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Offshore Wind
Posted by Jerome a Paris on December 10, 2007 - 10:55am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: electricity, offshore wind, renewable energy, wind [list all tags]
all photos by author
(And yes, in case there is any doubt, I work in the industry, finance it and spoke at the conference)
in black: existing wind farms; in blue: those scheduled for construction by 2009. Click to enlarge.
Just over 900MW of offshore wind had been built by end 2006 (compared to 74,000 MW onshore), as shown below, but the plan is to get to 40,000 MW of offshore wind in Europe by 2020, with approximately half in the UK, a quarter in Germany and the rest spread across Europe, mostly in the North Sea (which has good winds and shallow waters).
Click to enlarge
The industry, like others, has suffered from rapidly increasing costs in recent times, from increased commodity prices, overstretched suppliers and, it must be said, still unresolved technical difficulties with some turbine models that have been withdrawn from the market after encountering technical difficulties. There is a lot of focus on reaching a scale sufficient to rationalise and standardise both manufacturing and offshore installation, after the early years of projects designed on a case-by-case basis.
The graph below reflects costs prior to commodity increases - but these apply equally to other sectors, so all technologies are more expensive today. The great advantage of wind in that respect, of course, is that once it is built, the cost is fixed: you only have to repay the initial investment, a fixed amount, and not to buy fuel, whether coal, natural gas or oil, whose prices can also increase - and indeed have. And an other overlooked advantage is that wind's marginal cost (the cost of production of an additional kWh) is close to zero, so whenever wind blows, this takes out more expensive producers and reduces prices for everybody. In fact, a Danish study has demonstrated that the resulting savings for that country are now larger than the subsidies provided to wind...
Even if it is unreliable due to its intermittency, wind still has a real effect on both electricity prices as well as on carbon emissions, as each kWh of wind will usually displace a marginal kWh generated by a gas or oil-fired plant.
Click to enlarge.
Offshore wind is still more expensive than onshore (thus the need for additional support in the early years of this new industry), but it responds to the fact that Europe is quite small and densely packed, and some areas will not be able to take more wind turbines, especially the huge models now available, which tower more than a hundred meters above ground. With winds at sea being stronger and more regular, it is the obvious place to put industrial size wind farms, and the hope is that economies of scale will eventually make it cost effective (it is already competitive compared to gas-fired power, given natural gas prices) - and of course, that production that can be scaled to levels that allow the sector to represent a significant fraction of total energy production. The European goal for 2020, 20% of all energy from renewable sources is quite ambitious, as it means that more than 20% of all electricity should come from wind by then.
Click to enlarge
Another obvious trend was how the industry is now dominated by the large players, in particular on the investor side - the business is essentially run by the big utilities, with a few independent developers remaining (and those that have good prospects are usually take-over targets for the bigger players right now). On the manufacturing side, the presence in the business of GE (currently absent from offshore as they have no appropriate turbine, their 3.6MW model having shown unsufficiently reliable performance), French nuclear energy giant Areva (via Multibrid, still in the early stages of integration), German engineering group Siemens (the dominant player offshore) shows that concentration is well under way, and the fate of Vestas (still the largest wind turbine manufacturer overall, but a small company compared to the big indistrial groups) and Repower (focused on offshore, but whose main shareholder, Indian-based Suzlon, is itself a pure wind player and thus quite small as well) will certainly become a hot issue in the future.
Offshore wind is heavy industry: a nacelle weights 100-300 tons, a blade is 50 meters long, a tower is 80 meter high, etc... Managing 20-30% p.a. growth rates in heavy industry is extremely hard to do - logistics, supply chains and financial commitments are complex, and a wrong bet on where demand will be (on the high or on the low side) can have devastating consequences.
Thus we need to ensure at least a level-playing field, with stable regulation over many years (the opposite of what has happened in the US over the past ten years, with the PTC, the main support mechanism for the industry being renewed haphazardly and for short periods only, leading to collapsing production in some years. The current version of the Energy Bill, as approved by the House, extends the PTC for 4 years, which is the best that has been done this decade, so it's progress.
Click to enlarge
Offshore wind is less urgent in the US than it is in Europe, as there is still plenty of room onshore to grow (and with a much better wind resource than in Europe) and thus less need to pay the higher cost of offshore, but there could be some projects in areas like the Great Lakes or in the densely populated North-East.
In any case, there is no silver bullet, and wind (and a fortiori offshore wind) is not by any means the only solution. But today, it is the technology with the best prospects to have a real impact on our carbon emissions, at a low economic cost, and with very real positive effects on overall employment, redevelopment of isolated areas, and security of supply.
Wind is free, clean, indigenous, and available today.
:: ::
Earlier wind power diaries:
Don Quixote meets Wall Street - financing wind farms
Energy - some good news (for once) (Wind)
The future of power generation
Wind power: birds, landscapes and availability (I)
My detailed dissection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr 's misguided Op-Ed on Nantucket Wind in the NYT
(original title: Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a lying, deceitful, pathetic NIMBY SELL OUT)
Something to take your mind off indictments: Windfarm blogging
Wind power now CHEAPER for US retail consumers
USA to become world leader in wind power in 2005
2005 was a great year for wind power worldwide
Alternative energies: wind power
wind power: debunking the critics
Wind farm kills eagles in 'large numbers'
My job
No technical limitation to wind power penetration
Wind power: some lessons from 2006
5MW with location picture (by PeWi)
Solar Photovoltaic vs Wind (by Laurent Guerby)
Thanks for this Jerome! Very timely given the recent announcement from John Hutton, the UK Energy Secretary.
A few media clippings highlighted on PowerSwitch:
This sounds like fantastic news. 33GW though, that’s a big number. Can the industry deliver? What needs to be in place to enable the industry to deliver? There are some 4400 days until 2020. 33GW from 5MW turbines means 6600 or well over one a day.
It certainly seems possible in the same vein as the US mobilisation after Pearl Harbour.
The automobile industry went from producing nearly 4 million cars in 1941 to producing 24,000 tanks and 17,000 armored cars in 1942 — but only 223,000 cars, most of which were produced early in the year, before the conversion began. Essentially, the auto industry was closed down from early 1942 through the end of 1944. In 1940, the United States produced some 4,000 aircraft. In 1942, it produced 48,000. Source: Lester Brown
Compared to those numbers, ~7000 off shore turbines in 13 years, seems eminently achievable. What do you think Jerome?
WWII showed what we can do, but we won't do it because we would probably actually have to make trade offs
. But yes, let us shutdown most of the automobile industry and use that capital to produce things like wind turbines. Restrict auto output to those autos getting at least 45 mpg.
WWII was an obvious crisis that required extraordinary efforts and, in essence, a dictatorial approach to industry that forced them to produce weapons for the war effort. In my view , peak oil and global warming are problems that will dwarf the threats encountered in WWII.
But we will blunder, unprepared, into the coming decades.
Chris / Jerome - do you think this U Turn by Hutton is driven by climate concern or a more acute concern that the UK is fast running out of indigenous energy?
I’d like to think both arguments are worthy. Why the u-turn? I guess someone has convinced Hutton that offshore wind is technically feasible, economically viable and politically acceptable within the 2020 timescale. Well done whoever that was.
I'm not sure I understand the numbers
When calculating the number of 5MW turbines is it really 6600 i.e. 33000/5.
Why is it you do not have to include the capacity factor and technical availability i.e. 33000/(5*.4*.95). That would mean over 17000 turbines ?
Also is it realistic to assume these are all 5MW turbines - are 5MW off-shore turbines proven yet and would all off-shore sites be suitable for these big turbines ?
The 33GW Hutton is talking about refers to name plate capacity. Sure - that needs to be multiplied by the load factor (27% for UK offshore wind in 2006) to get the actual amount of energy generated. This is no different to other ways of generating electricity. The UK nuclear fleet had an load factor of 69% in 2006, coal 66%, gas 54%... it should be noted that gas at least wasn't trying to maintain 100%, whereas the wind and nuclear would have been targeting maximum production.
But the headlines talk about wind providing "half Britain’s current electricity consumption" or 100% of household consumption.
Is this reasonable ?
Indeed not.
The confusion between name plate capacity and actual output is an issue that dogs the wind industry, becuase such inaccurate claims are made, and then used to point out that wind is not as good as it looks.
What matters is the MWh rather than the MW. On that basis, wind is expected to provide 30% or so of total electricity generation in 2020.
Is it fair to say that 50% (or more) of wind's MWh are produced at night when demand is lowest ?
I can see that some of this night-time wind power can replace gas/coal baseload generation but surely not all of it due to the technical demands on maintaining a stable 50Hz grid.
Without the pump storage capacity available in Scandanavia won't much of the night-time wind MWh simply be thrown away ?
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
In your story entitled: No Technical Limitation to Wind Power Penetration published on line in the European Tribune,
http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/1/28/183633/609
I found a link which led me to a report by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change entitled: Security assessment of future UK electricity scenarios.
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/theme2/project_overviews/t2_24.shtml
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies. At this level of penetration they claim that only 9.4% of conventional capacity can be retired. This claim alone would appear to imply that this model is in strong disagreement with your claim that “wind turbines are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability”. However, here is specific verbiage from the report about the need to compensate for wind variability with conventional generation:
Due to this disproportion between conventional capacity and energy substitution by the wind source, a considerable number of thermal plants will be running at low output levels over a significant proportion of their operational time in order to accommodate wind energy. Consequently these plants will have to compromise on their efficiency, resulting in increased levels of fuel consumption as well as emissions per unit of electricity produced. This will cause higher electricity production costs.
The average load factors for conventional plants, with 25GW installed wind capacity at 35% average output, will reduce to about 40% (utilization factor for UK plants in the year 2002 was 54%)[DTI04]. Nevertheless the cost recovery of those plants that might be forced to run at lower load factors will be a major challenge for future electricity systems.
Would you care to comment on the contradiction between the conclusions of this paper and your statement above?
See my comments that the UK needs a half dozen pumped storage schemes in Wales & Scotland. These could absorb the fluctuations nicely. Interconnections to hydroproducers Iceland & Norway would also be useful.
Alan
I agree that storage is needed for effective integration of wind energy into the grid. Including it will naturally increase the costs. Also if they end up pumping fresh water rather than sea water then seasonality issues and long term fluctuations in rainfall may also affect the economics. Iceland seems like it's a long way away from the U.K. Norway is already providing effective storage for Danish wind power producers. They may have excess capacity, but I doubt that they can provide storage services to all of Europe.
Roger
Pumped storage water (other than - evaporation & + rainfall) is recycled. One time allotment basically.
Pumped Storage is also requied with a high % nuke grid (France uses Swiss Hydro + German coal, Italian, Spanish, Belgium FF + Luxembourg pumped storage to balance their nukes at night). Uk does not have the interconnections to do that. A high % nuke UK would also require pumped storage. As would massive tidal powerplants.
Landsvirkjun made a study on supplying 2 GW of peak hydropower to UK a dozen + years ago. UK uninterested, plant was built instead for steady 540 MW for aluminum smelter.
UK has best wind resources in EU, so "getting your share" should mean a fair % of Norwegian (and even Swedish) hydro. Biggest threat is large Norse wind development IMO.
Best Hopes,
Alan
There is no contradiction whatsoever. You need a lot of wind MW to replace a conventional MW (roughly 4 for 1). But each MWh of wind replaces a MWh of conventional electricity.
All we care about are MWh, not MW.
I wrote:
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies.
I said 'energy' and I meant 'energy'. I know the difference between MW and MWh. In this report 37% displacement of energy (MWh) supply resulted in 9.4% displacement capacity (MW). Have you actually read the report? I got the link to it from your article. You have not answered my question. You also conveniently ignored the statement by the report authors talking about the need to turn conventional generation plants up and down to compensate for wind variability which is in clear contradiction to your statement that wind capacity adds to the voltage stability of the grid.
I have written it three times: wind power replaces few conventional MWs. Yes, that's true. It does not matter. What causes global warming is conventional MWh, not conventional MW. So yes, wind power development requires that conventional capacity be kept in place - but used much less than now. I fail to see how this is a problem. It's not like you need to build new gas-fired plants, they are already there.
As to stability, I'm not sure what you mean. How are starts and stops of gas-fired plants detrimental to voltage stability?
I do not dispute that wind generation displaces some amount of CO2 emissions. I am not arguing that wind power is a useless technology, but we need to be realistic about its economic potential. The fact that with 37% energy displacement over 90% of conventional generation remains in place means that the capital cost of a wind/conventional generation system is much higher than conventional generation alone. And as the authors of the study quoted above point out the displacement of emissions is far less than 37% since spinning reserve and peaking reserve emit much more CO2 per kHw produced, and in addition this excess fuel use means excess costs.
Also natural gas, and after it coal, are going to decline in supply. If we have only displaced 9.4% of conventional capacity at 37% energy penetration then how are we going to produce a stable grid voltage in a post-fossil fuel world? My feeling is that in the long term effective integration of wind capacity will require energy storage which will add substantially to the costs.
I am convinced that wind energy will play an important role in humanity's future, but the claim that wind is already cheaper than natural gas and that there are no economic limits to obtaining arbitrarily large amounts of grid electricity from this source is incorrect.
The fundamental realization that the developed world needs to come to is that our levels of economic production are already too high and that reduction of consumption should be a primary goal. Encouraging people to believe that wind can easily substitute for fossil fuel and thus maintain our high consumption lifestyles without guilt about CO2 emission is dangerous.
Not if there are enough PHEV's and EV's. And with the V2G discussion, it's frequently mentioned that people don't want to see the Grid's unimaginable Demands leaning on their expensive batteries and their morning available-commute-miles, but this is a good reminder that if there are intermittent sources more heavily in the mix, that there will be times that there is 'Surplus to sell' too, and if V2G happens, isn't it reasonable to expect that people with such a 'Portable Smart-Grid Intertie' will pretty much set up their buy pricing scheme, their SELL price-scheme, and their 'Lowest Discharge Before Cutoff' or some such thing, so that on a Dark and Stormy Night when it's howling out there, you might get yourself a fine deal purchasing, and if the next calm morning, demand is high and your car is selling at a profit, you opt to jump on the bus or the bike. (I think it would actually be your car AND house that would be in automated Buy/Sell negotiations with the grid, not just the car.. ?)
By the way, who knows whether there is a functioning Flywheel System in standard use out there? I never hear any updates at TOD for the current state of that storage medium.
Bob
"I'm going off the rails on a crazy train!.."
- Ozzy
V2G is surely the way to go.
Or any other storage in that sense.
The danish wind industry has made an ambitious plan named "windforce 50" that outlines a plan to make wind contribute to 50% of our electricity use.
This envisions a major change in how we use electricity and which windturbines to build. Today we (danes) get 20% from 5.200 WT but with modern larger WT we could get 50% from 1.700 WT
The biggest issues are to get people to change when they use electricity and to what.
We need to get EV's or PHEV and use electricity to heating as well as transport.
The industry is already cooling freezers below -18 at times of cheap electricity to enable idling of cooling when electricity is expensive. The same idea applies to heating where the use of district heating is widespread and using electricity to heat water is a great way to store energy.
Cooling ice or heating water is just one way to even out consumption. In some areas they have installed meters that charge users by the hour on spotprice to encourage people to start there driers at night etc. We have 2 hours with very high electricity use, and it is easy to imagine that these hours could be covered by reduced use or V2G.
Soon the EV's will have >200 miles capacity and with most people traveling less than 30 miles a day, there is good storagecapacity available here.
Being close to Norway makes it a lot easier as their hydroplants give us the flexibility needed, but as soon as V2G is widespread the need for external storage is reduced.
Rune
Confident that most of our energy use can be replaced by efficiency and alternate generation.
use the electricity to make NH3, you can sell it at $500/t if you don't need it.
Here's the breakdown from 2004 (sorry no time to draw a new a new chart):
Click to enlarge
According to George Monbiot in his book Heat on p. 101, the UK uses about 400 TWh/year, an average power supply then of about 46 GW. Half of that is 23 GW so the required capacity factor on 33 GW nameplate is 70%. It is quite windy off shore of the UK, but I kind of think that there must be some anticipation of reduced consumption. California has shown that a 20% per capita reduction in consumption is good for the economy. Doing that gives a 55% capacity factor which sounds about right for offshore wind. Interestingly, Monbiot points out that the material requirements for offshore wind are lower than for onshore wind because the wind blows harder offshore. He cites the Performance and Innovation Unit, 10 Downing Street, as finding on shore wind reducing in price by factor of 1.4 between now and 2020 and offshore wind reducing in price by a factor of 2.75 by 2020 to the current onshore price. Both are expected to be less expensive than nuclear power in 2020 by factors of 2.5 and 1.75 respectively. See tables on pp. 111 and 95.
Chris
27% load factr sounds strangely low. The projects I have financed are close to 40% (and that's with pretty conservative estimates for the banking case).
Maybe this is the overall rate for all of wind in the UK?
The load factors for UK wind (offshore and onshore) as published by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (stupid, stupid name) are here (Excel):
http://stats.berr.gov.uk/energystats/dukes7_4.xls
To get anywhere close to the 80% reduction in C02 compared to 1990 levels by 2050 (required to avoid a 2 degree C temperature rise say the IPCC) the world will have to do much more than 20% reduction in primary energy by 2020.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but only for the UK - the whole world needs to do the same or we fail in the task.
by 2020 ? We are just three weeks from 2008 so BY 2020 means 12 years not 13!
4400 days is correct though. :-) But in reality they won't start installing them for a couple of years or so - so 10 years or 3650 days.
Eminently achievable? The numbers proposed could be a serious uphill task.
Britain’s current range of coal, gas, nuclear and other power stations are capable of generating 75 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. By 2020 most of the nuclear will be gone -close to half the windmills will be replacing that, so no C02savings there.
The 33 GW needs to be actual - if it isn't we don't get the 20% to 40% reduction in C02 required - the 5 MW windmills only produce full power 38% of the time (3300 hours per year).
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Worlds-Largest-Wind-Turbine-Generator.htm
So, that means we actually need ~90 GW of windmills
that's 18,000 5GW windmills - around 5 of these monsters every day.
That is certainly a 'war footing' porduction rate.
In WW2 all effort was directed to making tanks and aeroplanes etc.
Which parts of what remains of UK manufacturing will be shut down by the government do you suppose?
Or we could build Nukes in the same time frame if we had a government with the bottle for it. And the Nukes and Coalfired units that are slated for switch off produce base load will have to be compensated for.
The 7000 turbines will have to be covered by something like nukes, coal or gas, so we will have to spend money on back up systems as well.
So, thats 7000 turbines + back up generation capacity + additional new builds to take over from the Nukes and Coal fired stations coming offline.
In other words, we will be running to stand still.
As for 'reducing Carbon'...
We are about to give the go ahead for a 3rd , full sized runway at Heathrow, even though most of Heathrow traffic is for holiday flights and not 'essential to business and commerce' as spuriously described by this government.
Also, I dont know how much concrete will be used in the base pedastals for these 7000 wind turbines, but I should imagine quite a lot... Possibly more than you would need for 10 Nukes.
Wind no doubt will have its place as will tidal, PV etc.
But we will still need a lot more Nukes in my opinion.
IMO it is immoral to build any more nuclear until we can adequately deal with the waste. If we can deal with it safely then fine, otherwise use something else or plan to use less electricity.
Despite our best efforts we appear unable to engineer anything that will stay functional without maintenance for more than 100 years - a 100,000 year engineering job is required, this is a serious engineering problem.
Give me one good reason why it is ok to leave it for future generations to clear up our mess.
Dont need to give you one good reason:
We can bury it quite safely in hard rock and deep enough to survive the next couple of ice ages.
It is just a matter of political courage.
Sounds good - except that nobody anywhere in the world has done it, there is still waste and associated bombs around from my grandparents generation not dealt with! - and how do you know any of it is safe? - so, unless you can prove the engineering is safe(which it seems nobody can at present, even after sixty years of thinking about it), it isn't a good reason after all - so, no wonder the politicians don't have the courage - not all of them are immoral.
Detailed technical plans for burial have been in place for 30 years. Test Drilling has supported this at Windscale.
If they told me they were going to test drill for burial on the Buchan Shield, I would not be worried at all: We live with high levels of natural background radiation from the granite in the buildings and the land :-(
BTW
Jerome proveded two photos at the start of this essay.
They are very telling:
The sea is flat calm.
The turbines point in different directions.
What is wrong with these pictures?
Maybe bankers only go to sea on calm days? ;)
It occurs to me that the windmills can only be installed on calm days ... as the towers, blades and installation cranes etc are so tall. My experience is that the North Sea isn't a very calm place for much of the time - how long does it take to install one of these things?
I guess what I am asking is how many windmills can an individual barge install in a year? ... just so I know how many barges, cranes, crew, immigrants etc are going to be required.
Chris,
you say that the 33 GW is nameplate - are you sure? where did you get that from?
Ok, I saw that, you think that implies nameplate and not actual - even though windmills never produce anywhere near full nameplate? Maybe 33GW 'peak' would be more accurate?
If so, 39% (maximum, in a very windy spot?) of 33GW is 12GW, barely any more than the nuclear that will be gone by 2020.
Oh yeah - all these numbers are nameplate.
See this comment:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3342#comment-275378