The horizontal-axis wind turbine

Assembled from 36 blocks · 3 evidence · 25 related

1. Story
2. A machine that extracts kinetic energy from moving air through a lifting rotor, and the partial case in this Journey — half manufactured, half constructed. Two scaling relations govern its economics. Power available in the wind scales with the cube of wind speed, so a site with twenty per cent more wind yields roughly seventy per cent more energy; and captured power scales with swept area, hence with the square of rotor diameter, so doubling the rotor quadruples the capture. No rotor can take more than 16/27 — about 59.3 per cent — of the kinetic energy in the stream it intercepts, a result derived by Betz; good modern rotors reach power coefficients around 0.45 to 0.50, so the physics ceiling is not the binding constraint. Growth has therefore been growth in size: commercial machines of the early 1980s were rated in the tens or low hundreds of kilowatts with rotors under twenty metres, while offshore machines now in service are rated in the mid-teens of megawatts with rotors beyond two hundred metres, and larger prototypes have been erected in China. That is where the divergence from solar appears. The nacelle and blades are factory products and behave like factory products; the monopile, the installation vessel, the export cable and the grid connection are construction and marine operations, and they behave like construction — so offshore wind's costs rose sharply when interest rates, steel prices and vessel day-rates rose in 2022–2023, in a way solar module costs did not.
3. Knowledge
4. The experience (learning) curve
5. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
6. Critical minerals for the energy transition
7. Connections
8. Critical minerals for the energy transition
9. The experience (learning) curve
10. The United Kingdom's fifth contract auction attracts no offshore wind bids
11. The first Global Stocktake calls for tripling renewable capacity
12. China imposes export controls on rare earths and magnets
13. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
14. Lithium-ion battery storage
15. Bayan Obo mining district
16. Copper
17. International Energy Agency
18. The lithium price collapses after its 2022 peak
19. China imposes export controls on rare earths and magnets
20. Theodore Paul Wright
21. Photovoltaic solar generation
22. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
23. Lithium-ion battery storage
24. Nuclear fission power
25. International Energy Agency
26. Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
27. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
28. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
29. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
30. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
31. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
32. Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition
33. Evidence
34. Supports the finding that probabilistic forecasts built on observed cost-versus-cumulative-deployment relationships have outperformed the expert and official projections used in energy planning, and that solar, wind and storage costs have fallen at rates those projections repeatedly failed to anticipate. V55 verification basis: the paper was not retrieved in this session; the citation follows the reference declared in the Journey catalogue and the substance is stated from author knowledge. The fitted learning rates and their intervals were NOT read and are not quoted.
35. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.
36. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.