If you followed my Jeju/Andong walk last year (yeah, I can now say "last year"), you know that I walked past a few Jeju wind farms and ended up not liking the whole notion of wind power. I'd been neutral about it before, but seeing the windmills up close turned me actively against them. Sure, they're impressive feats of engineering, but one thing I couldn't help noticing was how inefficient they were. Some windmills didn't even move despite there being a strong wind, and for any given cluster of windmills, one or two would remain unmoving, leaving the rest of the cluster to do all the work of harvesting energy. Since wind is intermittent, it's an unreliable source of energy. Add in the mechanical issues related to turbines (the amount of oil needed to maintain them, their occasional propensity to burst into flames, their harming of local avian life, etc.), and the whole strikes me as far less than the sum of its parts.
Below is a video by eternal optimist Matt Ferrell. His videos are interesting, but I'm no longer charmed by them because I see now how he pursues these specious "green" solutions to current problems—solutions that come with their own sets of problems. In the video below, Ferrell talks about a "motionless" wind turbine that isn't actually motionless. In fact, it's strongly reminiscent of the Dyson "bladeless" fan. In both cases, the devices are marketed as motionless even though they do continue small turbines, with fan blades, inside their casings. A Dyson fan seems to blow air without any moving parts because the actual fan is hidden. Matt Ferrell is scrupulous enough to note that the Aeromine wind turbine that is the subject of his video does, in fact, have a fan. Despite his scrupulousness, though, Ferrell still chose to title his video "How Can a Wind Turbine Be Motionless?"—which is false advertising.
I don't want to be completely dismissive of these efforts by Dyson and Aeromine. If the ultimate goal is to create something with no moving parts whatsoever, then we can see the current efforts as steps along the path toward that goal. Simply dismissing these efforts as a failure would be narrow-minded. To that extent, I actually applaud such efforts. At the same time, if these companies falsely market their products as something they're not, well, I'm against that. We're not at the point, yet, where we can install something with no moving parts and expect it to passively harvest wind energy. But maybe, just maybe, we'll get there one day.
I was translating a documentary recently, which included some content about power generation on Jeju. The gist of it is that the number of wind turbines built was to cope with expected future power needs and that currently they don't need to run all the turbines to generate enough power to run the island. That was the basic explanation for why not all turbines are running all the time. I'm sure there was more but I don't remember...
ReplyDeleteSo if I see eight turbines, and only six of them are turning, then the two that are not turning have been somehow blocked from responding to the wind? I didn't know that that was how wind turbines worked, but I guess it makes sense that there'd be some way to lock them down. Hm.
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