 | What A Difference Two Years Makes | The Oil Drum: Europe | The limit of the statistic R/P in models of oil discovery and production |  |
130 comments on 2007: record year for US wind industry
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
130 comments on 2007: record year for US wind industry
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Jerome,
A portion of the cost for onshore wind is the rent paid for land where the turbine is located. Offshore should avoid this cost. Can you see a time when the rent catches up with the extra expense of working offshore? Would the reuse of portions of the equipment over a century or so bring the long term costs in line or does in just not converge?
Thanks,
Chris
Rent costs are minuscule, all considered.
What makes offshore more expensive is the following:
- foundations: the deeper you are, the bigger they need to be, which costs more to manufacture, and then to transport;
- grid connection: the further away, the more expensive (this is a really big issue)
- installation requires special vessels and cranes, and is dependent on weather, so takes more time
- operations and maintenance similarly requires specific transportation (vessels and cranes), which tales more time and is a lot more expensive, and a lot harder to make on time when the weather is bad (for health and safety reasons); as turbines are under bigger strains than onshore (stronger winds, salt corrosion), the needs are actually greater.
Against that, you get the ability to put bigger turbines, and much better and stronger wind, so higher capacity numbers on bigger turbines. As I said, for the time being, the overall cost per kWh is still higher, by about 50%. It might go down faster than onshore costs will (both are currently increasing right now, due to supply chain tightness and higher commodity prices, althoguh probably slower than for other sectors of the energy generation world)
an insanely out-of-box idea: a flotilla of floating VATs with minimal height positioned around and with electrical connection to a carrier with an on-board ammonia plant and storage.
all eliminated.
and you can move these carrier groups to wherever the wind is most favorable.
want strong winds? in Arctic ocean right now - 60+ kn. place them close to the ice cap, the excess capacity can be used to pump water through the thin ice to make the thicker ones. now the return on the investment is not only the clean fuel produced but also the side-effect-free ice cap fixing. what price-tag should one put on a vanishing ice cap and the risk of THC shutdown?
Unconventional offshore wind has a lot of promise, but it's still not even at prototype-level.
Most of the issues with offshore wind could be mitigated using a combination of any of the floating oil-rig type technologies, featherweight carbon fiber towers and blades, and some type of energy storage taking place in a fleet of ships.
The shipboard energy storage could be any number of things.
Lithium borohydride
Flow batteries
Compressed air (the Coselle CNG concept is nice here)
Liquid nitrogen from air (LNG containers, likewise, are already well-proven)
Ammoniasynthesis
Ethanol distillation
Hydrogen electrolysis
Any of a dozen reversible fuel cell technologies
None of these would work. A simple calculation:
- let's have a 3MW wind turbine installed on a floating barge, operating at 40% capacity factor
- let it need to go and "offload" its energy once a week (I don't think less than that would be practical).
During that time the wind turbine will produce:
3MW * 0.4 * 7 * 24 = 201.6 MWh
Using batteries with a typical power to weight ratio of 200Wth/kg will require:
201.6 10^6 / 200 = 1 mln.kg = 1000 tonnes of batteries only... forgetting about cost for a moment this will be some 10 times the weight of the turbine!
Compressed air stores typically 75 to 300kJ/kg, which translates to 20 to 83Wh/kg, so you will need around 3 times more air as weight than batteries - imagine a 3000 tonne compressed air bottle, waiting to blow up!
IMO the only close to feasible energy storage from those would be hydrogen, as it stores around 40kwH/kg, so it will require "only" 5,000 kgs of hydrogen. With roundtrip efficiency of 50% though (electrolysis + fuel cells) or 40% (electrolysis + NG powered plant) we would end up as though we have only 1.5 or 1.2MW wind turbine for all those investments... it will be hugely inefficient and expensive enterprise.
Jerome,
Thanks. Sounds like there is always something to rent. If not the land then the boat. I hope it pulls together well.
Chris
Methanol synthesis is not particularly difficult. Since you take the CO2 out of the air or water it's carbon neutral.
take the CO2 out of the air or water
any idea how much would that cost?
I made an estimate of the power required using zeolite as an absorber and it is not a lot. Others are working on this pretty hard. You can read my estimate here. I think the Navy considers dissolved carbon dioxide easier to work with.
Chris
i know nothing about zeolite. for the type that can trap CO2, what would be the cost, size and weight that can produce a tonne of CO2/day?