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by youngtaff 821 days ago
Plus how long does each turbine need to operate for before it mitigates the CO2 and other pollutants produced by building and operating the plane?
4 comments

If they move 3,000 blades for ~10MW turbines then a 20% improvement in capacity factor alone is worth 3,066,000 metric tons of CO2 year. Edit: (Ops 10Mw * 1,000 turbines * 0.5 tons from natural gas /MW * .35% capacity factor * 20% improvement * 24 * 365 hours, coal is roughly double that.)

By comparison a commercial jet takes ~20 years to emit 1 million tons of CO2. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-je...

Assuming: 500tons of fuel for the transport of the 3 blades (comparison: AN225 with higher max payload weight guzzled ~15tons/hour).

You could have used that energy to produce 500000kg * 40MJ/kg * 40% = 8TJ. The turbine would need ~40d to produce this (~25% capacity factor, 10MW nameplate power):

8TJ / (10[MW] * 25% * 3600[s/h] * 24[h/d])

The existing option is semi trucks traveling in daylight with additional vehicles supervising and special self steering trailers, local PD stopping traffic if necessary, new roads being built or existing ones improved.
From their website:

"Simultaneously, Radia is developing a world-class portfolio of wind energy projects to leverage this solution"

So they just need to deliver one of those projects for the carbon to be offset.