Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A Scottish wind farm composed of novel design floating offshore wind turbines has officially started generating power. Proponents claim the floating megastructures are cheaper than traditional turbines, and will open offshore sites too deep for traditional fixed pylon designs.
The Hywind project: the world’s first floating wind farm
By SOPHIE CHAPMAN . Oct 19, 2017, 6:43AM
The world’s first floating wind farm opened on 18 October by Nicola Sturgeon, off the east coast of Scotland.
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The 6MW turbines rise 175m above sea level, making them taller than London’s Big Ben and Oslo’s Plaza, and extend 78m below the surface of the water, tied to the sea bed by cables.
The anchors used to stabilise the turbines stand at 16m and weigh 111 tonnes.
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The concept of a floating turbine was conceived in 2001, a single prototype being made in 2009, and funding for the project was provided in 2015.
The benefits of a floating offshore wind farm are the lower costs of production than onshore farms, as well as floating turbines being able to reach areas in the sea with a depth of 800m, which so far has been unattainable for wind projects.
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Read more: http://www.energydigital.com/renewable-energy/hywind-project-worlds-first-floating-wind-farm
Lets hope those anchors are secure. One hundred and eleven tons of free floating wind turbine could create a terrifying navigation hazard.
Here’s another, more detailed article about the turbines with a video about how the farm will work.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hywind-scotland-glimpse-into-worlds-first-floating-wind-farm-2017-8
Each turbine weighs 11,500 tons.
And if you stacked the Leaning Tower of Pisa AND the Statue of Liberty on top of Big Ben, it would still be shorter than one of these monsters.
I’m not an economist, but am somewhat baffled by the economics of this project. If each turbine has a nameplate of 6 mega Watts and there are 5 of them that’s 30 MW at full capacity. At the retail power cost I pay here in fly-over USA of $0.11/kWh that’s a revenue of only $3300/hour which means these things would have to run at 100% capacity for nearly 9 years to even recoup the $253 million construction cost. At a more realistic (but still generous) 33% capacity they would not even recover the construction cost in the 25 year lifetime of the project, to say nothing of the maintenance, interest and any hoped for profit. Just how much are the Scotts willing to pay for power?
I’m also not an engineer, but can’t help but wonder that since these things are floating, won’t they be affected by wave action? It seems to me that any rocking moment from wave action would put an enormous gyroscopic force on the main bearings holding the rotors when they are turning. I would expect to see several catastrophic failures as the years go by. Plus reduced capacity. No wind, no power. Too much wind, no power. And, high seas, no power.
But money, money, money whatever happens, which is why subsidy farming is a popular business. Let’s hope there are a few surprises in store as Danish EV dealers found.
‘For example, Tesla sold 2,738 units in Denmark in 2015 and just 176 in 2016.
http://www.thedrive.com/news/11089/denmark-ev-sales-plummet-with-tax-break-elimination
Look out Bill, some people here can’t tell the difference between a snipe and dowitcher 😉
‘I am but mad north-north-west: when the
wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.’
Yup, the gyroscopic forces on the blades, bearings and hub of these these bobbing around should be AWESOME.
If a whole wind farm of these went down at the same time, we would have a remake of the campy film “The Giant Behemoth”
Just don’t show them the design plans for the space-based solar array.
I’d love to know how much pitch & roll one of these monsters could tolerate. The Statoil guff goes on about ‘testing’, but I’d love to see some numbers. I used to work on a fairly big semi-submersible drilling rig, and even when ballasted down, with all 8 anchors out and the dynamic stabilisers working, it would still pitch quite a bit in a decent North Atlantic gale. The North Sea is in some ways worse, and is notorious for short-wavelength ‘steep’ seas in bad weather. I’d not want to put my money into this project for fear of the flushing noises I’d hear as soon as I’d handed it over.
A floating structure in the north sea is going to move. A moving structure with a massive spinning turbine on it is going to generate all sorts of interesting forces on the blades due to flywheel effects. The engineers must have had a lot of fun designing it. But I wonder how long it will last.
Of the 3 way to be ruined,
gambling is the quickest,
women the merrier,
engineers the most certain
George Best (footballer of genius but prone to temptation) said this.
“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”
I recall years ago in the 70’s when north sea oil rigs were built and shipped to extract oil. They were of a 3 legged design, used to get models on them in cereal boxes. I wonder if we’ll see models on these things in cereal boxes?
In this, my final comment on WUWT, I reply to the very interesting comment above by one Janice Moore, an attorney. To paraphrase her comment above, Ms. Attorney Moore believes the recent articles on renewable energy have sullied the content of this blog, so in response she will no longer “hang out here.”
As an attorney, surely Ms. Moore is more than aware of the Free Speech Clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. And surely, Ms. Moore understands that, excepting approximately one dozen categories of speech, the government cannot pass laws to prevent speech. Also just as surely, Ms. Moore must know that the reasons behind including the Free Speech Clause in the Constitution was the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas, in which a great many ideas would be discussed in a manner that did not run afoul of the few prohibited forms of speech. Those discussions in the Marketplace of Ideas would include an assessment of the merits of the speech’s content; good ideas would be approved and accepted, while bad ideas would be hooted down and rejected.
It seems clear that Ms. Moore would like to shut down any positive discussions of renewable energy, but on what grounds, is not entirely clear. She appears to be on the hooting down and rejecting side, and not the approval and acceptance side.
Perhaps Ms. Moore is afraid? Perhaps she is afraid that news of the fantastic, positive progress of renewable energy system performance and economics might become more widely known? Perhaps the fact that onshore, US-based wind energy systems have declined in installed cost by a factor of more than 3-to-1 in less than a decade is unnerving to Ms. Moore? Perhaps the prospect of yet more declines in installed cost are imminent, indeed inevitable, while improved output is also inevitable, both are too horrible for Ms. Moore to see in print?
Ah, but Ms. Moore should be aware that the printing has already occurred, in the form of the Wind Technology Market Reports of both 2015 and again in 2016, both published by the US Department of Energy. Those Reports state that new, modern onshore US wind projects are selling wind energy profitably at only 4.3 cents per kWh produced, inclusive of all subsidies.
As this present article relates to offshore wind energy in Europe, perhaps Ms. Moore is afraid that the reality of declining installed costs, improved annual output, and declining operating costs in European waters would also make it into print? Again, Ms. Moore should be aware that the US Department of Energy has already published the “2016 Offshore Wind Technologies Market Report.” That report states, in part, that for European offshore wind “. . . winning bid prices have declined from approximately $200 / MWh for projects with a commercial operation date between 2017 and 2019 down to about $65 /MWh for projects with a 2024/2025 commercial operation date.” That’s only 6.5 cents per kWh in the 2024/2025 time frame.
Perhaps Ms. Moore is very afraid that the continued barrage of negative articles on renewables on this blog, featuring Australia and others, are not enough to counter the news of the incredible success of California, where renewables routinely provide 50 to 60 percent of instantaneous power to the grid, and more than 25 percent on an annualized basis, yet there are zero grid failures attributable to renewables? Perhaps Ms. Moore, a noted and very vocal nuclear advocate (I call her a cheerleader) is distressed by the fact that renewables in California succeed so well in a state with almost zero nuclear power? Could it be that Ms. Moore, so very vocal for nuclear power, is worried that others might realize that the power prices in California have not gone up due to renewable power plants, but instead have gone down as nuclear diminishes, natural gas power output increases, and renewables’ output also increase?
Perhaps Ms. Moore is terrified that others may observe the California experience, and perhaps she realized that a collection of fast-acting, flexible, load-following natural gas power plants are routinely ramping up at 4 and even 5 giga-Watts per hour to meet the load as the sunshine inevitably fades away while the demand increases – as indeed both did today on 23 October, 2017.
It is not for me to say what Ms. Moore is, or is not afraid of. Perhaps all the hundreds of comments, mostly negative, on the article I guest-authored on the Hywind project on WUWT on 5 April 2017, and referenced above by David Middleton, were not enough to satisfy Ms. Moore in her desire to quash articles on renewable energy.
The fact is, many billions of dollars, Euros, and other currencies are flowing into offshore and onshore wind projects world-wide because they make economic sense. These projects also show a continued improvement in performance and economics, which will be much appreciated in the very near future when nuclear plants are closing by the dozens each year, coal-fired plants are either closing or scrambling to find fuel to burn at a price they can afford, and LNG fuel is available but very costly.
Ms. Moore does share one thing with me, though, and that is the desire and decision to leave the WUWT page – although for very different reasons, I am sure. After the insults and worse I received in the comments on my final article as guest-author at WUWT, on 12 August 2017, there is no reason for me to contribute either articles nor additional comments. I saw this article and happened to see the Janice Moore comment, reproduced below, and chose to offer this last comment on WUWT. Whether it gets published or not, is another story.
The facts do not care, nor need, any commentary nor articles published here for those facts to be true, the trends they convey to be accurate, and men of vision and means to act upon them. The renewables are here to stay, because they perform exactly as they are supposed to perform: produce electricity that is ever-cheaper and more reliable, while the grid-scale storage systems also grow cheaper, larger, and more economic with each passing year. Meanwhile, gas-fired, flexible power plants easily follow the load as the output from wind and solar power plants oscillates. Grid-scale batteries will allow the gas-fired plants to operate more steadily, thus paying for their (the batteries) costs. In addition, it is a solid fact that new nuclear power plants in the West cannot be built on schedule and on budget, but take many more years than planned. The final costs are staggering at approximately $10 billion US for the Finland reactor, and about the same for the French reactor at Flamanville. If nuclear is the future, no one could afford electricity at those prices.
And finally, as I stated in the 5 April 2017 article on Hywind, the more renewable power that is produced, the less demand there is for natural gas, thus driving down the price for natural gas. That, lower natural gas price, has enormous benefits throughout every economy that makes more renewables a desirable goal.
Ms Moore wrote:
“So. Now, after promoting (ANY publicity is publicity) the enviroprofiteers with mildly critical (or essentially neutral) articles about “renewables” almost non-stop for months (the exceptions have been relatively few), WUWT has sunk to the low it was headed for: simple promotion of “renewables” (always stated on WUWT now without ” ” and with no qualifiers, as if they truly are “renewable,” when they still cannot cover their cost of production with their un-subsidized sales revenue).
“Such reporting is not “fair and balanced,” it is simply inaccurate — due to omitting significant key facts about “renewables” (See, e.g., http://blackmain.taylorpartners.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Ruth-Lea-The-Folly-of-Wind-Power-2011-10.pdf (Note: Offshore Wind has the worst ROI (and EROEI)).
WUWT has deteriorated from this:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/10/theres-a-reason-the-modern-age-moved-on-from-windmills/
to what you see in the above article.
“And I do not fault Eric Worrall — it is clearly the editorial policy of WUWT which is driving this subtle (and, now, not subtle at all) promotion of renewables. It was one thing for that wily-but-dull writer, L. Kummer to promote AGW (promoting “renewables” is to promote AGW and its $$ sc@ms), quite another to simply promote them.
“Thus, WUWT is no longer the powerful voice for truth and data it once was.
Rats.
**************************
“And if anyone wonders in the days to come, just because I’ve been around this place for a few years, “Where is Janice?” Here’s the answer: the anti-data (about human CO2 as well as “renewables”), lukewarm, soft-sell of AGW, around here is sickening to me and I can’t stand to hang out here. Yes, I will miss many of you people, but, your presence here doesn’t make the swampy atmosphere here any more easy to take.
“And, yes, I realize our host could not care less about what I write here. Our host’s new policy of largely ignoring his supporters after they fund trips to AGU and other places and his doing nothing to address my expressed concerns (in a comment a few weeks ago which I know he read) assures me of that.
“I gotta say this, before I take a break from WUWT (I don’t know for how long):
1. I admire all of you regular commenters who are still hanging in here — you have more resilience for enduring what I described above than I do; you are fine, great-hearted, people.
2. Our host is to be highly commended for allowing this comment to be published.
Bye (for now, at least)!”
https://www.thegwpf.com/green-crap-another-solar-subsidy-business-goes-bust/
This post deals with the wind power situation in UK.
‘The official data, expertly analysed by Paul Homewood on his blog, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, show that last year we were all paying for offshore electricity through our household bills at nearly three times the going market rate, including subsidies of £1.4 billion. And this is still soaring so fast that, by 2021, we will be paying £3.1 billion a year for offshore wind energy, equating to £115 for every household in the land.’
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/the-true-cost-of-wind-power/
A more recent post has this from US.
‘A green energy company heavily incentivized by Mississippi is shutting down, raising questions about whether the state will get repaid. It’s the fourth green subsidy company to go bust recently.
Solar panel maker Stion notified the state Tuesday that it would close its Hattiesburg plant Dec. 13, laying off 137 employees.’
Bye bye Roger,
where will I get my stock tips?
“Could it be that Ms. Moore, so very vocal for nuclear power, is worried that others might realize that the power prices in California have not gone up due to renewable power plants, but instead have gone down as nuclear diminishes, natural gas power output increases, and renewables’ output also increase”
Could it be that Mr. Sowell believes the press releases from the California government? I have lived in California for most of my life, and I can assure you that the prices for electricity use have steadily climbed in the last few years. I can also assure you that we now experience more rolling brownouts than ever before.