113 comments on Fierce pride - yes it works! (or, first ever bank-financed offshore wind farm inaugurated!)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
113 comments on Fierce pride - yes it works! (or, first ever bank-financed offshore wind farm inaugurated!)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Blogroll
- ASPO The official site of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas.
- Energy Bulletin Clearing house for news regarding the peak in global energy supply.
- PowerSwitch Dedicated to raising awareness & discussion of the impending & permanent decline of cheap oil & gas supply.
- ODAC Oil Depletion Analysis Centre working to raise awareness and promote better understanding of the world's oil-depletion problem.
- Global Public Media Public service broadcasting for a post carbon world.
- Post Carbon Institute Learning to live in a low energy world.
- PeakOil.com US site and forum to educate and promote awareness of global hydrocarbon depletion.
- FEASTA The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
- Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) This website describes an effective and fair response both to climate change and oil/gas depletion
- Aleklett's Energy Mix Global Energy Systems, Peak Oil, etc
- www.SamassaVeneessä.info Finnish peak oil site
Other Blogs
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
Yes, and I'd actually forgotten about that in my back-of-the-envelope calculation, so thanks for pointing that out.
A 25-year lifespan means 4% yearly replacement; on 1.5M units, that's 60,000 units/yr in the final year, meaning it would dominate the installation of new units. Production would have to increase from 20,000/yr in 2030 to 80,000/yr in 2100, or an average rate of 2%/yr, which seems pretty modest.
That assumes building all-new units, though, which I suspect would be unlikely. I would imagine - and please correct me if I'm wrong - that some parts of wind turbines would wear out much faster than others; the gearing might need to be redone from scratch, for example, whereas the support tower might not have suffered much wear at all, especially for onshore installations. So I would imagine that replacing a wind turbine with an identical unit would be substantially cheaper than building the original, due to re-using and/or recycling parts, and that a wind turbine built in 2070 is likely to last longer than one built in 2007. I'd guess - guess - that the replacement costs in this scenario in 2100 would be no more than the new-unit costs.
For reference, at $2M/MW onshore, a "unit" would be $6M to build today, and 80,000 new units/yr - the maximum possible requirement - would cost $480B, or less than 1% of current world GDP, and around 5% of current world manufacturing capacity. In 2100, servicing such a large installed base of wind turbines won't be a problem; either it won't exist, or its existence will provide enough energy to keep growing the industrial base and make $480B in 2008$ an even more minor part of the world economy than it already is.
Also for reference and roughly speaking, 1.5M units @ 3MW @ 30% CF = 12,000TWh/yr = 6BT of coal @ 33% efficiency = $600B @ $100/ton, meaning that the amount of societal capacity necessary for building and maintaining the wind turbines should be roughly similar to the amount necessary for mining and providing an equivalent amount of coal at today's prices.
Towers and related electrical infrastructure (transmission lines, transformers) for on-shore projects are expected to last at least two generations for on-shore projects.
The best sites are being built out first. This will raise an interesting question, is it better to replace 2008 1 MW turbines with 2033 16 MW turbines or 1 MW turbines.
One thought is to space the new larger turbines up high (more thinly spaced) and replace 15/16s of the old 1 MW WTs with new 1 MW WTs. (Larger turbines are more thinly spaced, their wind shadow is greater).
Best Hopes for more WTs,
Alan