by Biba89 on 1/1/21, 7:46 PM with 20 comments
by ncmncm on 1/1/21, 10:36 PM
If erected on a farm, it provides both fertilizer and fuel for the farm, and any surplus for neighboring farms. Since the requirements for both inputs are wholly predictable, the value proposition is ironclad.
A great advantage of this use is that it is extremely tolerant of intermittent supply; when wind is slack, you just leave off production; and produced ammonia is, exactly, storage, for as many barrels as you care to bother filling.
There have been several recent projects demonstrating practical small-scale catalytic production of ammonia. An amazing thing about ammonia as fertilizer is that saturated aqueous solution may be injected behind a plow disc and be taken up by soil bacteria so quickly that no odor can be detected, following behind the plow. Injecting ammonia while plowing probably produces much less runoff to waterways than the much more frequently seen surface spraying.
by ordu on 1/1/21, 8:39 PM
It is just sad, that nytimes is happy to convert meters into feets, football fields and Empire State Buildings, but doesn't want to show metric numbers in a footnote, so I wouldn't need to find a converter to make sense of those numbers.
by kaliszad on 1/1/21, 9:34 PM
I imagine a very large turbine like this could run almost always in an off-shore wind farm but at what power output? This is quite important for comparisons to other sources of energy. Even nuclear power plants don't run for much more than 85% of days in the year (at least Temelín in Czechia)
by eigenvector on 1/1/21, 9:09 PM
4 MW class onshore turbines first introduced in 2017 are just now starting to hit their stride and be installed at large scale.
by jonplackett on 1/1/21, 10:47 PM
by Nokinside on 1/1/21, 8:16 PM