--- Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I never thought of that. But how would you anchor them? It would take immensely strong anchors to prevent something like this from sailing off.
No anchor. The West coast, and Northeast has little or no "shelf" and the ocean is too deep for anchorage anyway. You would use converted drogues. A drouge is a sea-anchor which merely slows movement, like a parachute- and does not attempt to create a permanent anchorage. It can slow a ship in a 30 knot wind to 1-2 knots - or perhaps a 20 mile controlled-drift per day. They are steerable. Imagine a giant *funnel* which at the small outlet-end there is a propeller attached to a generator. When drug behind a ship it creates a huge drag, almost stopping the wind aligned vector. Using this you could recoup some of the energy it takes to return to your starting position when the winds subside - usually late at night. IOW the catamaran flotilla would be in constant controlled-drift mode- starting at point-x in the morning, and capturing wind energy for 20 hours, using it to compress air and produce some electricity for onboard use, and using the ocean heat sink would allow easy conversion of air (enriched) to a liquid for storage. Around midnight, or as winds subside the flotilla uses power to return the 20-30 miles which they have drifted during the work-day, returning to the same point-x by morning for the next days repeat of the same routine. The wind farm flotilla is never "really" anchored but see-saws back and forth in a general area. They can be pretty far out to sea this way - where winds are strongest and the operators can even choose the best locations seasonally, if there is a predictable pattern. The constant shuttle movement of the flotilla creates only a small inefficiecy compared to the amount of wind which is harnessed, a few percent, and has many advantages - particularly in a storm. A cryo-tanker comes by every day or two and collects the liquid from each catamaran, returns it to port or direct to a nearby (converted) natural gas plant which can thereby produce 30-50 percent more energy using the same amount of methane as before - and the best part is that all the electrical distribution infrastructure is already in place from that plant - so we are only adding a bulk transportation infrastructure - relatively cheap and with no bureaucracy to deal with. Jones
