I’m not sure where this is going, but the first thing I thought of was this old sci-fi movie “Them“:
Via Eurekalert: Evolutionary lessons for wind farm efficiency
Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.
Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a “selection of the fittest” step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms” to optimise wind turbine placement. This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.
“Renewable energy is playing an increasing role in the supply of energy worldwide and will help mitigate climate change,” says Dr Neumann. “To further increase the productivity of wind farms, we need to exploit methods that help to optimise their performance.”
Dr Neumann says the question of exactly where wind turbines should be placed to gain maximum efficiency is highly complex. “An evolutionary algorithm is a mathematical process where potential solutions keep being improved a step at a time until the optimum is reached,” he says.
“You can think of it like parents producing a number of offspring, each with differing characteristics,” he says. “As with evolution, each population or ‘set of solutions’ from a new generation should get better. These solutions can be evaluated in parallel to speed up the computation.”
Other biology-inspired algorithms to solve complex problems are based on ant colonies.
“Ant colony optimisation” uses the principle of ants finding the shortest way to a source of food from their nest.
“You can observe them in nature, they do it very efficiently communicating between each other using pheromone trails,” says Dr Neumann. “After a certain amount of time, they will have found the best route to the food – problem solved. We can also solve human problems using the same principles through computer algorithms.”
Dr Neumann has come to the University of Adelaide this year from Germany where he worked at the Max Planck Institute. He is working on wind turbine placement optimisation in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Current approaches to solving this placement optimisation can only deal with a small number of turbines,” Dr Neumann says. “We have demonstrated an accurate and efficient algorithm for as many as 1000 turbines.”
The researchers are now looking to fine-tune the algorithms even further using different models of wake effect and complex aerodynamic factors.
@Kim: Fascinating! It’s certainly a private remedy tort under UK law for an upstream landowner (astride a natural watercourse) to deprive a downstream owner of reasonable flow, but this doesn’t actually apply to man-made watercourses which need a specific agreement.
Can this therefore apply to (man-made) bat-choppers – surely it’s more of a claim in nuisance if the peturbations in wind, or the noise or stream of bat remains becomes excessive. (Of course if it just topples onto your land you have a trespass remedy.)
Ron Dean
Unfortunately the one thing wind power can never provide is generating reserve, despite the best attempts of modellers to come up with diversity factors. UK December peaks showed that all too clearly – where was the wind? Mind you we knew that in the 1980s (peak demand on windless days), but someone forgot it in the meantime.
And even more efficient wind produced by these modellers will still be grossly inefficient and uneconomic.
Joe Citizen said on May 4, 2011 at 10:45 am:
Modern science meets modern art. Magnificent model masterpieces, mostly.
“We have demonstrated an accurate and efficient algorithm for as many as 1000 turbines.”
Until, of course, Bob the farmer plants energy forest or palm (oil) that changes all the wind dynamic of their perfect world models, or Bob the builder puts a second story on his house, or Bob the city planer thinks it be every so more beautifully to put all the nasty sky rises out of eye’s way by those ugly unruly good for nuthing bat chopping propellers. Or just if the forest surrounding the farm grows a couple of feet.
But I’m sure they can stop the natural human society progress if they but will it. :p
‘Them’ was a great movie. James Whitmore very good and a pre Gunsmoke James Arness. And Edmund Gwenn of course.
And a great introduction of the ants.
“When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”
On topic – is it wise to build wind turbines in areas where tornadoes can spring up?
PS – and if I remember aright there is a blink and you miss him appearance by Leonard Nimoy!
And your brains fell out!
We do NOT need “every extra electron” at any price! There’s a maximum tolerable cost for everything, and windfarm electrons are WAY over the top. Nothing to do with how “mature” the technology is; it’s just fundamentally stupid to use a wildly variable input to generate stable useful output. When there are perfectly functional EXISTING stable inputs, at far lower cost “per electron”.
IMHO the best ant movie ever made was Phase IV.
If they’re going to build windfarms anyway, this seems like pretty interesting and reasonable research.
Saying that, with endorsement by some eminent sceptics
Trev says:
May 4, 2011 at 11:55 am
“‘Them’ was a great movie. James Whitmore very good and a pre Gunsmoke James Arness. And Edmund Gwenn of course.”
You beat me to it, just barely. That was a great movie, for kids. It is a very young James Arness. And the sounds that the ants make are terrific.
..oops, hit the ‘publish’ button prematurely.
..this is getting interesting:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3144827.ece
Perhaps wind energy will be unnecessary in any case?
Genetic programming is like neural nets. Both are ways to attack a problem that you don’t understand. Personally, I’ve always had better luck understanding the nature of the problem first and then attacking with the application of first principles.
But then I never dabbled in climate science.
Ann In L.A. says (May 4, 2011 at 11:32 am): ‘It’s not “Them”, it’s “Them!”’
But shouldn’t it really be “They!”? 🙂
(Apologies for posting something so useless, but I’m padding my resume; I’m applying for a job in the wind power industry.)
I work with tradies (Tradesman, Plumbers, Chippies, Brickies, Concreters etc) and they have a wonderful way of seeing things simply.
“Yeh, beaudy, wish I was that smart. To be able work all that stuff out.”
“What happens if the wind doesn’t blow”? 🙂
Lipstick on a pig!
BACK to the FUTURE
As our quest for “green” power is having us look backwards in time to primitive techniques like wind and “child labor” “PlayPumps” see below:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/merri-go-round-pump.php
? Why not return to harnessing animals turning a shaft and connect it to a generator ?
http://www.sabor-artesano.com/image/millstone-roman/roman-millstone.jpg
This “technique” could be a “backup” power source for windmills when the wind dies.
I can see one of these in everyone’s back or front yards or even on every flat rooftop in the cities. So fun and easy even a child could do it. One of these would have about the same output as a small windmill, therefore a perfect match. We need to look, face, and be backwards to get “Back to the Future!” Giddy-up !
Hey everyone, we have a Global Warming Documentary Coming out and I was hoping to get your opinion on the trailers.
Trailer #1:
Trailer #2
viv evans wrote: “Just put an ant on the rim of an empty plant pot – and watch it go round and round and round and round, following its own pheromone trail.
It will not get off that rim to join its colony, it cannot break off its own trail.
Mindless, just like building more and more wind turbines …”
The point is to have many ants, just as genetic algorithms and actual nature genetics generate many alternatives.
Tucci78 wrote: “I propose that these wind turbines should be distributed so that one of each is sited on the residential property of every legislator who votes for their creation, every government officer of the executive branch who implements the enabling legislative acts and regulations, and every judge who rules in favor of their construction. ”
Well that will make sense after everyone lives down wind or down stream from the coal, gas or nuclear powered plant that generates his or her electricity. I personally would rather live near a nuclear power plant (especially in California) than in most American cities, but I think I am in a small minority on that. The 45% of Americans who get all or most of their electricity from coal burning generally force a very tiny minority of their fellow citizens to breathe or drink the junk that the burning coal produces, and they don’t care a whit for the ill health and deaths suffered by their fellows. Wind turbines would probably produce a net improvement in American health, though it is hard to tell because at present the health care costs of coal consumption (that’s an intentional play on words) are hard to estimate.
Maurice Gaurotte wrote: “Personally, I’ve always had better luck understanding the nature of the problem first and then attacking with the application of first principles.”
That leads to intelligent design instead of evolution by random variation and natural selection. In lots of large systems, like aerodynamic drag, light bulbs, crop breeding, design of pharmaceuticals, climate and ecology, the systems are understood only in part, and intelligent design often can not compete against trial and error in any long run.
I glad they’re getting this wind power generation down pat. It’s not like the wind ever changes direction or speed …
This is how Ca handled the “max demand on windless days problem,” yesterday.
http://www.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20110503_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
Robert M. Wagner – Just watched the first trailer. Liked it. But it would really help if you put a name to every one of those people interviewed.
I was wondering who those 25 year old ‘climate scientists’ were… at their age almost everything is unprecedented.
The Ants (1)
It was a small town, small in the way only really tiny things can be small. And yet, there was a melancholy flavor in the way the ants, with their brightly tinted bonnets and tattered Broadway musical scores, would parade up and down the street until the wee wee hours of the morning. Their only snacks would be the veal cutlets dispersed by old Jack’s cropduster fleet.
But even then, things were changing. The low bleating of the Sheep of the Ages softened to a dull roar, gradually, year by imperfect year, until at last it was all over. No more would the ants bravely strip naked in celebration of the harvest. Brutal big-eyed hamsters with meat cleavers and finely tuned muffin launchers roamed the streets of the small town. An ant wasn’t safe now, not any more.
The town fair was a haven of relative peace; here the hamsters dared not go, not yet, not until the Great Shaving. Every fall, as the days lengthened, and the toads swelled to enormous size in anticipation of the seasonal junkets, a little sunshine would rejuvenate the ants’ bleak, pathetic lives. They would bet merrily on their eel-driven chariot races… raucous laughter would fill the air at the weevil fartathon… and it would be as it once was, for a time, until the twilight came, and with it, the soft rustle-rustle-THUMP of the creeping hamsters, hauling their rickety pianos out to the town square in ominous fashion.
On this topic, they may as well just put ants on treadmills. First Goldman Sachs et al need to figure out how they can rent out the ants.
No, wait… ants produce CO2.
David Suzuki , while genetically engineering temperature sensitive fruit flies: http://www.pnas.org/content/68/5/890.full.pdf+html
decides we are actually maggots: http://thesecretsofvancouver.com/wordpress/is-our-beloved-david-suzuki-still-a-eugenicist/environment
Dr. Tim Flannery thinks we are evolving to termite level:
“Flannery described the theory of his book in brief: that human society is, in fact, a superorganism, upon which we – like ants, termites, and other hive-mind insects – are entirely codependent. While such a comparison may sound unflattering, Flannery was careful to explain the difference between us and our cockroach compatriots. They’re linked together by genes, he told the audience, while we are connected by the desire, evolved over millennia, to divide labour, to co-operate, and to be together. Scientific socialism! It sounds idealistic, but hey, if it helps convince people that we need to work together to prevent looming environmental catastrophe, I’m all for it.” http://www.blogscanada.ca/2011/04/15/an-evening-with-environmentalist-tim-flannery-why-we%E2%80%99re-like-termites-and-why-that%E2%80%99s-a-good-thing/
All the ants I knew did not get grants, worked hard and adapted to their changing surroundings.
Do great minds really think alike?
K.E. = 1/2 * mass* velocity^2
This is the biggest problem with windmills. You have no control over “v”. If you depend for energy on something you have no control over your asking for trouble.