GB.5. - Scotland  Floating Wind

Introduction

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Concept Background

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Ross was a keen angler in his younger days. One of the learned skills, involved distance casting of fishing floats in windy conditions on Scottish Rivers & Lakes.

Specialist floats are employed for this type of angling. They comprise elongated hollow-tube or balsa sticks, suitably weighted at the bottom. They are designed to settle deep in the water so as to avoid surface turbulence. Only a brightly-coloured tip protrudes above the surface; just sufficient to be visible at long distance. Waves wash over the floats with constant regularity. An interruption to this regularity signals the interest of a fish in the bait below.

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Concept Outline

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It occurred to Ross that the weighted fishing float design, with its proven success in distance angling, could possibly be adapted to support a wind turbine in waters of a certain depth around Scotland's storm-wracked Atlantic Fringe.

The engineering principles are quite simple.

Further calculation & experimentation is required.

Engineering components need to be sufficiently robust to survive expected weather conditions.

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Envisaged Location

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Scotland's Continental Shelf of between 100m and 200m depth, extends some distance beyond the Outer Hebrides. Much of it lies on the Wild Atlantic side, with long reaches and high wind velocities, that lend themselves to massive energy generation. The problem is of course, that severe conditions are very destructive of normal engineering solutions.

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