Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
While your questions have some merit, I find it strange that with announcements like this, people always seem to assume that no thought or planning has gone into it whatsoever. Without any specific knowledge on the subject, I find it pretty likely that the answers to your questions are
a) No suitable onshore site exists. Abandoned mines have a risk of contamination if there is a leak, and would be too expensive to make safe.
b) Cost-benefit analysis has been done and favoured the island over other options. Storing large amounts of electricity is a very expensive business.
c) Island to be built in coastal waters outside any shipping lanes.
Of course, I could be wrong...
Oh no... it's the future.
This is similar to Plan Lievense (translation), a 30 year old idea. The original plan did call for storage on land, by pumping water into a reservoir. Only problem is that a breach of the reservoir had the potential of creating a massvice flood.
As for room on the North Sea, there are already plans for wind farms to be built there. Since ships have to steer well clear of these, you could build this reservoir in the middle of it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is a very old idea, although most countries don't need to build artificial islands to do it. For example, the Ben Cruachan pumped storage plant in Scotland uses two lochs at different levels. Energy is stored by pumping water from the low one to the high one.
Pumped storage power stations are typically used for short-term handling of power spikes; if you get sudden load on the electricity network, you can spin up a pumped storage plant in minutes --- sometimes seconds if you know that a spike is due and can prepare --- while traditional oil, coal and nuclear can take hours. So the pumped storage plant handles the load while the big power stations rev up.
Drawbacks involve not being very efficient ---Wikipedia says 70-80% --- and they don't store that much energy. Ben Cruachan, for example, can only generate 440MW for 22 hours before running dry. They're also environmentally rather poor (although not nearly as bad as the alternatives, which are usually fast-start gas turbines, of course).
Using an artificial island is an interesting idea. If you're using off-shore wind farms then the power generation is local and you save on infrastructure and transmission costs; you avoid destroying valuable mountainside (although at the expense of destroying valuable sea bottom); it's close to the coastal cities which would be using the power... does anyone have a link to more technical information? Like how big it is? The linked article is almost entirely content-free.
d) The guy who owns the company that would be contracted to do it is the golf-buddy of the guy who makes the decision.
Unfortunately, that particular link I have witnessed on scales from the education secretary down to local headteachers in everything from primary schools to academies (privatised schools that break the rules that state schools aren't allowed to break, and get private "sponsorship" which allows them to sign exclusive, long-term contracts with manufacturers owned by the guy from the same army regiment as the "superhead" appointed by a parliamentary Lord to run the academy).
The councillor in charge of waste management in my local London borough "just happens" to own the independent waste management company that they contract out all their services to. It's declared on something called the "Register of Interests" but I can't help feeling that that's a conflict of interest whether you state it or not.
It's really that common in politics and the only question is whether you can prove it or not. I've worked in places where it was literally so bad, we used to Google the directors of the company of any van that pulled into the car park. Glaziers, carpet-fitters, electricians, IT cabling guys, you name it, we managed to find direct links back to those people authorised the contracts (and, in some cases, they directly profited from the companies that were employed to do those contracts - but it was all "okay" because they declared their interests in some obscure paperwork that was almost impossible to find).