
The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine - rbanffy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/wind/the-troubled-quest-for-the-superconducting-wind-turbine
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dennyabraham
The inner workings of the magnomatic gear they mention are a thing of beauty

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAELukfr2oY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAELukfr2oY)

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CarVac
Holy crap, it's a magnetic version of a harmonic drive!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_drive)

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aunty_helen
The first illustration is terrible. It's making multiple comparisons at the
same time, the most prominent being the difference in blade size, which isn't
variable between the 3 technologies the article is actually talking about.
Whilst at the same time making it harder to see the pertinent data,
differences in the generator size and weight.

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carapace
I'm just gonna trot this out one more time:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator)

very simple design (it's basically one half of a Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm
turn on it's side and powered by wind instead of gravity.)

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gattr
This article reminded me of the concept or an airborne turbine [0].
Interesting to think what would happen if we had thousands or more of these
immersed in jetstream somewhere, siphoning terawatts. Environmental impact
could be noticeable (or not) [1].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_wind_turbine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_wind_turbine)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Possible_future_pow...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Possible_future_power_generation)

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dagss
Does anyone know why the rotation force is not transferred mechanically to
ground level?

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Animats
Hydraulic transmission has been proposed.[1] That would move the generator to
ground level. But even its enthusiasts say the hydraulics won't scale beyond
the 500KW level. This article is about scaling to 20MW or so.

Vestas is up to 9.5MW for their biggest offshore model. It has a gearbox; it's
not direct drive. Probably because at that scale it only turns about 10 RPM.

[1] [https://www.machinedesign.com/energy/hydraulic-wind-
turbines](https://www.machinedesign.com/energy/hydraulic-wind-turbines)

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Gibbon1
I wondered about that, longer blades, lower RPM means very slow RPM which
means massive magnetics. But gears are problematic as well. Low speed means
high torque which also mean large heavy gears. ($$$)

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machiavelli1024
What’s up with vertical axis wind turbines though?

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selimthegrim
Don't they still suck?

