Economics of offshore wind power

DiggerUK

chris_m wrote: »

..........until such time as the Moon escapes Earth's gravity and sails off on its own.

If the moon decides to go off and do its own thing, AGW will get the blame..._

michaels

Solar can make sense if it is cheap enough and backed up with storage although of course it makes much more sense it areas with coincident demand for air conditioning.

Electrification of the vehicle fleet will in effect work as a vast energy store with the use of smart tariffs to demand shift to when wind and or solar are overproducing.

Nuclear also goes down so requires an 'intermittency' back up even if that backup rarely gets used.

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

Solar can make sense if it is cheap enough and backed up with storage although of course it makes much more sense it areas with coincident demand for air conditioning.

Electrification of the vehicle fleet will in effect work as a vast energy store with the use of smart tariffs to demand shift to when wind and or solar are overproducing.

Nuclear also goes down so requires an 'intermittency' back up even if that backup rarely gets used.

That's not really true. Its like saying a coal plant needs a backup because coal plants can go down for a period. Its true but because coal or gas or nuclear plants don't typically go down at the same time they don't need much of a backup. If one of those plants have a 10% chance of being offline for a month the chance that two will be offline at the same time is about 1% and the chance that three will be offline in the same month is about 0.1% etc

This is obvious by the fact that France doesn't have many CCGTs or Coal plants backing up its nuclear fleet.

Solar PV is a waste of resources and time compared to future offshore wind which can achieve so much more. The very High CF if 63% and potentially improving further means you wouldn't need the mass batteries or mass curtailment that would be needed with solar and low CF onshore wind.
Also obviously a tech working at 63% CF has much better use of inverters and converters and grid connections and lines than a tech working at 11%

Solar can't power whole nations. Onshore wind can't but it appears offshore wind turbine technology really can.

What's more offshore wind is really right at the beginning to the learning curve.
Only about a thousand turbines have been made and installed in the EU and of many different designs and sizes and companies. So its still very close to small scale bispoke manufacturing.
At some point in the late 2020s the companies will converge onto a handful of great designs and then from there they can stop concentrating on the wind turbines and concentrate of the facotires and processes to make them on a mass scale quickly and cheaply

Would only take ~10,000 such turbines over 30 years to power all UK needs electricity heating and EVs. That works out to just 1 turbine manufactured and installed per day which seems very plausible. Also hopefully most the work can be done in the UK unlike solar where about half flows out to China.

cepheus

GreatApe wrote: »

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

This seems to be based on company figures, and the capacity factor will depend on location. Perhaps it's a best case scenario in locations where the wind is more reliable?

Featuring a 12MW direct drive generator and a capacity factor of 63 percent, the Haliade-X will produce 45 percent more energy than any other offshore turbine available today, the company said.

even if it really generated 45% more energy, and all that could be explained through capacity factor, that means capacity factor would normally be 43% (63/1.45) which is far higher than most wind farms (all of them in the UK I think).

GreatApe

cepheus wrote: »

This seems to be based on company figures, and the capacity factor will depend on location. Perhaps it's a best case scenario in locations where the wind is more reliable?

even if it really generated 45% more energy, and all that could be explained through capacity factor, that means capacity factor would normally be 43% (63/1.45) which is far higher than most wind farms (all of them in the UK I think).

Yea it did cross my mind that they could be lying about its potential but I don't think GE would do that especially as it would leave them to being sued down the line if their customers didn't get close to it. Also they could be doing what a lot of solar farms do which us derate their output but that doesn't matter too much. How that works is for instance they might produce a 14MW turbine and only rate it at 12MW and limit it to 12MW.

Either way anything above 60% really solves all the problems especially as the wind farms spread around the UK won't have perfectly 100% correlation perhaps only 90-80% correlation.

What all this means is offshore wind can produce very large amounts of clean power and be integrated into the UK (and most EU grids). With such capacity factor offshore wind could produce 250TWh annually (75% of UK current needs) with little to no problems. Solar PV couldn't do that nor could low CF onshore wind.

silverwhistle

Solar has been pretty pants this last, windy week, but during the cold snap the previous week I was getting near 16kWh from my system and all the hot water from a diverter. I even had an electric heater on for a period using the spare power. I had the gas boiler on for a very short time twice this week for hot water, but basically from now until the late autumn the solar panels will do the job.

So don't under-rate solar which is now very competitive, and benefits from being near the consumer (very near with domestic installations).

silverwhistle

cepheus wrote: »

This seems to be based on company figures, and the capacity factor will depend on location. Perhaps it's a best case scenario in locations where the wind is more reliable?

It's a comparison with current turbines, wherever they are installed. The improvement is because of the extra height, not the location.

Anyone who has seen land based turbines will notice how location is important: ridge lines, passes, escarpments and the like. At sea the same considerations are not as important.

GreatApe

silverwhistle wrote: »

Solar has been pretty pants this last, windy week, but during the cold snap the previous week I was getting near 16kWh from my system and all the hot water from a diverter. I even had an electric heater on for a period using the spare power. I had the gas boiler on for a very short time twice this week for hot water, but basically from now until the late autumn the solar panels will do the job.

So don't under-rate solar which is now very competitive, and benefits from being near the consumer (very near with domestic installations).

Your electricity system works because you have a grid connection not because you have solar panels.

The problem with solar is you can't really get past 15% of the nations needs using solar power without adding mass storage which is very costly and also needless waste (building batteries that have finite lives that need to be reprocessed or sent to landfill)

With offshore wind you can get closer to 75% of the nations needs and no need for mass battery storage.

What's more offshore wind correlates reasonable well to seasonal demand.
If at some point in the future we want to electrify seasonal heating that is 200TWh of seasonal heating over roughly 4 months of winter. Solar can't do anything there nuclear is too expensive and would be even more expensive if run for 4 months of the year which basically only leave offshore wind power as the only non fossil way to do seasonal heating.

michaels

GreatApe wrote: »

That's not really true. Its like saying a coal plant needs a backup because coal plants can go down for a period. Its true but because coal or gas or nuclear plants don't typically go down at the same time they don't need much of a backup. If one of those plants have a 10% chance of being offline for a month the chance that two will be offline at the same time is about 1% and the chance that three will be offline in the same month is about 0.1% etc

This is obvious by the fact that France doesn't have many CCGTs or Coal plants backing up its nuclear fleet.

Solar PV is a waste of resources and time compared to future offshore wind which can achieve so much more. The very High CF if 63% and potentially improving further means you wouldn't need the mass batteries or mass curtailment that would be needed with solar and low CF onshore wind.
Also obviously a tech working at 63% CF has much better use of inverters and converters and grid connections and lines than a tech working at 11%

Solar can't power whole nations. Onshore wind can't but it appears offshore wind turbine technology really can.

What's more offshore wind is really right at the beginning to the learning curve.
Only about a thousand turbines have been made and installed in the EU and of many different designs and sizes and companies. So its still very close to small scale bispoke manufacturing.
At some point in the late 2020s the companies will converge onto a handful of great designs and then from there they can stop concentrating on the wind turbines and concentrate of the facotires and processes to make them on a mass scale quickly and cheaply

Would only take ~10,000 such turbines over 30 years to power all UK needs electricity heating and EVs. That works out to just 1 turbine manufactured and installed per day which seems very plausible. Also hopefully most the work can be done in the UK unlike solar where about half flows out to China.

Both France and Japan have seen major issues when a large proportion of their nuke fleet has been offline at once. The only way to build nukes at anything approaching competitive prices is to build loads of the same design - so discover a crack in one and the odds are they will all have it or be at risk of having it. Plus hpc is 7% of uk demand in one station so it alone going off line would be a problem without backup if it happened at a high demand low surplus capacity moment.

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

Both France and Japan have seen major issues when a large proportion of their nuke fleet has been offline at once. The only way to build nukes at anything approaching competitive prices is to build loads of the same design - so discover a crack in one and the odds are they will all have it or be at risk of having it. Plus hpc is 7% of uk demand in one station so it alone going off line would be a problem without backup if it happened at a high demand low surplus capacity moment.

I'm not pro nuclear it is obvious small scale anything ends up costly and expensive and due to the power of reactors it means even a large nation like the UK only needs 20 so most of that 20 will be expensive inexperienced costly mistakes.

I would be pro nuclear for China/India and maybe Nigeria in the future as those places with 1+ billion people could do 500+ reactors and get the experience so after the 50th or so it's mostly clear sailing and after the 100th it would probably be cheaper than anything else imaginable. But even then its probably going to be unnecessary with high CF wind more socially acceptable

The only thing positive remaining about nuclear is its non environmental impacts. What I mean is we are not yet sure if trying to pull 50,000 TWh from the wind could change wind patterns or trying to pull 50,000 TWh from solar might create local or global problems (covering huge areas in black absorbing more heat)

Plus we may need the nukes materials for interstellar travel/living.
At some stage ageing will be cured and if humans still want babies it could mean exponential human population growth so we will spread to the cosmos and we won't be powering the spaceships with wind mills so leave the uranium for the great grand kids