By comparison, when Hinckley Point C is finished, it will have a strike price of £92.50. And the solar panels I have on my roof are paying me 14p/kWH in subsides because they were build under the old regime.
Doggerland (where Dogger Bank is situated) is a pretty intriguing place and worth reading up on. But the general gist is that the UK was landbridged to the Netherlands and Denmark up until relatively recently (10,000BC) when a glacial lake gave way and submerged the area.
The cool thing about this is trawlers in the area have occasionally hauled man-made specimens from the era (~10,000BC), meaning there could be archaeological remains just there underwater.
The article is about the 13MW Haliade-X tubine, but on part of the Doggerbank (Sofia wind park) an even larger 14MW Siemens Gamesa turbine will be installed. As short as maybe 5 years ago >10MW turbines were thought of as unlikely in the near time, and look where we are now. And we still haven't hit any hard limits, meaning there is still room to grow! And as the turbines grow, so do the foundations. Most turbines are installed on a single steel tube that is driven into the ground, a monopile. A single one can be 100m long, 10m in diameter and weigh 2000 tons!
I live in an appartment (still counts as a home) and consumed 6.6 kWh/day on average. The very large turbines don't do 1 rotation per second (wiki [0] says 5-20 rpm). So, totally doable with a 14MW wind turbine
I doubt the rotation speed is 1/s, that would imply pi*220m/s at the tips or 2488 km/hour! Based on animations, it looks more like 1 rotation per 20 or 30 seconds. 20-30kWh seems very reasonable for a house's consumption.
whats the expected lifetime on one of those?
does it grow or diminish with size,i.e. do bigger ones last longer?
it does seem that maintenance on the bigger ones is more complicated and requires more sophisticated gear ,not to mention difficulties of operating in North Sea
The number of days where it makes no little or no contribution to the UK grid surprises me: https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
In the press, at least, it seems that the UK is consolidating on wind as the 'green solution', when it's clear the UK needs a much more mixed solution.
Take a look at the actual time when wind power contributed little or nothing. It's mostly night hours between 23:00 and 5:00.
Contrary to conventional power sources, wind power can be regulated basically "on-the-spot" by turning turbines on and off.
Living next to a small on-shore wind farm, I can tell you from first hand observation that most of the time turbines are turned off deliberately, because production simply exceeds demand.
A chart like the one you've linked to doesn't tell the whole story and can be very misleading indeed. You'd need to plot the actual load on the grid versus production to get a better picture.
Why then, would they shut down a wind turbine rather than a gas turbine. There was no point in the last year where gas turbines were not supplying power.
If what you say is true, then the grid is being run in a more carbon intensive way than necessary. Why would this be?
Because, as qayxc intimated with "Contrary to conventional power sources", it is more expensive to turn gas turbines off and on again than it is wind turbines. Price will dictate action in a marketplace, so sufficient incentives need to be introduced to motivate greener supply.
This is correct. And the costs are built into the contract. Wind and hydro dams are very easy to control. Gas is quite easy to control. Coal costs more to start and stop, but nuclear nearly changes in output over the course of a week. Nuclear is tuned to output the base load, the level below which demand never drops. Then the other sources are layered on top.
For the situations where all power sources are at max output and there is still not enough power, then the UK will pull power from France. This typically happens when East Enders (TV Soap Opera) finished and millions of people turn on the kettle (high powered water heaters of 2 or 3 kW).
Because gas and other fossil fuels are inelastic - it's expensive to turn them off or on, and it can't be done rapidly. The fact that wind can be turned on or off at will means they can be used to balance demand spikes.
My guess: When the spot price of electricity turns negative (or low enough that is not covering costs), a wind turbine can put on the brakes immediately, whereas a gas turbine might prefer to accept some loss.
I'm curious though. If the UK wants to 'go green', then why turn wind turbines off at all, rather than turn off some carbon-based power stations instead? What's the reasoning behind that?
This is a problem I've raised before - if we have excess wind electricity, why aren't we storing it? The UK doesn't really have that much pumped storage/hydro: you need hills and dams, and almost all of those are in areas of outstanding natural beauty, and are therefore difficult to build.
I'm no expert, but I guess if you disengage the load the turbine blades would accelerate until the internal heat losses to friction matched the energy input from the wind. In other words, they'd spin very quickly, probably far in excess of their design speed, meaning at best that they would wear out much more quickly, or I guess more likely RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly), causing them to be considerably more dangerous.
No. A parked turbine has its blades furled and is locked in place. A freely spinning but disengaged turbine is super dangerous because there is nothing to stop it from overspeeding and that can happen quite quickly with the right gust of wind. So you always want to have drag on a spinning turbine.
This is why electric cars needs smart charging - plug it in when you get home, and expect for it to be charged by the time you need to go to work - but the actual charging hours should be linked to the grid in order to manage overall demand.
Its a shame that this regulation and UI environment is not already ready, since these vehicles are already being mass-manufactured.
The excerpt speaks for the "quality" of this kind of journalism: headline says
> "Britain faces green energy disaster as lack of wind triggers new blackout warning"
Actual quote says:
> National Grid said the margin notice “highlights that we would like a greater safety cushion between power demand and available supply” but “does not signal that blackouts are imminent”.
In short: yes, regenerative or "green" energy requires a different approach, including overprovisioning, short term storage, and stand-by power stations (e.g. natural gas-powered ones) in order to work reliably.
That's not news, however, that's a well known fact. Plus both wind and solar can be predicted fairly well over the short term and a more intelligent grid could be used to adjust demand accordingly to also help with this.
Posting a link from a 240-year-old Western medium that was downvoted to -3 from the default 1 was the last time I wasted my time on commenting a HN post.
Afaik green energy has never meant to provide standalone, at least until the surplus energy generated at daily peaks can be reasonably stored for days.
As other posters have mentioned, offshore is significantly more economical for a number of reasons (stronger, more consistent wind; large tracts of available area for large-scale farms; the capability to build turbines much taller where they can access stronger winds) - so instead I'll mention another problem facing offshore turbines other than corrosion: the air.
It turns out that offshore, the air contains a lot of minerals and water droplets that make it much more abrasive than the air over land. This is a particular problem for turbine blades, as their leading edge is moving through the air at a significant speed: enough to gradually ablate away the leading edge material! Consequently, offshore turbine blades need to be replaced more often than onshore turbine blades. This is one of the reasons that larger turbines are more economical: fewer larger turbines mean fewer, larger blades that need to be periodically replaced.
It's possible to build bigger turbines at sea, which are more efficient. The limitation on land is transporting the blades which often requires roads to be modified.
It’s not so much “not in my back yard” as there is no back yard big enough. The article says the new digger bank wind farm will be as big as Yorkshire, which is really very big (in UK terms)
Not just more consistent, but also usually stronger. Currently, for example, wind speeds over the North Sea and the Baltic are stronger than over the adjacent land, and the change at the coastline is quite striking (I'm assuming that the model behind this map is reasonably accurate in that regard.)
As I understand it this technology has developed because the government (David Cameron) essentially banned onshore wind by removing the subsidies for it.
They changed the rules back again last year though [1].
Especially in a geographically pretty small country like the UK, NIMBY (or indeed anyone else's back yard) may be a perfectly valid argument. These things are big and somewhat noisy.
Somebody posted a link to the YouTube video that showed a Dutch turbine exploding. In the description it said pieces went 500 meters. So there probably needs to be a physical safety zone of 1km or more, not that turbines seem to explode very often.
Corrosion on the submerged parts is quite simple to mitigate with sacrificial as also used on ships. The hard part is the splash zone which is only intermittently submerged.
There's a huge amount of experience in this area from oil and gas infrastructure; there've been large-scale offshore rigs in the North Sea since the 60s.
Technology as force multiplier. If your job was generating energy directly, you'd struggle to manage more than 100W continuous and quickly get bored of pedalling.
The main problem with a hundred meter long blade is going to be finding somewhere to put it. Maybe they'll end up as artificial reefs or polders. Or maybe in the intervening 20+ years somebody will develop a technique for recycling glass-epoxy composites.
Recycling is generally done when extracting new resources is more expensive than reusing existing resources. I don't know what type of resin these wind turbines use but if we assume it is an Epichlorohydrin+Bisphenol A [0] based epoxy resin the material inputs are basically oil (or any other relatively pure mixture of carbon and hydrogen) and salt for the chlorine.
Oil is treated as a consumable in cars and ends up in the atmosphere. Salt is used in food. Why would anyone want to recycle these materials? They are considered "worthless" by the rest of society. If you bury them they at least stay in the ground instead of ending up in the atmosphere.
Glass fibers are just SiO2 (glass). The two most common elements on earth. [1]
Why? Recycling it could be very energy intensive. Recycling is only preferable in particular circumstances, and until you have a specific recycling process to evaluate, you can't make general conclusions about the preferability/environmental superiority of recycling vs landfill disposal
> each one can generate enough electricity to power 16,000 homes, at less than the average price of electricity in the wholesale energy market.
This is the kind of wishes presented as facts that discredite almost all articles about new renewables.
They don't say if this 16k figure is peak charge, they don't say how these homes are powered when the wind is down, if this price includes all costs (transport, subventions, storage...), etc.
It gives the impression that electricity works like fuel : you just extract it, then use it when you want.
The 220m turbine is rated for 12MW meaning if it turns at full speed it will provide 12MW of power. What you are worrying about is the capacity factor. The capacity factor is a percentage of the average load on the turbine. Wind turbines generally have around a 50% capacity factor so if you install a 12MW turbine it will generate 6MW per hour averaged over the entire year. The capacity factor entirely depends on location so you cannot make a general statement about the capacity factor just based on looking at the turbine itself.
> they don't say how these homes are powered when the wind is down
You can run gas plants, which you have to do anyway because they produce less CO2 than coal plants. The nice property of gas power plants is that the fuel is quite expensive, meaning you only run them when you have to. So naturally they will yield to renewables if there is wind available.
>It gives the impression that electricity works like fuel : you just extract it, then use it when you want.
If you run wind power to avoid CO2 emissions then that's exactly the way it works. It doesn't matter when you stop burning gas. What really matters is that you are burning less gas.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 280ppm before the industrial revolution. It took much less than 200 years to add another 45% CO2 on top of that. We are at 409.8ppm now. This means 120ppm or around 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man made and that percentage is going to increase in the future. You have to consider that not all of the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. A lot of it is also absorbed by the ocean. It took a lot of human effort to get this far and now we have to stop it from getting worse.
Strike prices are a form of option or insurance which guarantees income for the producer over the long term regardless of market prices. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...
By comparison, when Hinckley Point C is finished, it will have a strike price of £92.50. And the solar panels I have on my roof are paying me 14p/kWH in subsides because they were build under the old regime.