, and the article makes some attempt to address it, so, to save you from reading the whole thing:
>Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
>“It comes down to the stress engineering of the components,” Arent says. Blades could one day be 3D-printed on-site, which could negate the need for an airplane, but that research is still in early stages, he says. (Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.)
2) I'm also curious if anyone has done the numbers on how long it takes these large turbines to pay back the energy cost of flying them there? You would have to a) find out how much more energy they make from the same footprint compared to smaller wind turbines, and b) how much more energy it takes to fly them there compared to transporting the smaller ones (and I'd be curious about a smaller plane vs ones that can be transported on the ground).
The energy content of the max fuel load of a 747 is something like 2.5 gWh. The specifics of the site matter an awful in how fast that pays back.
So like if the extra generation were 1 megawatt with a capacity factor of 30%, you are looking at 7500 hours, less than a year, to yield that much energy.
That's a lot of assumptions, but the delivery flights probably average less fuel than that, and one of the benefits of size is that the capacity factor goes up.
Jet engines are on the order of 50 MW, and big turbines are on the order of 10MW (at least, onshore ones).
So you’re really only talking small multiples of the flight time, which is minimal compared to the lifetime of a wind turbine.