Economics of offshore wind power

GreatApe

Amazing

https://mobile.offshorewind.biz/2018/03/01/ge-unveils-operation-haliade-x-12-mw/

Most critical improvement has been with capacity factors.
With 63% CF it means you can power whole nations with offshore wind without any costly and wasteful batteries

While I was pro nuclear and pro fossil fuels in the past I've changed my mind fully this year.
The EU should stop building solar, phase out its nuclear and go heavily offshore wind and natural gas.

UK could go 80% offshore wind 20% NG

What's more by good fortune in Europe offshore wind correlates somewhat positively with seasonal demand. That means we can add EVs to the grid and add base load heating (hot water needs) to the grid and even add some seasonal heating to the grid and offshore wind could solve those problems too

What's more amazing is that if the EU built just 15 of these per day it would be enough to electrify almost all EU needs. Electricity transport and heating. Amazing! And surely achievable just 15 turbines per day for a group of nations 500 million people strong

kinger101

There would need to be a Europe-wide supergrid to get to anywhere near that level of penetrance for wind. I still think storage and other renewables will be part of the solution. Storage is possible at home (Tesla Powerwall....too expensive at the moment) but is great at ironing out baseload problems.

Electricity demand will of course also increase due to a transition to electric vehicles.

DiggerUK

Wind has a known unreliability factor......it is not always there.
Nuclear is reliable, and always there.
The only other non fossil electric supplies that should be considered are hydro and thermal..._

chris_m

DiggerUK wrote: »

Wind has a known unreliability factor......it is not always there.
Nuclear is reliable, and always there.
The only other non fossil electric supplies that should be considered are hydro and thermal..._

And tidal - unlike wind or wave, roughly 4 tide movements a day are guaranteed until such time as the Moon escapes Earth's gravity and sails off on its own.

GreatApe

kinger101 wrote: »

There would need to be a Europe-wide supergrid to get to anywhere near that level of penetrance for wind. I still think storage and other renewables will be part of the solution. Storage is possible at home (Tesla Powerwall....too expensive at the moment) but is great at ironing out baseload problems.

Electricity demand will of course also increase due to a transition to electric vehicles.

That's the thing with High capacity offshore wind power we don't need super grids or mass storage.

These turbines are quoted as 63% CF and they have somewhat positive correlation with demand. That is to say on average more production in the day than at night and more production in winter than in summer.

What thus means is you can indeed get to the 70-80% offshore wind power mark without mass storage or mass interconnectors.

GreatApe

chris_m wrote: »

And tidal - unlike wind or wave, roughly 4 tide movements a day are guaranteed until such time as the Moon escapes Earth's gravity and sails off on its own.

Tidal isn't needed at all these Hugh capacity factor offshore turbines really do solve all the problems with renewables. It doesn't matter even if there is a while week with zero wind power as its fully backed up by 50GW of CCGTs (I think we already have about 30GW and we are going to build another 20GW as we phase out the old coal plants so the CCGTs will exist at bi extra cost)

DiggerUK wrote: »

Wind has a known unreliability factor......it is not always there.
Nuclear is reliable, and always there.
The only other non fossil electric supplies that should be considered are hydro and thermal..._

This is true with solar and low capacity wind but not true with large offshore wind

The UK needs 50GW of CCGT and with 50GW of high CF offshore wind that would take the UK to 80% wind power 20% gas power

It does of course mean the CCGTs will mostly be idle but since CCGTs are cheap to build and cheap to operate its not a huge problem

GreatApe

Really these high capacity offshore wind turbines solve everything that was unsolvable with solar and low capacity onshore wind.

There is finally a solution to the problem that can work. Not PV not low CF wind they do have the big problem of being unpredictable and requiring mass storage that doesn't exist and would be wasteful eben if it did exist.

What's more the industry is really just a baby at the moment.
It may take another 5-10 years but at some point the big players will converge on a good design and then mass manufacture those turbines.

Right now the industry is closer to small scale car manufacturing. Making only 500 or so turbines of one design before upgrading and making another design. Once they get to a great High CF design they can go from what is almost small scale custom builds to mass manufacturing of one (or a handful) of designs.

The UK would only need to manufacture 1 turbine (12MW) per day and we could go to almost all electricity and transport and baseload heating to wind powered.

The world would only need to make 100 such turbines daily to go almost fully wind power. Not just for electricity but for everything

Voyager2002

I'm not sure why this thread is in a secton on house prices...

Anyway, I have to agree with most of the points raised, while noting that in the absence of a Europe-wide grid offshore wind power is not going to be much good to countries like Switzerland. Don't write off solar power; it relies on light rather than sunshine so gives a reasonably consistent and predictable output; adding solar cells to existing buildings is easy so increasing capacity does not pose major planning and financing issues; and above all the cost per GW has fallen greatly and is likely to fall further with new materials so that it is a decidedly cost-effective solution.

Nuclear power is unlikely to prove cost-effective in the long term, particularly if we use realistic models of the costs of long-term storage and disposal of radioactive waste (current accounting methods discount costs in the future to such an extent that very high costs extending far into the future have a net present value that is close to zero). I hope that fossil fuels will also fade out on cost grounds, even if they cannot be excluded because of their effects on the climate.

kinger101

GreatApe wrote: »

What thus means is you can indeed get to the 70-80% offshore wind power mark without mass storage or mass interconnectors.

Which means you still need energy from other sources (import, storage, or generation).

Even high CF will sometimes produce very little electricity at a fixed location. I agree these are better solution for baseload, but they are not a panacea, and only part of a solution.

GreatApe

kinger101 wrote: »

Which means you still need energy from other sources (import, storage, or generation).

Even high CF will sometimes produce very little electricity at a fixed location. I agree these are better solution for baseload, but they are not a panacea, and only part of a solution.

These high capacity factor wind turbines solve the intermittency problem and they largely help solve the seasonal heating demand problem

Really by good coincidence and good engineering the EU energy problem has been solved by offshore high CF wind power. Low capacity onshore wind should stop getting any support and likewise solar should stop being supported (apart from hot countries where peak demand is driven by AC which correlates well to PV output)

Yes I am aware this means we need full backup with CCGTs but those already exist in the UK and more is going to be built to replace the lost coal stations.

With mass production of a handful of good models if prices could be reduced to £2/watt then its the end of coal and most gas add EVs and its the end if oil too. And yes I really mean -80% not -100% as we will still need fossil furls for chemicals plastics etc

GreatApe

Voyager2002 wrote: »

I'm not sure why this thread is in a secton on house prices...

Anyway, I have to agree with most of the points raised, while noting that in the absence of a Europe-wide grid offshore wind power is not going to be much good to countries like Switzerland. Don't write off solar power; it relies on light rather than sunshine so gives a reasonably consistent and predictable output; adding solar cells to existing buildings is easy so increasing capacity does not pose major planning and financing issues; and above all the cost per GW has fallen greatly and is likely to fall further with new materials so that it is a decidedly cost-effective solution.

Nuclear power is unlikely to prove cost-effective in the long term, particularly if we use realistic models of the costs of long-term storage and disposal of radioactive waste (current accounting methods discount costs in the future to such an extent that very high costs extending far into the future have a net present value that is close to zero). I hope that fossil fuels will also fade out on cost grounds, even if they cannot be excluded because of their effects on the climate.

People don't understand that the biggest problem with low CF sources like PV is not that they don't produce at night but that they produce everything in such a concentrated way. This means it quickly saturates a grid and is pretty much useless past 10-15% and makes other technologies harder to integrate into the grid too. In the EU solar should not get a penny more of subsidy it will act in the future as a mechanism which limits offshore wind which is the real solution.