Comment by boxcardavin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boxcardavin | Hacker News Reader

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The biggest ones produce over 5 megawatts at peak capacity, I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure.

5 megawatts is a pretty useless figure for most people to imagine, and I think imagining it in units of homes-powered isn't great either because we don't have a sense of the heat or kinetic energy equivalent because our homes are quiet machines. A 260 horsepower car (think new minivan) at full throttle is producing about .2 megawatts, so the worlds largest turbines are generating the same power as 10/.2=20 minivans at full power.

Another way to think of it is in terms of heat. A big stovetop burner will generate about 3000 watts of heat, so a minivan is like 65 burners at full blast, and a 10 megawatt turbine is like 3300 burners.

So, basically a single big offshore turbine 5-10MW can power a single electrical locomotive with power ranges 5000-10000 kW continuously. That's rather impressive considering how insanely powerful locomotives are.

Your calculation is not very helpful either, and it’s not only because division error (10/0.2 is 50, not 20). More importantly, an average minivan most likely never reaches its full power over its lifetime. It would make more sense to consider its energy use as it cruises, which is probably something like 50-70 HP. So, one 10 MW turbine is really rather 200-250 minivans, not 20 — a whole order of magnitude.

But perhaps the most useful might be power-plant-equivalents.

The Stockton Cogeneration Facility near San Fran had a nominal output of 60MW. Thus, around twelve of these mega-windmills would roughly equal the output of that coal plant.

A large size nuke plant does about 1300 MW nominally (it is initially about 3000 MW thermally but only 35% or so is successfully converted to power for the grid).

Wikipedia says the Vestas V164, with upgrades, is the largest at 9MW.

As someone else said GE has a 12MW in development, and I swear I've heard announcements about 10MW and 11MW prototypes.

> I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure.

GE just announced a 12MW turbine, which will start appearing in real world projects in 2020.

50 minivans!

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