Hydro Wind Energy

[Dave3]

"Hydro Wind Energy" company is developing offshore windmills with on-board "batteries" (cables with big weights that elevate up and down from the ocean floor). Weight size, water resistance losses, corrosion would be some considerations for a debunking video. . .



https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hydro-wind-energy-secures-50-million-capital-commitment-from-gem-group-to-disrupt-energy-and-desalination-markets-301451283.html

[helio0centra@gmail.com]

all I see in the video is computer generated graphics. That's a sign that this probably won't work.

the weird system of lifting weights just adds more failure modes. You want as few moving parts as you can get. Simply connecting a big battery to every wind and solar farm works to smooth out the spikes anyway.

[BrianHG]

How does the turbine keep a 90 degree perpendicular position and a 'tot' line during the change of tides and wind speed applying lateral angular forces?

I guess you need a tube cemented into to ocean floor down to bedrock or buried concrete base just like a towering wind turbine.

Also, if the weight is in the water, all that water resistance will place such a huge loss of power that just placing a quality neodymium PMG generator beneath the sails and charging batteries will result in a much greater power efficiency and delivery in almost all cases.  I am not sure about the reluctance or why of using modern HV DC power switching technology is considered worse than a complicate mechanical system with it's tons of losses due to friction and multitude of additional moving parts which need to be running below the ocean surface where marine life such as barnacles, or other shell life will attach themself to that long cable going up and down with varying random torque which would need cleaning and maintenance as well as the gears and pulley system.

[pcprogrammer]

Just the same idiotic idea as the one with the concrete blocks and tower cranes.

I saw a documentary a while back about a system where they use the water storage principle, but with a kind of a balloon on the ocean floor.

With superfluous energy the water is pumped into the balloon, and when energy is needed a turbine is driven when the water flows out of the balloon due to the pressure.

The down side it needs at least 50 meter depth to work, which is a problem near the wind farms out on the north sea.

[Kleinstein]

It is even worse than lifting concrete blocks with a crane: under water the boyancy reduces the weight - with concrete or similar by some 40%. In addition the cable under water see extra corrosion and dirt.
At best the weight would be short time storage for a fraction of a day, not the more 5-15 days weather cycles. Off shore wind in many places is actually relatively steady and thus not that bad for the grid. Turbines at different places are averaged.

A reason why the offshore turbines tend to be quite large is that the foundation gets easier and maintance and the grid connection don't scale well to smaller units. So many small units have a pretty poor start.

On-shore the vertical axis turbines did not work out very well and are not really competitive.  They have a similar problems with having to turn down in high winds and it is just not economical to install a larger generator for the few days of high wind. AFAIK the high winds are actually one of the problems with vertical axis ones, as reducing the speed of rotation does not reduce the drag force as much as it does with the conventional horizontal axis ones. This adds to the build costs for a stronger foundation, just to survive high winds.

So it looks they try to combine 2 techologies that on there own did not work (at least not well) and hope this would do the magic of convincing peaple for investment or goverment for research money. Let's hope they do as well with the finance as they do with the engeniering (that is fail).

[PlainName]

I agree that this won't see the light of reality, but:

all I see in the video is computer generated graphics. That's a sign that this probably won't work

What would you expect to see without that, which would push it towards 'work'? You're not going to see an actual thing in action at this stage, and a wall of text describing it won't float. The graphics quickly tell you what the idea is, and so long as they're not being passed off as reality I don't see a problem.

Sure, it would be cool if they set up a miniature version in a fish tank, but then it would be clearly 'unprofessional' and provoke masses of 'but it won't scale' comments.

So, assume this could work (or pick something else for illustration purposes) - what could they have done to replace the graphics?