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Title: 'If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We're Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes'

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/...

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: The
world's largest airplane, when it's built, will stretch more than a football
field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing
aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look
like an oil tanker that's sprouted wings - aeronautical engineering at a
preposterous scale. Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it'll haul just
one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore
wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size
constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it's
transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn't be moved over land, since
they wouldn't fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate
some of the sharper curves of roads and rails. So the WindRunner's developer,
Radia of Boulder, Colorado, has staked its business model on the idea that
the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there...
Radia's plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter
blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may
sound audacious - an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia's
supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job - the
only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger. Bigger turbines, after all,
can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is:
Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble...? Having fewer total
turbines means a wind farm could space them farther apart, avoiding airflow
interference. The turbines would be nearly twice as tall, so they'll reach a
higher, gustier part of the atmosphere. And big turbines don't need to spin
as quickly, so they would make economic sense in places with average wind
speeds around 5 meters per second compared with the roughly 7 m/s needed to
sustain smaller units. "The result...is more than a doubling of the acres in
the world where wind is viable," says Mark Lundstrom [Radia's founder and
CEO]. The executive director at America's National Renewable Energy
Laboratory Foundation points out that one day blades could just be 3D-printed
on-site - negating the need for the airplane altogether. But 3D printing for
turbines is still in its earliest stages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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