this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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I've thought for YEARS that we should to the same thing with the Hoover Dam. Should also mount wind turbines on the face of it to catch the updrafts out of the canyon. You all acting like green energy has to be mutually exclusive to one another. Wind turbine blades have a lot of surface area that could be covered in solar panels, which solves the issue of solar panels energy output decreasing with heat because then they'd always have built in cooling. No wind? There's still light and some wattage is better than no wattage. Put the turbine blade head on a giant hinge and they can catch rising air from the grounds' radiant heat at night. Free energy is everywhere if you just know where to look and how to take advantage of it.
That is a stupid idea. Blade weight is one of the biggest engineering issues for wind turbines.
if you can get a solar cell in a 6 oz calculator, I doubt highly that incorporating it into the design of the blade is going to add much more weight than the expanded aluminum and fibreglass that's already there.
Are you listening to yourself? Because a 4 cm² solar cell fits in a 170 g calculator, that means that 200-300 m² of solar cells will be fine for the 35 ton turbine blades at around π/2/s of angular momentum with the outer radius of 100m? Those concepts are barely related.
You have no idea if the fiber glass blades have the tensile force to spare to deal with 3 tons of extra weight from the panels alone, or what it will do to the bearings in the generator if you load them 10% or 15% more, or how much flat panels will fuck up your blade aerodynamics, or how expensive it will be to get custom curved panels to preserver the aerodynamics.
Just hand waving everything that stands against your idea away as solvable is magical thinking, not visionary brilliance.
Right, and we'll never walk on the moon, either. Got it.