14MW turbine would power a Tesla Model 3 for 218 miles

sevenhills

"We've worked out that a single turn of a 14MW turbine would power a Tesla Model 3 for 352km (218 miles),"

Is this true? That would be like generating three gallons of diesel power.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58704792

How many turns would a 14MW turbine make in a year?

QrizB

A 14MW turbine could produce 14MWh in an hour. That's almost 4 kWh per second.

218 miles in a Tesla will take somewhere between 55 and 80 kWh.

If the turbine turns between 3 and 4 times a minute, that would work.

(The blades on that turbine are 115m long, so each revolution the blade tip travels 720 metres. At 4rpm the blade tip is travelling at 170km/h, roughly 105mph.)

Note: calcs are my own, it's late and I'm tired so could be entirely incorrect!

Verdigris

I like doing calculations, in my head, for my local windfarm, when I'm out for a walk. They're only 2MW turbines, though.

Martyn1981

sevenhills said:

"We've worked out that a single turn of a 14MW turbine would power a Tesla Model 3 for 352km (218 miles),"

Is this true? That would be like generating three gallons of diesel power.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58704792

How many turns would a 14MW turbine make in a year?

Hi. As QrizB points out, the larger a WT gets, the lower its rpm's will get, otherwise the blade tips will be travelling too fast.

It's hard to express the power and energy that these monsters can produce, so often a WT or the whole farm will be compared to X homes worth of leccy pa. These calculations typically take the capacity factor of the WT(s) into account so as not to mislead.

Which leads me on to the progress that has been made with regard to capacity factor. On-shore wind in the UK did have a cf of around 25%, and early off-shore wind was in the 30's. Now we are seeing figures moving towards 40% for new on-shore wind, and high 50%'s heading for low 60%'s for new offshore wind*.

That means that for a 14MW turbine, it could generate approx  (14MW x 60%cf x 24hrs x 365days) = 73,584MWh's / 74GWh's pa.

Assuming the Tesla Model 3 mileage in the article is based on 4miles/kWh, then an 'average' 1hr of generation would give us:
14MW x 0.6cf x 1hr = 8.4MWh's, or 8,400kWh's, or 33,600 miles.

Hope this is interesting and fun.


*For anyone interested, you can find the Gov predictions on pages 10 & 11 of these CfD documents 

Interestingly, we see projections of 47% for 2020 offshore wind installs, which is very close to the rolling 12 month figure found here: UK offshore wind capacity factors  [Edit - and to the figures given in the link by Ken of 28% onshore, and 46% offshore. M.]




@Verdigris - We have a 2.4MW WT near us that we see when we are out walking, I've noticed that it seems to have two operational speeds either 20rpm (3sec rotation) or 12rpm (5sec rotation). I assume it has a two speed gearbox? I think it's beautiful.

JKenH

Current cf for UK wind is around 30%. Over the last 365 days we have averaged 6.97GW from our current installed capacity of 24.2 GW (28.8%).

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=1-year&start=2020-10-19&&_k=u0b0xh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom