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130 comments on 2007: record year for US wind industry
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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.