A good use for a wind turbine far from the power grid is to power ammonia production at the base, which otherwise needs only air and water feedstocks.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
It is a thing of 220m diameter and 260m tall.<p>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.
Does anybody have good data on how size improves usage and efficiency? I would ideally like to see statistics of how large a turbine hits what power output during a year.<p>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)
The "who has the biggest turbine" race between wind turbine OEMs is the Formula 1 of the wind industry. It's mostly about bragging rights and long-range R&D. The vast majority of new turbines being installed today are in the familiar 2-4 MW class. The >10 MW turbines are more important as an R&D platform than as an actual contributor to energy production.<p>4 MW class onshore turbines first introduced in 2017 are just now starting to hit their stride and be installed at large scale.