Monday 11 May 2015

Lincs offshore wind farm

Here are 2 views of the same colossal offshore wind farm -first looking north from Gibraltar Point and second looking south from Mablethorpe. I estimated about 70 turbines. I looked it up on the excellent wikipedia offshore wind farms page. It consists of 75 turbines made by Siemans. They are 100m high to the rotor hub and the diameter of the blades is 120m. Each is 3.6 Mw so the wind farm is rated as 270 MW. Hartlepool nuclear power station is 1300MW so about 4 of these would be rated the same. Except that the capacity factor isn't listed. this is normally about 0.3 so you'd need 3 times as many on average. They are expected to last about 40 years but that is about the same as a nuclear power station. It cost £1 billion to build. Nucleat clean up is expensive. I need to find pout how they wire up the 75 turbines. Are they series or parallel? Solar cells are a mixture of the two where series increases the emf and parallel reduces the effect of internal resistance.