Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

NigeWick

zeupater said:

... unless the reference is (as I suspect!!!) to local populations of a larger 'bird brained' bipedal species that is! ....

Yep, this latter one.

Martyn1981

Great to see a large scale CAES system being deployed. So many interesting longer term storage items out there, and I suppose we don't need too much yet (till RE reaches higher levels of grid dominance), but still, we need to see 'real' deployments.

So, how about 320MW of power, that's equivalent to a small power station, that can run for 3.5 days non stop (26.88GWh of energy)?

Also worth a read, as it explains why they are going for a 40% efficient system, rather than a 65% efficient one. Horses for courses, it seems, with this scheme having lower efficiency, but greater energy storage.

The article suggests that this scheme will have a rolling two week arbitrage cycle.

Corre to deploy 320MW CAES long-duration energy storage facility for Eneco in Netherlands

Utility Eneco and Corre Energy have signed an agreement for the latter to deploy a 320MW, 84-hour duration compressed air energy storage system (CAES) in Groningen, the Netherlands.

Dublin-based Corre Energy plans to build the facility in a salt cavern in the municipality of Zuidwending. Exploratory drilling will start in 2023 to assess if the site is suitable for compressed air storage, and the installation of the entire system is expected to be completed by 2026.

The planned system will use up to 220MW of power to convert excess electricity into compressed air and store it in the cavern. When the energy is needed, the compressed air will be expanded through a turbine which will generate electricity with a maximum power of 320MW.

The system can discharge at this power for three and a half days, of 84 hours, which equates to a potential 26,880MWh or 26.88GWh energy storage capacity.

Martyn1981

Had to post this, not because it's the biggest of news, but because most (all?) off-shore wind components are usually distributed from a coastal location, and look modest in size v's the humungous install ships that put it all together. But here's a pic of an off-shore blade being moved by road. Yes they always look big, but this is simply on another scale. Very impressive, and hard to comprehend at the same time.

World’s most powerful wind turbine’s blades arrive for installation

All three blades for the prototype of the Vestas V236-15.0 MW offshore wind turbine have arrived at their final destination, and they’ll now be installed and spinning soon.
The 379-foot (115.5-meter) blades were manufactured at Vestas’ blade factory in Nakskov, Denmark. They were transported to Denmark’s national Østerild Test Center on the northwestern coast, where they’ll be installed.

The prototype’s tower sections, nacelle, and hub are already installed. So once the blades are attached, the prototype will be ready to produce its first power.

A single Vestas V236-15.0MW is capable of producing 80 GWh per year. That’s enough to power around 20,000 European households and save more than 38,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing 25,000 passenger cars from the road annually.

[Note - Looks like they are assuming a cf of ~60%.]

silverwhistle

15MW! I saw Rampion going in around 5 years ago when visiting Brighton. Those turbines are 3.4MW..

The maintenance crews operate out of Newhaven, which doesn't have a single working public EV charger!

ABrass

60% CF would be amazing and it is what they are aiming for.

A bit of searching says that East Anglia One was built with 7MW turbines and they're averaging 46%. That's a hub height of 120m and diameter of 170m.

The new Vestas one has a diameter of 236m.
https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW

zeupater

70sbudgie said:

I do think tidal generation is desperately needed, but I'm not sure about tidal barrage. I don't disagree with your logic about delaying the tides, but my concern (based only on your descriptions) is that the birds are attracted to the mudflats at different times not because of the depth of the water, but because they feed on the wildlife that is exposed or otherwise. If the flow of the water is controlled and all passes turbines, what implications will that have on the mobility of the wildlife that the birds feed on? Off the top of my head, for the Wash, don't eels move between salt and fresh waters in the estuary? Will they be stuck on side or other of the barrage? How will effect their ability to migrate upriver to spawn? I am not a biologist, so feel free to identify the inaccuracies of my concerns.

Hi

I'm more minded to harvesting tidal flow but enhancing generation by artificially accelerating flow where the turbines are .... between islands, curved concrete structures etc ... as this should work out far cheaper than constructing full barriers, however, there are a number of places where the creation of artificial tidal lagoons may actually make a lot of sense, especially so when you consider that they would allow for time shifting their generation towards natural slack water periods when there's no actual flow to harvest energy from ...

Regarding impact on wildlife & their habitats .... there's plenty of reports detailing the effects of wind turbines on birds and these seem to form the foundation for many activist groups' arguments against tidal schemes ... the issue that many miss is that because of the relative fluid density between air & water, far more energy can be harvested in a far smaller swept area using larger surface area blades resulting in considerably smaller diameter turbines with far lower tip velocities, so whereas the the tips of the largest wind turbines reach velocities of close to the speed of sound, the tips of water turbines will be much slower, not only will be, but effectively 'must be' because of efficiency limitations imposed by vortex cavitation, so the maximum design tip velocity would need to be well under 100mph, which would likely be hard to achieve in something like a ~7mph estuary tidal stream.

The issue of aquatic wildlife passing a barrier is simply an engineering problem, for which there are many solutions, but most would revolve around periods of level equilibrium on the barrier which would create a new slack water period where sluice gates or other solution could be opened four times/day for maybe one hour each time .... as for spawning, the obvious example would be salmon, the issue here is that they already encounter & overcome such engineered barriers with turbines, but on a much larger vertical scale ... dams ... where aids such as salmon ladders provide perfect examples of how engineered solutions can mitigate what are initially considered unsurpassable problems.

On mudflats and birds feeding .... the issue here is that there should be little difference in the time per day that the mudflats are exposed, it's just that on one side of the barrier the mudflats will be exposed for one period of time and on the other there'd be a delay of a few hours ... effectively, between both sides, the period of time that a proportion of mudflats is exposed is extended, therefore also expanding the wading bird feeding period .... seems like a logical win for the local bird population!

HTH - Z

70sbudgie

I think this is the lowest carbon intensity I've ever seen for the NW England. Possibly in part due to the recent additions of ofshore wind in the NE, which is only at a carbon intensity of 3.

michaels

Could you provide a link please and thank you

70sbudgie

michaels said:

Could you provide a link please and thank you

Sorry, it has been linked before, which is why I didn't add a link.
https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk/
You have to scroll down a fair way to get to the map. And then tap on the region you are interested in to bring up the chart for that area.

Martyn1981

ABrass said:

60% CF would be amazing and it is what they are aiming for.

A bit of searching says that East Anglia One was built with 7MW turbines and they're averaging 46%. That's a hub height of 120m and diameter of 170m.

The new Vestas one has a diameter of 236m.
https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW

Hi, you may be interested in this site then. It's run by AZPS (Andrew Smith), the same bod who maintains the Energy Numbers live generation site.

It gets updated, but not regularly, and is about 6 months behind now. But it shows the cf's for the UK offshore farms, total averages, etc etc.

Not a golden rule, but in general you'll see that the younger farms have higher cf's, as they tend to have ever taller and more powerful WT's. Note that some are closed, demo's etc, so the average fleet cf will rise as older ones 'fall off' and newer ones are added.

Also scrolling down, you'll see the load duration curves. Most of the farms appear to generate around 90% of the time, and the fleet as a whole, about ~100% of the time. But obviously the power output at those upper percentiles is very low.

[Edited, bad link. M.]

UK offshore wind capacity factors