By David Wojick
My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.
Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.
Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.
See https://www.oedigital.com/news/504812-addressing-the-challenges-of-developing-floating-wind-at-scale
Of course, these are just estimates based on proposed designs, not measurements. Keep in mind that no one, anywhere, has ever built one of these Titanic monsters. Governments are setting huge targets for a technology that does not exist.
Based on UK permit applications, we are looking at a colossal individual floater footprint of around 160,000 square feet. That is roughly three football fields, so a mighty big float. And the UK does not get anything like hurricane-force winds. Maybe 100 mph, but never 160.
Weight-wise, Lewis suggests up to 5,000 tons of steel or 20,000 tons of concrete per float. Mind you, 5,000 tons of steel floaters will not keep 2,000 tons on a tall pole upright. These designs are what are called “semi-submersible”. This means the Titanic float is something like half full of water. There is enough air to float it but also a lot of water to hopefully weigh it down. I have yet to see the math on all this and have my doubts about its viability, but this is what is reported.
Of course, these huge floaters make floating wind power extremely expensive. The guess is at least three times as much as the already ridiculously expensive fixed-bottom offshore wind power. It could be a lot more.
These enormous numbers are based on 15 MW turbines, which are the biggest built today, although none has yet been installed and operational offshore. But bigger are coming with 18 MW on order and 20 MW advertised. Floater size and weight scale exponentially with turbine weight and height, so the above huge numbers may actually be quite small.
As an engineer, I would build a few of these monster floating assemblies and run them through a few hurricanes to see how they did, especially if they survived. Of course, the hell-bent Biden folks and green States are doing nothing like that.
For example, next month, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is selling 15,000 MW of floating wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. California just announced a 25,000 MW floating wind target with 5,000 MW already leased by BOEM.
Just to play with numbers, this 40,000 MW of floaters would take just under 3,000 of these monster 15 MW floaters. In addition to filling up a lot of surface ocean, each has to be anchored to the sea floor with at least three mooring cables, more likely around eight each. Plus each has a live wire cable transmitting its energy output.
Lewis says the depths involved are like this: “In the U.S., the first commercial-scale projects will be off California (500-1,300 meters). Future activity is planned off Oregon (550-1,500 meters), the Gulf of Maine (190-300 meters), and the Central Atlantic (over 2,000 meters).” A mile is roughly 1,600 meters.
So we have many millions of feet of mooring cables and hot wires filling the ocean between the floaters and the sea floor. This is a whole new form of harassment that needs to be authorized (or not) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
What is really funny is I see no plans for building these thousands of Titanic floating wind assemblies. I recently pointed out that the Biden Transportation Dept was illegally diverting almost a billion dollars to build floating wind fabrication facilities in Maine and California. But, neither facility design has what it would take to actually make this stupendous semi-submersible junk, starting with dry docks.
I strongly suggest we put a big hold on leasing and funding floating wind technology. Let’s first see how and if it works and at what cost.
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Octopus Energy are diversifying into wind generation field building. So, a rise in fuel bills was to cover for the loss of cheap fuel from Russia or it was a means of market empowerment for the chosen few. This is tuning into a rerun of religious wars of the 18th Century in Brittainy but not republicans versus monarchist/church coalition but the tyranny against the little people. Soon people will be stopping us on the street, “Citizen, are you a denier?”. Be careful how you respond, do not try and reason. Self evidently Octopus have a lucrative financial scheme and are able to diversify while crushing many of those they were set, under privatisation, to serve, to accommodate in a competitive market. What a charade.
Story tip.
16,500 ton twin turbine Cat 5 hurricane floating thingy!
https://newatlas.com/technology/mingyang-oceanx-floating-double-wind-turbine/
I am constantly amazed at the lengths the BS artists and grifters will go to separate the taxpayers from their hard earned money. This idea of a floating windmill device ranks right up there with the most ridiculous “Rube Goldberg” plan I’ve ever seen. The folks behind all this crap need to be sedated and assigned a bunk in a decent mental institution where they cannot harm normal folks.
Look for reports of massive scrap heaps from failed wind thingees in the near future.
May I suggest a change of nomenclature in describing wind turbines? Instead of ’25 MW’, we should call them ‘0 to 15 MW, depending on the weather’ in the first reference of the article; then ‘probably not much’ in later references.
The whole idea of floating wind turbines is absurd. If we look at the history of sailing ships before the invention of diesel-powered cargo ships, the largest of them probably had masts less then 200 ft high, and they all had ballasted keels, so that if the ship listed to leeward due to the force of the wind on the sails, the keel weight would move to windward and slightly upward, giving a counteracting righting moment to the ship. Often the keel depth was between 30 and 50% of the mast height.
If we’re considering a wind turbine centered 500 ft above the sea surface with blades 300 ft long, the tipping moment would be about 5 times that of a sailing ship with a 200-foot mast, assuming that the average height of the sail above the ship is 100 ft. In order to balance that tipping moment, the wind turbine would have to be attached with steel spokes to a donut-shaped catamaran, since the the tipping moment could be in any direction.
There would probably have to be a ballast along the axis of the “mast” or support pole of the turbine, possibly about 150 to 200 feet deep, to counteract the tipping moment, similar to the keel of a sailing ship.
The other problem would be that the list angle would be continuously changing (low angle in light winds, higher angle in strong winds), so that the rotation axis of the turbine is not necessarily horizontal. Even if the turbine had a downwind vane to keep it pointed along the same azimuth as the wind direction, the tilt would make the turbine less efficient in strong winds, due to the list angle.
Such problems could be avoided by only using wind turbines on fixed bases either in shallow water or on land.
gCaptain reports …
<b>U.S. Coast Guard Issues Warning After Wind Turbine Blade Breaks Off at Vineyard Wind Farm</b>
<i>The U.S. Coast Guard has advised mariners to exercise extreme caution following reports of a 300-foot-long piece of debris in the water near where an offshore wind turbine blade broke off at the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm off Nantucket, Rhode Island.
Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partner, reported that the turbine blade broke off Thursday morning, following a blade failure on Saturday. Debris has since washed ashore in Nantucket, leading to the closure of some beaches.</i>
https://tinyurl.com/mr485wkt
gCaptain.com
You can get some detail of the Kincardine floating offshore wind farm here.
https://energyindustryreview.com/renewables/kincardine-project-worlds-largest-floating-windfarm-fully-operational/
The guts are 5x 9.5MW Vestas 164 turbines with a blade tip height of 190m. Already two of the turbines have been towed to port for repairs lasting a year. The windfarm gets paid 3.5 ROCs per MWh of production. Each ROC us currently worth about £73, so the subsidy above market price is worth over £250/MWh. Because of the problems and costly repairs the wind farm has been making a loss despite the subsidy.