Belgium Plans Artificial Island To Store Wind Power

bmcage writes "Belgium wants to build an artificial energy storage island within 5 years. The island will store excess energy produced at night from the offshore wind farms already present in the North-Sea. From the article: 'Belgium is planning to build a doughnut-shaped island in the North Sea that will store wind energy by pumping water out of a hollow in the middle, as it looks for ways to lessen its reliance on nuclear power. One of the biggest problems with electricity is that it is difficult to store and the issue is exaggerated in the case of renewable energy from wind or sun because it is intermittent depending on the weather. "We have a lot of energy from the wind mills and sometimes it just gets lost because there isn't enough demand for the electricity," said a spokeswoman for Belgium's North Sea minister Johan Vande Lanotte.'"

Comments

Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean??

[dr.Flake]

First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.

But why make an island first? One could also transport the energy on shore and do the same trick with an old abandoned mining network for instance. Sounds like the upfront costs are going to be huge.
Also, the North Sea is the most busy shipping route on the planet. Do we really need an extra island in it?

Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean??

[hackertourist]

Actually Plan Lievense was to convert part of the IJsselmeer (a large lake) to a reservoir, so not on land.

A later version of the plan mitigated the flood risk by keeping the reservoir at a lower water level instead of a higher level than the surroundings, which meant using the IJsselmeer wasn't feasible as it was too shallow. So they looked at putting it in the North Sea instead. The Belgian plan is exactly this.

Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean??

[polar red]

On land it already been done in Belgium, can't find the link right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_Power_Station

Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean??

[bmcage]

In Belgium, you MUST vote, or you get a fine. It is called 'election DUTY' instead of the common 'election right'.

conceptual drawing and local print

[Anonymous Coward]

Translated short article with conceptual drawing

Picture, some more info

[De Lemming]

Here is an article in Dutch which includes a rendering of the island.

The capacity would be 300 MW, equivalent to a standard gas power station. It could provide electricity for 3 hours a day. This would be sufficient to intercept peak usage during morning and evening hours (1.5 hours each).

One of the contractors would be the Belgian dredging company which also worked on the Palm Islands in the United Arab Emirates. Building of the island would take around 2 years. Price: around 800 million euros.

Re:Has anyone done an assessment...

[ledow]

Not a lot. Certainly no more than building cities and skyscrapers over hundreds of years.

The energy in the wind is ENORMOUS. Stupendous. On a scale we can't even begin to imagine. Huge masses of air going higher than mountains and pushing things over at huge velocities without even trying.

But our harnessing of it is pathetic. It's like putting a child's windmill into a wind test tunnel, but actually much, much worse. Sure, we get useful energy "for free" but we don't take 1% of 1% of 1% out of the power of the wind (if you want to see why, just work out how much volume a wind turbine takes up out of, say, the entire atmosphere above your country. It's literally lost in the measurement error. Multiply by even a million and it's still nothing, and beaten by the change in wind pattern generated by, say, a small avalanche on a high mountain).

The biggest problem is: what sort of impact does having to add all that infrastructure have on the "greenness" of the project? What energy are you using to produce it, and cope with its losses, and what water will you use and how will you filter it (if at all) to get efficient transfer and how will you maintain it (if it's offshore - that's yet-another thing that has to be maintained at great expense and someone has to use a diesel-powered boat to get to it and check on it every so often, etc.). It's all small stuff but it all eats away at the efficiency of the system and we're already at the point where the efficiency of the system has now been admitted to be INADEQUATE after decades of investment and now needs this new "energy store" to make it more efficient.

Re:Has anyone done an assessment...

[hackertourist]

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full

Re:AKA pumped storage

[Thorodin]

I remember as a kid, Consumer's Power and Detroit Edison built the Ludington Pumped Storage facility which can generate quite a bit of power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant

Local jobs - good publicity

[spectrokid]

chalk this one up as cheap publicity for the politician. I AM Belgian, and right now the vast majority of electricity comes from Nuclear. We simply do not have enough wind power yet to justify such an investment. Note that Belgium is a world leader in dredging (we did the dubai artificial islands), and that the biggest dredging company is in the politicians constituency.