Hi Tallak:
The reason I posted these items I had just, by luck, come across within an hour or so, is to illustrate how easy it is for teams we would assume knew better, to chase whacky ideas and talk about them in all seriousness, while those of us with just a little more knowledge or common sense can immediately see how silly they are. I mean, Jeff Immelt, head of GE, promoting a molten salt battery for cars? Really, you are going to sit there while a 1500 lb. battery pack is heated up to the temperature of a pizza oven. THEN you are free to drive? Sure, real sensible, let’s spend a quarter billion dollars on it!
Or these guys with another vertical-axis turbine. But not a good one. A really goofy-looking one, with way too much rotor solidity. Part Savonius with cloth sails? And you notice their renderings show a thin floating foundation, hoisting a heavy concrete(?) weight. But there was no float big enough to float such a weight shown. Maybe they hadn’t thought it through that far yet. But at least they were “educated” to the point that they “knew” the vertical-axis turbine was a better choice. And they “knew” it would be cheaper, AND a better return on capital because it could keep working in ridiculously strong storms! Because big storms are the best time to make a lot of wind energy, especially at sea! And it’s also a good idea to provide a huge generator to take advantage of those storms, even though your turbine would be dragged down by a way-too-big generator 99.8% of the time. These guys are geniuses. Reminds me of how AWE people all assumed we’d be harnessing the Jet Stream but only years later started calculating how much the tether would weigh… How did these Professor Crackpots “know” their turbines would keep working at 40 m/s winds? Because they had never built or run a wind turbine in their entire lives, so they just thought it “looked” like it “should” - I guess…
I wonder if they had done any back-of-the-envelope calculations on how much energy their weight could store? Let’s see, energy = weight x height, OK here’s an easy calculator:
Allright, 1000 kg x 300 m = 0.82 kWh, (but then you’d have to subtract the volume of water the weight displaces, some water friction, cable friction, motor/generator/gearbox efficiency. Maybe you could get a half a kWh. But offshore turbines are into the MegaWatts, and you’d need enough flotation to buoy that correspondingly huge amount of mass. And then here is another thing about the Professor Crackpot Syndrome: always ruining a god invention by adding a bad invention. If a floating island with reeling weights for energy storage is a good idea, why “ruin” it with a vertical-axis turbine? If it is a valid component, it should stand on its own as an energy storage idea. This is where investors should be smarter. They tend to swallow a story that a known bad idea should be a great idea if it is combined with an unknown idea. “All-ya-gotta-do-is” reasoning. Astute investors would start with examining the two parts of the idea separately - is either one valid?
Anyway, we should all get good at debunking goofy energy ideas, starting with our own. We all need to spend time debunking our own ideas more than others, but debunking others gives us good practice. 