标题: Japan's Experimental 'Floating' Windmills [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 10-25-2013 11:37 标题: Japan's Experimental 'Floating' Windmills Hiroko Tabuchi, To Expand Offshore Power, Japan Builds Floating Windmills. New York Times, Oct 25, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/busin ... ting-windmills.html
Quote:
"The project’s backers say that offshore windmills could be a breakthrough for this energy-poor nation. They would enable Japan to use a resource it possesses in abundance: its coastline, which is longer than that of the United States. With an exclusive economic zone — an area up to 200 miles from its shores where Japan has first dibs on any resources — that ranks it among the world’s top 10 largest maritime countries, Japan has millions of square miles to position windmills.
"What sets the project apart from other offshore wind farms around the world, consortium officials say, is that its turbines, and even the substation and electrical transformer equipment, float on giant platforms anchored to the seabed. That technology greatly expands potential locations for offshore wind farms, which have been fixed into the seabed, limiting their location to shallow waters. For this reason, there have been few great sites for offshore wind farming in Japan, which lies on a continental shelf that quickly gives way to depths that make it unfeasible to build structures into the seabed. But floating wind farms could change the picture in a big way.
Paul J Scalise, a research fellow at the Institute of Social Science, also at the University of Tokyo, said: “We shouldn’t forget the obvious reality check. The farther from the coast they place these floating wind farms, the more expensive it becomes to build them and transmit the power back to Japan”
"Durability is the third large question mark. Shimizu, the construction company, says the turbine’s blades have been designed to last at least two decades, and to withstand the biggest typhoons to have hit the region over the last half-century. But Mr. Imamura at Shimizu acknowledges that no one is certain how long, or how well, the turbines will hold up.
The "floating" windmills are not actually floating but have "giant chains that anchor the turbines to the seabed * * * The 2,500-foot long chains on the three initial turbines, with links each weighing more than 450 pounds, use a total of 20,000 tons of steel from Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal.
My comment:
(a) Usually I do nothing about experimental procedures. Who knows if they will have a future? But this report has something else that is interesting, as shown in quotation. There is no ned to read the rest.
(b) list of countries by length of coastline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis ... length_of_coastline
(Canada> Indonesia > Russia > Philippines > Japan (No 5) > Australia > Norway > US (No 8) > New Zealand > China (No 10))
(c) dibs (n) www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dibs
(d) "Takeshi ISHIHARA, a civil engineering expert at Tokyo University and the leader of the project" 石原 孟