Typically wind is dissipated by friction losses with the surface I think (bleeding off speed and energy by making waves, waving trees, and just rubbing against the ground) and wind is generated by heat from the sun (warm air expanding pushing against cold air, creating pressure differentials across thousands of miles).

Because wind is quick to regenerate and this does nothing to stop that the result is probably a pretty small drop in average wind speeds around the new mill and no greater ramifications than slightly less pollen travel in the spring.

I’m no scientist but I think it would take an absurd and unrealistic amount of these to have any sort of noticeable effect on average wind speeds.

While it is rather complex and hard to predict, the most likely global outcomes are fewer extreme weather events and extremely mild cooling. The hairy ball theorem tells us there’s already somewhere on the globe with no wind, so it’s not that big of a deal to convert some wind into electricity. This particular approach couldn’t convert “all” wind into electricity.

https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/spinning-skies-how-earths-rotation-shapes-our-weather – We won’t run out of wind until after we start slowing down the rotation of the earth, and we watch that pretty closely to know when to add leap seconds, and I imagine it’s an just absolutely huge store of energy in the form of angular momentum (et. al.).

In theory nothing. Wind is just the flow of air from high pressure to low, which itself is caused by heating from sunlight. If uncollected, the kinetic energy of the wind would eventually be lost as heat to friction between air molecules.

The windmills will steal all the spinning from hurricanes, a bust to home owners insurance

It will impact weather patterns and severity. I’ve certainly not done the work on how much, nor do I really have a grasp on the scales involved, so that’s mostly a meaningless statement, but I can say with confidence the impact will be real. Just like dams affecting rivers, icecap mass affecting heat reflection, and solar panels increasing local temperatures.

Given that one of the impacts of global climate change has been increased weather severity and chaos, I am not afraid of positing that reducing the severity and chaos of the jet streams could be a good thing.

Similarly, there are some interesting projects going on surrounding the use of aerogel and other materials that could help focus sunlight at the top of the oceans, where evaporation can actually occur, that are focused on creating clean drinking water—and while I think this is a good end unto itself, a nice side benefit would be less solar energy reaching the ocean and raising the body temperature.

For once, it’s cool to hear about proposed industrial projects and their side effects and they’re maybe positive, instead of “well that sounds like it’s going to leech heavy metals into the surrounding community”

Of course, aerogel is horrible to work with and clogs if it doesn’t break, and nobody else has solved the problem of scaling up and dealing with the steam getting in the way. On the lightweight flying jet stream turbine front, well, I’ve been following development for 8 years and nobody has even solved the ‘limited supply of helium leaking away into space’ problem for starters. And it’s hard making an efficient generator so lightweight that it can fly. So we don’t have to worry about them potentially improving global weather severity just yet. Or potentially devastating our remaining populations of migratory birds!

Switching to renewables makes a lot of sense from an economic and ecologic point of view but also geostrategically. Unfortunately, Western governments have pretty much lost the ability to act on those considerations. This is due to then being beholden to a few billionaires who would rather see civilisation as we know it end than accept a few percentage points revenue drop for a couple of quarters.

Yes the Hindenburg disaster had more to do with the flammable paint used than the hydrogen inside it. But the safety procedures when working with on the ground may be more expensive than just using helium.

They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.

That looks complicated and frankly kind of stupid. Imagine trying to get something like that working without having an engineer standing by that can get everything fixed once it crashes down or something else like that happens.

Promising concept too, but this is 250-500x the scale of that.

Yes but, you see, that was an animated film aka a work of fiction. This is happening in reality.

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Kinda.

it is 1.2mw = 12x100kw

Using hot air instead of helium would not work. The density of hot air is much higher than helium, so you would need a significantly larger airship to lift the same mass of payload (the useful bits). That and keeping the air hot would require constant energy input reducing the efficiency of the system dramatically. I’m pretty sure that system would be literally impossible to construct.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce a fair amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil will do a lot to produce the desired lift.

I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.

The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?

It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.

The article says:

The S1500 features a main airfoil and an annular wing that together form a giant duct. Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.

That suggests to me (admittedly a layman) that each blimp is more like 1.2MW?

[face Palm].

JFC people, take a grade 10 physics class.

It did that already, yes. It’s a BFB: Big Friendly Blimp

It’s a Zeppelin. 100 year old tech.

Tether to the ground limits X-axis. Buoyancy limits Y-axis. Draw a circle around the sine of ground-to-windmill hypotenuse and you immediately know the max constraints of where the windmill will be

As a European… Are feet logarithmic? Wouldn’t even surprise me that much.

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.

They used different people’s feet.

The zero key got stuck.