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Floating turbine towers above — the S1500 hovers to harvest wind at 131 feet (www.ecoticias.com)
submitted 1 day ago by UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The S1500 floating turbine’s operating altitude is 4,921 feet above ground level, where wind speed moves about three times faster than at the surface. The advantage of this altitude (also referred to as vertical slice) can result in a power output up to 27 times higher than a conventional ground-based wind turbine of similar capacity.

The capacity to generate one megawatt of electrical power (MW) with the S1500 system is comparable in size to what small wind power turbines normally generate (a conventional 328-foot-tall wind turbine), while the footprint of the S1500 system is significantly smaller. This amazing power density shows the efficiency benefits of being able to access high altitude wind power resources by new and innovative airborne platforms.

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[-] somegeek@programming.dev 1 points 14 hours ago

Lot's of birds will be shredded

[-] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago

Have data to prove that? Because existing wind turbines hardly kill any birds. That's oil lobby shit leaking through.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago

You know, I was skeptical that birds even got up that high.

Turns out this thing is actually far too low.

Incidentally, also why the other wind turbine bird death stories are largely horseshit.

Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.

[-] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

I wonder if the way they tested it to get those higher numbers was something like finding a field where birds were roosting with windmills present, then fire off some massive fireworks at night and assume any bird that died did so because of the windmills.

Assuming they didn't just pull the numbers out of their ass and actually designed a bad faith experiment that could inflate bird deaths.

this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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