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 Irish 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 Ireland'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.

Consideration could be given to motorized gyroscopic stabilization of both the float and turbine to maximize platform stability.

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Envisaged Location

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Ireland's Continental Shelf extends to some 10x the size of the Land Area. Much of it lies on the Wild Atlantic side, with 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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