Megapixels: A Wind Turbine That Can Power 6,000 Households

Well this new development will make all wind turbines, natural gas power plants, nuclear power plants, coal fired power plants, and any Big Oil powerplant obsolete:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130227085942.htm

You mean it's not made by that conglomerate of corruption - General Electric? I'm shocked!

gizmowiz,

It will take a combination of that and a new battery solution, because energy that isn't used right away is wasted. The answer may be a combination of those solar panels and this battery: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html

Some day electric companies won't have power plants but renewable energy sources and large battery facilities.

The day that one can run a modern industrialised society on wind solar and other renewables will unfortunately never come.

Kudos Denmark! Well done!

I read an article a while back that said the uk's wind farms were suppose to produce 100% power for 30% of the year, turns out it was only half of that, pushing the payback time for each turbine past its life expectancy

Wind power is a big joke

6,000 households in IDEAL CONDITIONS. Wind falls off, so does power output to the point where power is fed in to keep the rotor moving (good P.R. and stops flats developing on the bearings.) Wind increases? then blades are feathered and again no power. The episodic nature of wind severely reduces its usefulness, there is no point saying "It's always windy somewhere" the losses through the Grid from one end of the country to the other make the whole process pointless. Base Load is everything in power generation; you need to produce power 24/7 regardless of Natures whims.

This would be amazing if it is able to get the output they say. I wish we would see the floating turbine combo go somewhere or a mega structure tapping into the jet stream here. We would have a great power source.

Good luck building a structure that goes as high as the jet stream.

The strongest jet stream is the polar jet, at around 7–12 kilometers (23,000–39,000 ft) above sea level.
The tallest human-constructed structure is the Burj Khalifa skyscraper at 829.84 meters (2,723 ft).

And you do know that the jet streams are meandering ... constantly moving over the earth's surface and shifting positions, right?

SeekerOfTheTree, MisterThomas, you're both thinking about this in the wrong way. A few thousand feet above ground, the wind is much more ferocious than it is right above ground, and it usually stays that way. Hence, there is now work on a type of spinning aerostat (kite balloon) turbine- one which has been showing great success.
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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

For sure these Siemens blades are an impressive piece of composite manufacturing work. But this wind turbine would not produce a full 6MW output 100% of the time. The average output would be closer to something like 4MW. Nor would it come anywhere close to providing enough power for 6,000 homes. Even at max output, that would only be 1kW per house, which would not even be enough for running the A/C in warm climates.

This article perpetuates the myth of the usefulness of wind power by repeating the claim that it generates 6 MW of power, "enough to serve 6,000 homes". The fact is, like every other wind power generator, this one serves exactly 0 homes. No one wants to have electricity only when the wind blows. We still need all the infrastructure required to provide us with the power we need up and running and ready to go both during low wind periods and, more critically, when the wind tops its 54 mph maximum and switches from full power to no power in an instant.