Offshore wind farm
Windcatcher – a 300 meter wind turbine is supposed to supply 80,000 households with cheap electricity
The system promises a revolution in electricity generation costs
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The Windcatcher does not rely on a huge rotor, but instead clusters 117 small rotors in a 300 meter high scaffold. The company from Norway promises lower costs and better utilization of wind energy.
Wind turbines are already producing inexpensive electricity today, but new designs show that the technology is far from being exhausted. So far, all commercial wind turbines have followed the idea of the “windmill”. A rotor is attached to a mast. Other models that bend like a leaf in the wind (“Vortex Bladeless”) and thus generate electricity or turbines with a vertical axis of rotation do not get beyond small systems.
A completely different concept for an offshore wind farm has now been presented in Norway. The Windcatcher – wind catcher – is based on a square lattice frame in which not just one rotor, but a large number of them are mounted. In the computer images there are 117, each with a capacity of one megawatt. The system is to be installed at sea on anchored platforms. Such platforms are also used for gas and oil production. One advantage is that they can be towed. So they don’t have to be mounted in the open sea. The land consumption should be 80 percent less compared to conventional systems.
A single system is supposed to supply 80,000 households with electricity. The plant should be able to generate around five times the annual energy of the largest single turbines in the world. Wind Catching Systems is owned by Ferd and North Energy, which in turn is owned by the multi-billion dollar Andresen family. The systems are mainly to be built by Aibel and marketed jointly. Aibel builds offshore and land-based oil and gas production systems as well as wind parks – including for the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the Dogger Bank Offshore Wind Farm. So it is not about the vision of a small start-up.
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Although it has only been a computer simulation so far, the system should be ready for use as early as 2022-2023. Ole Heggheim, CEO of Wind Catching Systems, promises that the Windcatcher will be the first wind turbine ever to produce electricity at market prices. It can therefore be operated economically without subsidies or special conditions. “Our goal is to enable offshore wind power operators to produce electricity at a price that can compete with other energy sources without subsidies.”
The short development time is possible because, in the end, no new basic technology is invented, but rather existing systems are only reassembled. The Norwegians hope that this will result in a significant reduction in costs. The large number of smaller rotors can be produced and maintained more cheaply than a giant system. The load on the construction should also be lower. In addition, smaller Roteren have a better area of effect. In strong winds over 40 km / h, large rotors have to adjust their blades in order to limit the speed of rotation, this effect only occurs with shorter lengths of the blades at much higher speeds. WCS states that the system is designed for a 50-year service life, significantly longer than the 30 years of a single large turbine.
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