Plan For World's Largest Wind Farm

ClockworkPlanet writes: "A Hebridean island (North of Scotland) is set to become the global capital of renewable energy with advanced plans for the world's largest onshore wind farm acting as a catalyst to attract wave and tidal power stations. This article spills the juice."

Comments

Still playing Catch-Up with the Continent

[Cy Guy]

• The government is working towards providing 10% of Britain's electricity supplies from renewable sources by 2010; at present, they provide 2.8%.
• Britain is Europe's windiest country but has only 880 operating wind turbines, based on 61 wind farms. They produce less than 1% of the country's needs. World leader Denmark gets 15% of its power that way.

So in nine more years they'll only be at two-thirds the level of where Denmark is today. Hardly sounds like a groundbreaking achievement.

I wish the article would talk about the technology used in the cable itself as that seems to be the big breakthough that will enable this project. Will it use superconducting technology such as is already being tested in the US and in Denmark? If we can produce 350 mile long undersea cables, then maybe we could harness heat from undersea thermal vents to generate electricity? or perhaps the thermal mass of the great sargassos sea? Or put Oil and Gas fired plants on current offshore drilling platforms so the energy is being transported not the oil and we won't have to worry about another Exxon Valdez disaster.

Wind and solar farms in the deserts

[Catskul]

From what I understand, the Saharra is a pretty windy place. It also has tonnes of sunshine for the taking. With advancements in superconducting cables(1,2), maybe the deserts of the world might someday soon be an un obtrusive place to put some of these land scape marring reneuable resource adsorbing systems.

Silly backwards-going schemes don't catch up.

[Spamalamadingdong]

...put Oil and Gas fired plants on current offshore drilling platforms so the energy is being transported not the oil and we won't have to worry about another Exxon Valdez disaster.

The problem with that is that you are throwing a lot of the energy away. If you need space heat instead of light, converting the fuel to electricity on a platform loses 50% or more; you can't use cogeneration to improve your return on a given amount of fuel, either.

The real penalty would be in transport energy. We currently use oil because it makes fuels which are compact and easily transported. If you convert the fuel to electricity on the platform you have to convert the entire vehicle fleet to batteries, with all the range limitations this implies. You also lose all the flexibility you get with pipelines and storage tanks; if you lose one cable, you can wipe out a large part of the transport network as well as the industry and whatnot. Storable fuels provide a valuable buffer against supply and transport disruptions, and any nation which ignores this in a push to go "green" is risking trouble on a scale which would make California's blackouts look trivial.

Re:Silly backwards-going schemes don't catch up.

[Cy Guy]

If you convert the fuel to electricity on the platform you have to convert the entire vehicle fleet to batteries,

My suggestion was only for sea-based oil platforms, obviously the idea gets less apealing when you apply it to land based rigs, especially those that are in the middle east since then you would need thousands of miles of cable, not hundreds, or say land-based Texas oil wells where production per well is low and transportation costs for the oil are considerably less. But as for North Sea oil rigs, often the rigs can't be accessed due to rough seas, this would be irrelevant to an undersea cable. Also, some of the co-generation could be used to harvest methane-hydrates from below the sea floor, or just to inject steam into the oil wells to increase output.

BTW, love your sig. I'm a big Trout Fishing In America fan as well.

Eliminate nuclear? Who are they kidding?

[Spamalamadingdong]

Said the article:

If planning permission is granted Britain will more than double its renewable energy capacity. Environmental campaigners say a new generation of nuclear power stations may not then need to be built.

Why not eliminate an older generation of coal-fired plants instead, and eliminate their carbon emissions? Wind cannot replace nuclear by itself, because there is no cheap way to store wind power. There will remain a need for constant supplies of power to feed the base load, and that power will have to come from some kind of energy store such as fossil fuel or nuclear. The only one of these which doesn't emit CO2 is, of course, nuclear. Given the concern over global warming I am amazed that elimination of nuclear power is still a Green priority; it is vastly easier to sequester a few thousand tons of spent fuel every year than billions of tons of diffuse gas.

More Open Space

[n-baxley]

The biggest complaints about wind power seems to be the unsightly appearance of the towers dotting the landscape. Well, why are there not more wind farms in remote places? There are certainly many "remote place" around the world. Is the cost of transporting that power to the places it's needed just too great for this, or is the cost of producing power from wind too great in and of itself? It seems solar power might be simpler since there are no moving parts like a wind turbine. I'm pretty uneducated about this type of thing. What's the general concensus?

Re:More Open Space

[n-baxley]

I don't think finding a remote, windy place will be that hard. Ever been to Kansas?

Re:Eliminate nuclear? Who are they kidding?

[JJ]

Removing coal-fired stations would throw a lot more people out of work. New nuclear plants can be made virtually fail-proof and remain at zero CO2 emission level. Renewable is great, when it can be had and when enough power can be generated. It is far-fetched to imagine replacing nuclear power though.

I love a self-refuting opponent

[Spamalamadingdong]

you're full of poopoo.

... sez the guy who assumes the nome de plume of a group known for singing songs about Star Trek. Come set foot in the real world for a while, willya?

Solar and wind energy should be a bigger focus, but we lack an efficient transport and storage mechanism. We obviously don't have enough of an incentive to develop these technologies. dino-oil is cheap.

Not so obviously (you have to know what you're talking about), you're wrong. There is a huge market for energy-storage technologies which are lighter, cheaper, longer-lived and more compact than what we have now. There's a host of devices, from computers to phones to PDAs, which would benefit from these things. So far we are still stuck with prices where a little Li-ion battery holding ten watt-hours or so costs tens of dollars. Lifespan is a few years or a few thousand charges. Charging takes a large fraction of an hour, at best.

I thought we'd finally broken that barrier when NEC announced the proton polymer battery last year; with its power density, freedom from heavy metals, 5-minute charge time and a lifespan in the tens of thousands of cycles, it was a dream come true. Unfortunately, that may have been a flash in the pan. I have been looking for more news about this thing, and found nothing. It just goes to prove that transporting and storing electricity efficiently is hard.

Someday when we have a global power grid that efficiently moves energy between the continents, we will be able to produce peak-time energy for the other side of the globe and vice versa. for now i'm happily releasing nasty hydrocarbons to power my computer

And you're not going to change your habits in case that never comes about. I believe that makes you part of the problem. Quelle surprise.

Run the numbers, man.

[Spamalamadingdong]

Let's see. If you live in a nice, wet place where you get 30 inches of rainfall per year, and 1000 square feet of roof, that's 2500 cubic feet of water. Call it 20,000 pounds. If the roof is 20 feet above the ground, that makes 400,000 foot-pounds of work per year. I make that out to be about 540 kJ/year, or about 150 watt-hours; over the course of a year you'd be able to run a 20-watt compact fluorescent for a bit less than 8 hours (assuming no losses in conversion).

A 40 watt-peak solar panel on the roof would be able to run the same light for 8 hours a day, most days. The roof would accomodate quite a few of those panels. You can build your gutter-micro-hydro systems. Please do, I can always use a good laugh!