The active camouflage concept is definitely interesting, but I think there's an issue in terms of power consumption. Some quick napkin math:
blade length of a modern turbine: 75m
Power consumption of high power LED strips: 19 W/m
assume two strips per blade, 3 blades = 450 m of LED strips
Power consumption = 8.5 MW of power consumption. Just for hiding the rotor, not the nacelle or tower.
That's a bit more than half of the total such a turbine can produce. So you'd sacrifice at least a quarter of the energy in order to hide the turbines (assuming you run it only in the daytime). And a bit of quick research indicates those power numbers may be insufficient to make the lights bright enough to hide the outline.
Yeah, I'm not sure how the math would play out precisely. It is definitely something that requires further research. I do think that a 10-15% increase in cost to hide the turbines would be doable, but certainly not half of the electrical output.
The active camouflage concept is definitely interesting, but I think there's an issue in terms of power consumption. Some quick napkin math:
blade length of a modern turbine: 75m
Power consumption of high power LED strips: 19 W/m
assume two strips per blade, 3 blades = 450 m of LED strips
Power consumption = 8.5 MW of power consumption. Just for hiding the rotor, not the nacelle or tower.
That's a bit more than half of the total such a turbine can produce. So you'd sacrifice at least a quarter of the energy in order to hide the turbines (assuming you run it only in the daytime). And a bit of quick research indicates those power numbers may be insufficient to make the lights bright enough to hide the outline.
Yeah, I'm not sure how the math would play out precisely. It is definitely something that requires further research. I do think that a 10-15% increase in cost to hide the turbines would be doable, but certainly not half of the electrical output.