Can a wind plant compete with a gas plant? Trying with a VAWT carousel with vertical blades.

Wind energy remains an intermittent energy, unlike fossil fuels and nuclear which are controllable, but capacity factor offshore is higher than onshore, being about 30-45%.

Another obstacle of wind power compared to controllable energies is the dispersal of many units in large areas. A HAWT-farm uses only a tiny fraction of the intercepted wind.

This problem is made much worse with AWES and their long tethers going in all directions.

If these obstacles are eventually overcome in one way or another, only intermittency would remain or even be removed by taking account of the flywheel effect for very large carousels.

That could be wrong. Assuming a carousel of 5 miles (8 km) diameter and blades of 1/8 diameter (not more to benefit from a better efficiency in the leeward row), so 1 km height. The weight of the rotor and its speed would lead to a huge moment of inertia. I don’t think such a machine would stop often. A brief calculation would give a power of 2 to 3 GW reduced to one (1) permanent GW, for only 50 km² sea use compared to about 230 Haliads (12 MW each) occupying hundreds of km² and requiring vessels to slalom and maintenance engineers to travel from turbine to turbine. The larger the machine, the more energy it stores.

I must say that the documents that I have attached above draw a perspective such as I have not seen for several years concerning unconventional wind power, even though I don’t know if the “floating flywheel” on “air cushion” solution such as presented may be adequate. If yes, it would be an interesting mass supplement. If no just stick to the mass of the rotor and blades.