Ask HN: wind powered, power generating ships | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: wind powered, power generating ships

3 pointsstuntgoat6 comments

Would a very small ship with a very large mast dragging a water turbine generator create enough power to be useful?

I doubt it. Compared to a fixed tower wind turbine you have hull drag losses, water turbine losses, and the problem of where to put the power since you won't have cables to shore.

Some cruising sailors do use systems like this to generate their own power when under way.

Agreed. There was a link here at HN sometimes to an article about a ship with wind turbines going to see and returning with stored hydrogen as an Energy source which I thought was a good idea, if the economics eventually make it viable.

I was thinking of how many tons and how big the sails were on mast ships. If there was a design of a much lighter and smaller hulled ship ( catamarans have less drag ), and a much larger mast assembly, seemingly, it could power a decent sized generator with some force.

Power could be stored onboard and transfered via a cable-connected, station out at sea.

Thanks for your reply.

'useful' is subjective. That mast would not have to be 'very large' to power one's GPS system, and having that certainly could be useful. At even lower power, a tiny impeller that measures boat speed could be very useful.

If you are aiming for large amounts of power, I would expect it to be more efficient to replace part of the sailing by a wind turbine, and to get rid of that water turbine.

Take a look at this; I submitted it a couple days ago and found it very interesting:

http://thepowergeneration.blogspot.com/2009/09/hydrogen-chal...

If you had other ships carrying away the generated hydrogen, it seems like a brilliant idea.

My friend Craig, an engineer for an oceanography company, has been working on very similar ideas for a while. Here are two of his proposals:

http://longshotcity.com/2008/11/17/flymill/

http://www.paratow.com/

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