Eric Worrall writes:
According to Breitbart, Germany’s flagship Bard 1 offshore wind farm has turned into a bottomless money pit, with stakeholders frantically lawyering up, scrambling to pin the blame and ongoing money hemorrhage onto other parties. BARD Offshore 1 is a 400 megawatt (MW) North Sea offshore wind farm encompassing 80 5-megawatt turbines. Construction was finished in July 2013 and the wind farm was officially inaugurated in August 2013. The wind farm is located 100 kilometres (62 mi) northwest of the isle Borkum in 40 metres (130 ft) deep water.
The magazine Windpower monthly reports that Bard Offshore 1, developed and built by Bard, is owned by project company Ocean Breeze, which in turn is owned by HypoVereinsbank. Getting it fully commissioned in August 2013 had taken more than three years, with many setbacks and cost overruns.
Breitbart reports that according to the German magazine Speigel “everything has turned to the question of who is responsible for the fiasco – and the costs.”
The project is estimated to have cost €340 million in the last year alone, as investors struggle to salvage something of value, from a deeply flawed system which has never functioned as the designers intended. Full details at Breitbart.
My thought – if even the Germans, with their legendary high precision engineering skills, can’t make offshore wind work, surely it is time to pull the plug on this technically infeasible dead end?
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Assuming that wind and/or solar can overcome inherent disadvantages with techonolgy some day in the future, relying on wind significantly now is much like making people rely on air travel from the time that Da Vinci first mused about air travel.
Here is some information on the converter stations: http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/energy-topics/energy-stories/offshore-converter-platform.htm
No wonder Siemens is showing a loss for this quarter.
BARD 1 does not use Siemens converters to my knowledge.
What may be easy and straight forward maintenance on land, becomes very difficult at sea as supply ships/ships with cranes heave up and down and roll from side to side in the swell and waves/wind conditions.
The problem is that maintenance at sea is very expensive. You cannot easily pre-plan maintenance since you do not know when there will be good weather windows that will permit maintenance work to be carried out, and in adverse weather conditions maintenance cannot be safely conducted.
Accordingly, there are huge standby costs, commissioning and decommisioning of supply vessels etc. anyone involved in the off-shore industry will be familiar with this.
The planners have grossly underestimated the harsh environment that these wind turbines are operating in and the toll that this takes on machinery (even the blades will be rough profiled within a short period as they get abrassed by salt air), and the diffiuclties of performing maintenance and hence they have grossly under-estimated the running costs and downtime.
Off shore wind was always mad. It was only proposed because of the eyesore that windfarms have on areas of natural beauty, the politicians though out of sight out of mind. But engineering wise, the decision is a disaster.
The better the location for wind “farms” , meaning a windy location, the more difficult the access for repairs, inspection etc. now if they built them in areas where there is not much wind repairs would be easier.
Thanks, Eric. I think it is not actually a “bottomless money pit”, it is only 40 meters deep.
But that’s enough. That money is lost, it will be turned into petroleum, together with birds killed, in a few millions years.
Contrast this “project” with the Three Gorges Dam. The outcome could not be more opposite.
The problem is electrical/electronical, and it is said that it is due to the unexperience of Bard on these issues. But it could be more fundamental; it seems that they have unexpected harmonics which trouble the AC/DC and DC/AC converters; perhaps a problem on the “mini grid” of the wind mills before the AC/DC converter which is not a problem when all the wind mills are connected directly on a huge normal grid.
Voluavent. The problem isn’t harmonics. It is something called ramp rates. The turbine blades are constantly adjusting to variation in wind speed, Ramping up and down to try to keep the generator at a constant loading. This is obviously not instantaneous, and introduces ramp rate fluctuations in the electricity. Think mini fast brownouts. With land based systems, these are compensated at the grid connection by statcomms or synchronous condensers that are necessary to stabilize the grid anyway. Cannot be done?/was not done$ out at sea with Bard 1.
Dear Rud
ramp rates are fluctuations of power; it creates effectively some problems on the grid, but I do not think that is the actual issue on Bard1; I suppose it is either a problem of the management of the reactiv component of the current or a problem of harmonics produced by the assembly of all the equipments (transformers, converters, filters, cables) coming from different suppliers which seem to be one of the well identified difficulties of such a system .(they speak of “wild currents”)
It is crucial for them to solve this, as the DC transmission is the key issue for the whole huge planned project for the future
For all the talk of losses, someone did make and someone still is making piles of money from this fiasco.
I get frustrated at the people who are blindly anti-fossil fuel as much as I get angry at people who are blindly anti-wind. Every technology in human history goes brought fits and starts until people learn from past mistakes and makes it better. More efficient, So, we shouldn’t be blindly crowing everytime a mishap or setback happens somewhere in this world.
All of this technology is ultimately going to lead to a better world to live in. We should all be enthusiastic for it and hopeful for its success.
That being said,it should be funded by (mostly) private interests and not propped up by illegitimate carbon taxing schemes. Then we have the duty to be openly critical.
I am all for new technologies, but wind is not new technology and will never build a better world.
It was superseded and made redundant centuries ago.
It is extremely rarely the case that the way to the future, is back to the past, and if there were no subsidies, it would never have been given a second look in.
“All of this technology is ultimately going to lead to a better world to live in.”
That’s pretty naive.
Lots of technologies fail simply because they’re inefficient.
Adam
You say
A “better world to live in” was built by abandoning wind power in favour of fossil fuels when the steam engine enabled the great energy intensity in fossil fuels to do work.
A return to using the low energy intensity in normal winds can only remove the benefits gained from replacing wind power with fossil fuels. We should all be enthusiastic for opposition to the con-artists promoting a return to windpower and hopeful for their failure.
Richard
There is no blind anti-wind. Wind turbines are a bad idea on land, and a much worse idea out to sea. Wind turbines cost more than they are worth.
The safest, most economical, some would say most abundant energy source is coal.
There is no reason to limit CO₂. Therefore, there is no valid reason not to burn all the coal we need to run our civilization, and carry on with the business of improving life for our species on this planet.
~
I suggest everyone abandon the incorrect terminology windmill, and use the more precise term wind turbine. I don’t care what Wikipedia says. I’d rather listen to this guy:
If words are not correct, then language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.
孔夫子
Kǒng fūzǐ
Confucius
>That being said,it should be funded by (mostly) private interests and not propped up by illegitimate carbon taxing schemes.
That being said, do you really think any private interest is foolish enough to fund this nonsense??? The ONLY reason these are build is because of the public gravy trains and food for the useful idiots.
“That being said,it should be funded by (mostly) private interests and not propped up by illegitimate carbon taxing schemes. Then we have the duty to be openly critical.”
Absolutely Adam! I am all for that. Tell the governments that they should not use ‘our’ money, only yours and investors like you.
““All of this technology is ultimately going to lead to a better world to live in.”
Nope. Let me correct this: “All of this technology PUT TO BENEFICIAL USE is ultimately going to lead to a better world to live in.”
Technology is good/evil neutral. It is the application that makes the difference.
The problem is that BARD 1 bought a professionally designed AC to HVDC station from ABB but feeds it with a self-designed AC to AC voltage converter; BARD 1 was too cheap to outsource that one as well. I guess it is that ad hoc designed unit that is the cause of the problems.
This will be fixed eventually, there will be lawsuits, and somebody will go bankrupt. In either case, of course an offshore wind turbine park is far more expensive than a simple gas power plant, and far less useful as long as one has a supply of NatGas – which is currently jeopardized by USA/NATO strategy.
I somehow wonder if this is the ONLY problem. I don’t know of another system this large located this far from land. Any links to details? Also, any information as to why this location was chosen so far offshore?
Pierre has a good writeup as already mentioned by others.
http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/11/spiegel-germanys-large-scale-offshore-windpark-dream-morphs-into-an-engineering-and-cost-nightmare/
Why so far offshore? Well Germany is desperate to cover every possible location with renewable energy contraptions. It’s not like we don’t already have near-shore wind parks, like Riffgat near Borkum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borkum_Riffgat
german government gives longer larger guaranteed subsidies the further from shore and the deeper they are.
So built there to take maximum subsidy farming advantage
Get wind generated electricty to an electric meter, without any other coal, nuke, water, gas powered plant on line also,,, then we can talk.
These things are 100% carried by tax money or the other power sources used in the grid.
As of now little if any wind generated electricty gets to a meter ever.
The resistance is not so much a liberal vs conservative or such.
The transmission lines, the dristribution lines and the transformers are the “resistance”.
Keep it simple.
There is a large wind farm in the Smoky Hill region of central Kansas that I have driven past on I-70 and flown over on many occasions. An enormous network of service roads snakes through the wind farm. I can usually spot trucks parked next to the turbines which seem to require constant maintenance. Do they use electric vehicles to get around on these roads, or are their vehicles fossil fuel powered? If the vehicles are powered by diesel or gas, how much fuel do they expend on a monthly basis? Is this an ecologically sound practice?
http://www.sundaypost.com/news-views/scotland/special-investigation-toxic-wind-turbines-1.282890
And to all the Breitbart haters; they did a good job reporting it. I’ve been reading about the BARD 1 fiasco for months on notrickszone , Spiegel , Witschaftswoche, FWN and many more.
Because I cherish a good tech disaster.
I suppose that I am a pedant, a semantic pedant at that.
Be that as it may, I have to say that a turbine is built with a fixed nozzle ring to its outer casing that increases the velocity of a gas (superheated steam, for example) and impacts on a series of turbine blades that are individually fixed to a rotating shaft. There can be more than one row of nozzles, and, indeed of turbine blading.
There are no nozzle rings on wind propelled generators, and they are therefore not turbines.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to call them wind impellers, but for me, ‘windmills’ does the trick, and they will die a death just the same as their forbears for grinding grain.
It seems you don’t know much about Germans – they will just keep throwing money at it until it works 🙂
Wasn’t it Churchill who said “The Americans always do the right thing – after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.”
English-American here, living in Germany. I’ve seen all three approaches. The trouble is, the Greens (aka watermelons) seem to have an inborn aversion to maths. With their pie-in-the-sky poorly-planned schemes they always end up using someone else’s money to balance their equations (apologies to Margaret Thatcher on that one…).
Interesting too is the fact that ex-chancellor Schroeder played a large part in the (soon-to-be) fiasco of Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas. With the Greens’ managing to get nuclear shut down, natural gas (along with coal, of course), becomes crucially important as an energy source, either for electricity production, or heading/fuel/etc. How convenient, then, for Herr Schroeder who is likely benefitting from his, cough, advisory role to Gazprom and Russia. With electricity prices rocketing upward, and the crises in eastern Europe, the coming winter looks to be very cold indeed.
The fact that Schroeder pushed through the construction of the Nordstream pipeline might be the only thing that saves us when NATO policies lead to a shutdown of gas transport through Ukraine and Poland.
Schroeder did not make us more dependent on Russia; we’ve been buying their oil and gas since the 1970ies. We would so LOVE to have a gas pipeline directly from the home of the free but UNFORTUNATELY geography doesn’t favor it. XXXXOOOO.
@Dirk, you’re right, I confused that with the other pipeline. Good thing then, that it’s an alternate source, although I wonder if (Ras)Putin would be inclined to turn off the tap anyway…lots of money to be made in wintertime 🙁 I do remember Schroeder going to Nordstream (of course the same thing happens in the US and other countries too…sort of a cronyistic cross-pollination of politicians). Wish I could strike oil (better yet, gold) in my backyard 🙂
“@Dirk, you’re right, I confused that with the other pipeline. Good thing then, that it’s an alternate source, although I wonder if (Ras)Putin would be inclined to turn off the tap anyway…”
A) Germany is dancing a complicated dance now; we must not anger the Americans who control NATO; and we want peaceful business with Russia at the same time
B) You might think calling Putin Rasputin is a kind of insult. In fact, Rasputin was a pacifist; he was murdered shortly before WW I so he would not be there to convince the Tzar to stay out of the war. In my book Rasputin was one of the sanest political advisors you could have.
As I recall, offshore wind usually attains somewhat less than 40% capacity. Let’s assume 40%, to be generous. That would make this offshore windfarm capable of 160 MWs, average. I assume many are not familiar with power plant capacities, but base load generators, like coal and nuclear typically run at 100% (sometimes more for nuclear – 110%) while they are online. Nuclear overall averages about mid 90 percent capacity, but that is because of downtime for refueling, but that is not an issue, since refueling always is scheduled for the time of the year when power consumption is much reduced (Spring and Fall) and closing the plant does no harm nor cause extra expense. In effect, nuclear plants run at 100% (or greater) capacity, almost always.
Total German (net) power capacity is aproximately 150,000 MW!! That should provide a picture of just how insignificant is the net power capacity of this windfarm (160MW). It’s NOTHING!! A tenth of one percent. It wouldn’t even rate a mention in any analysis of German power generation. A smaller-than-average closed cycle gas generator could replace the whole damn windfarm and probably be built in a week or so. And it wouldn’t need any additional generation capacity sitting around costing money, unike the windfarm.
+1
I really hate to see so much hand wringing and extra effort thrown in to make electrical generation so difficult. The whole idea is to make it cheap, easy, and get it to the customers in abundance. Economies grow strong with cheap abundant power!, why dick around with these windmills that suck more economic resources than they generate? Each dollar, or Euro, thrown into something wasteful is money that could have been used to grow the economy. How long do politicians who press this nonsense think we are going to tolerate this? How are we expected to remain inspired and productive when we see them throw hard earned money away. Why do we tolerate their insinuations about our patriotism and commitment when we are reluctant to turn over even more money?
/rant over/
With climate change, it’s the appearance of making an effort that counts. Build a few wind turbines and you can be forgiven for using massive amounts of your own coal.
The biggest problem with wind power is that it fails when either wind currents or subsidies stop flowing.
Breitbart article
FLAGSHIP GERMAN OFFSHORE WIND FARM PROJECT HUMILIATED BY TECHNICAL FAULTS
by DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS 12 Sep 2014
Germany’s flagship Bard 1 offshore wind farm has been described as “a faulty total system” as technical problems continue to plague the project, casting major doubts on the feasibility of large scale offshore projects.
The wind farm was officially turned on in August last year but was shut down again almost immediately due to technical difficulties that have still not been resolved – and now lawyers are getting involved.
The wind farm comprises 80 5MW turbines situated 100 km off the north German coastline. The difficulty facing engineers is how to get the electricity generated back to shore. So far, every attempt to turn on the turbines has resulted in overloaded and “gently smouldering” offshore converter stations.
Built at a cost of hundreds of millions and costing between €1 and €2 million a day to service, the project is estimated to have cost €340 million in lost power generation over the last year alone. And if the problems with the technology are deemed not to be the fault of the operator, German taxpayers will be on the hook for the running and repair costs, thanks to the German Energy Act 2012.
Understandably, the project’s investors are becoming increasingly nervous, which is why lawyers are now scrambling to pin the blame elsewhere. According to the German magazine Speigel “everything has turned to the question of who is responsible for the fiasco – and the costs.”
Inevitably, the fiasco has brought into question the feasibility of the entire green energy industry. The Bard 1 project was designed to be the global leader in offshore wind design: a model for everyone else to follow. That it doesn’t work has already cast doubt on other projects. Energy company Trianel are concerned that their ‘Windpark Borkum’, Germany’s second largest major offshore project, will now not work when it comes online next month. And they have already shelved plans for a further 200MW offshore project until the technology can be proven.
Germany already has amongst the highest energy bills in the world, not helped by the EU’s commitment to carbon reduction measures at the behest of an increasingly hysterical climate change industry, and the rest of Europe fares no better. British and European climate change policies already add an extra ten percent to British householders’ energy bills, at a time when fuel poverty affects one in four people.
Offshore wind is often seen as the acceptable face of green energy. Earlier this year Conservative minister Michael Fallon announced that the party was planning to scrap subsidies for onshore wind farms, but they remain fully committed to offshore projects.
Opening the 175 turbine, 630MW capacity London Array wind farm, the world’s largest to date, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said “This is a great day for Britain and a big win for renewable energy. London Array shows you can build large scale renewable energy projects right here in Britain. This is because when it comes to clean energy, the UK has one of the clearest investment climates globally.”
His support gives the lead for the rest of his party, with Conservatives of all ranks lining up to get behind offshore wind power.
In July, planning permission was granted by the government for a 175 turbine wind farm off the historic south coast of England, which will be seen from the newly created South Downs national park and tourist spots such as Beachy Head. The Rampion project will cost £2 billion to construct, and is expected to be handed £200 million a year in taxpayer subsidies. The local Conservative candidate for Lewes constituency, which runs along the affected coastline, wrote to her local paper to underline her support for the project, saying “I supported this scheme and actually voted for it as a local councillor when it was first proposed a few years ago. I was therefore delighted when the Conservative led Government approved the scheme earlier this year.
“The Rampion Wind farm will bring a much needed energy supply for the country but it will also be a huge boost to the local economy and that is why I voted for it in 2010 and why I still support it now.”
Likewise, Conservative MP Therese Coffey, whose Suffolk Coastal constituency is likely to be affected by a vast offshore wind farm project, has also written in support of offshore wind. An article on her website reads “Therese has welcomed the announcement from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills that an Offshore Wind Investment Organisation to boost levels of inward investment and to further stimulate jobs in the UK offshore wind industry, will be set up.
“Therese said: “The creation of the Offshore Wind Investment Organisation will help bring enormous economic benefit to our shores, supporting skilled jobs. … The formation of this industry-led partnership will boost the positive benefits that the offshore wind sector can bring to the UK economy”.”
However, with the Bild 1 turbines are already being tagged “white elephants in the North Sea” by sources such as the Economist, and with costs mounting and no end in sight, the question being asked, in Germany at least, is “Is the wind boom over before it even really began?”
Link to that article is already in headpost.
Other projects in Europe with problems. (Not offshore wind)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/finland-nuclear-olkiluoto-idUKL5N0R20CV20140901
http://www.ausbt.com.au/berlin-s-new-brandenburg-airport-won-t-open-until-2016
Reblogged this on Centinel2012 and commented:
Since it never had a chance to actually work (expect in some alternative reality) why is there any surprise?
Without cost-neutral (buffer)storage the german “Energiewende” is just an idiotic waste of energy-consumer money, initiated by “Green”politicians and lobbyists for their own benefit!They are still supported ideologically by climate alarmists, pseudoenvironmentalists and anti nuclear-power activists. This collective madness is hyped by “Green” journalists and morons who slept in their lessons of “Physics/Electricity”, thus they can’t understand the difference between – KW – and – KW/h- and certainly not the technique of high-voltage power grids and their requirements!
If the Wind Park owners/operators were paid only for a steadily! delivered certain amount of the maximum rated output energy (in KW) to satisfy the demand schedule, instead of being paid for useless KW/h s of fidget-current , the whole craziness would be dead at once!
Nearly every week I read such nonsens in the regional Newspapers like: ” The recently installed wind turbine will generate electric energy for xxx households!” —– Will? —- By the ghost of Sir Beaufort!– Would perhaps!
Nothing will go, when the wind doesn’t blow!
“Nearly every week I read such nonsens in the regional Newspapers like: ” The recently installed wind turbine will generate electric energy for xxx households!” ”
On average; and don’t forget to divide the number by 5, as the capacity factor of onshore wind is 20%. The journalists always use the name plate capacity when they write that. So it should read, will generate electricity for XXX households during the moments where full capacity is delivered, shortly before the wind gets just a bit too strong and the wind impellers will go into emergency shutoff. (as delivered energy is the 3rd power of the wind speed, those two points – 100% generation and shutoff – are right next to each other. The energy production time series of a wind impeller always looks very spikey for that reason.)
DirkH,
The average Capacity Factor for onshore wind in Ireland is a little over 29%. I have calculated it from the available wind production datasets from 2001 to 2013 (15 minute interval values). The standard deviation is around 3.6%. All annual capacity factors in that period have been between just under 22% up to 36%. In Germany the average figure is around 19-20% (and would be similar for continental Europe generally). Expected Capacity Factor for offshore is expected to be up to 50% (this is not wild speculation as the wind surveys would be statistically very robust). The unknown figure, however, is the availability level which will greatly affect that capacity factor but given the level of industry experience nowadays educated guesses could be made as to the likely availability figure achievable.
Thats exactly the point! Windmills deliver Now-And-Then-Occasionally-Current and are useless nowadays as their ancestors!(Sonne und Wind schicken keine Rechnung!—lol!)
Wind turbines will generate XXX energy for households is a “marketing” strategy fed to the public via the news media and by other means as well.
@ur momisugly alacran – ‘“Green” journalists and morons who slept in their lessons of “Physics/Electricity”, thus they can’t understand the difference between – KW – and – KW/h’
Sorry to point out your error to you, and embarrass you in public, but the unit of energy in electrical systems is kWh not kW/h.
Absolutely no one claims or believes that wind power is reliable in the sense you mean. Ireland has the highest penetration of wind power in any large synchronous power system in the world, with as wide a spatial diversity as is possible, and even then the output is still at times next to zero. It seems to be the case that wind will always require next to 100% backup (this isn’t a surprise to those who were honest about it). However, largely unacknowledged on this website is the fact that, concomitant with the development of wind technology, the gas turbine technology developments have been very significant (as well as the developments in gas sourcing which are an unbelieveable paradigm shift in world energy markets: USA now No. 1 gas producer in the world! Who’d a thunk it 10 years ago?!). Gas generated electricity works very well with wind in terms of ramp rates, part load efficiency and capital costs. CCGT now can work at efficiencies close to 50% on loads as low as 20% of nameplate. I know and understand that electricity is more expensive with wind than without it but the issue was never about the cheapest source of electricity but energy security and sustainability (in terms of leaving something to the generations to follow us).
I would sure hate to be one of the ‘Engineers’ on this project.
Job interview time.
Interviewer: Whats the most expensive mistake you have made and how-much did it cost your company?
Applicant: errr… $3.8B tax payers money… it was a unicorn fart generator…..
Interviewer: Did you say 3.8 with a ‘B’
Applicant: err… err… yes…
Interviewer: Just a moment …. ‘click’ Security… Thank you and have nice day … next.
Having an educated does not mean you are smart.
You can’t fix stupid.
Oops … ‘Being educated’
The folly of Wind Follies. A system for making energy very expensively, very intermittently, with large amounts of material, to trash the environment, get in the way, bugger up radar, fall over, break up and catch fire, noisily……. But ultimately not work at all.
Thus proving the political strength of the mind virus driving them. Which even now deserves more sacrifice, and ever more, ever larger totems to the green goddess of de industrialised poverty and the saddling up of the four riders.
Bloody well said, Fen!!
My favourite comment of the week – from Bishop Hill’s blog (sorry) – was from a comment by Pointman. It was in the form of a quiz question:
(We’re talking 2014 here!)
I’ve made sure I have plenty of candles and a Tilley lamp ready for when the wind fails to hit the fan.