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Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Post by Skipjack »

Hey, I mean I am for anything that helps, I am just sceptical as to how much it really does help. One problem is that you can not control when the wind blows. No wind, no power. You can not store the power from when the wind was blowing heavily either. So it does not seem like a very stable thing. With a nuclear plant you just run it hotter when demand goes up.
A fitting annectode, btw: My grandfather actually filed a patent almost 20 years ago for a new kind of windmachine. The design reminded me a little more of an airplane turbine than the propeller shapes of "normal" windwheels. Siemens built it and made a few tests. Then my grandfater died and noone ever heard of the thing again. I think my uncle said that the first tests were promising, showing a small gain at slow wind speeds and a greater gain at higher speeds. The awesome thing is that my grandfather designed this without a computer or a windtunnel, doing all the math on paper by himself (I am not even sure he had a pocket calculator). He was 87 when he filed the patent.

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