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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.'"
It’s a good idea. I do wonder how the harsh north sea tides will affect it though. And as power storage goes, it's the safest way to store it... also the most tasty.
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?
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
You can't have wind power on any serious scale without storage. Storage built off-shore - near the wind-farm - also lessens the load on the link to the mainland.
Only question is: Will the polulation accept the high price, or will they prefer to import cheaper nuclear energy from France?
Translated short article with conceptual drawing
Weather and sunlight are not, and cannot be, intermittent. They can be variable and cyclical, but not intermittent. There is always weather, and the sun does not shut down at sunset.
The engineer in me wonders what happens when an extended period of calm, cloudy weather fails to yield enough surplus energy to pump up their doughnut.
Perhaps they should consult the experts at Krispy Kreme.
Or redesign it as a Belgian waffle?
Now I'm sorry I missed breakfast.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Once again we have a green/renewable energy plan that comes without a price tag. This stuff isn't free -- in fact it's pretty expensive. If people knew how expensive they'd, be more cautious about building.
After being named "the emperor of Ostend" Vande Lanotte needs to clean up his public image.
Accusations of various conflicts of interest exist on the guy.
A broader approval of this project is needed.
He better makes sure this is a viable project and not a "prestige project" like some of the Dubai venture of the same companies proposing this.
A similar approached is used with fresh water in Germany, unfortunately salt water is a lot more aggressive.
Furtunately Belpex gives some verifyable data:
http://belpex.be/index.php?id=5
How long will the big spread in this data be profitable ?
Are there some other ways of arbitraging this spread to a lower value ? Yes there are (smartgrid etc....),
the same politicians and electricity monopolies are standing in the way of using these.
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.
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.
Yes. Slashdot wrote about it i december: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/30/1155243/new-study-suggests-wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change
If they're going to this much effort to store/release coastal water, wouldn't it be easier to just rely on the daily tides instead? No wind turbines required.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
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.
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full
Dr. Evil is using this as a cover to build a "secret" lair.
He is Belgian, after all!
While they are busy pumping water out at night, North Sea rains could pour water in their waterhole 24 hours a day. It would be wiser to pump water up into the artificial lake, so that rain will just add energy to the system. But for sure this has been designed by a belgian engineer...
Also: Goddamn trees, right, stealing all that wind energy and trying to cook us. The dwarves were right!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The scheme is not as much about price arbitrage as about smoothing demand.
There's more demand for energy during the evenings than during the mornings, and price differences will never be able to eliminate that. No one will turn off their lights in the evening to turn them on during the morning, no matter what the prices are.
The effect of energy storage are to allow a steady supply, like wind, to be used when it's most needed. Storage would be even more important if solar energy is used, for obvious reasons.
Do they come with different dipping sauces?
Why is Snark Required?
if you switch from nuclear to wind you give no benefit to the environment. while there is still fossil fuel power on the grid its irresponsible to reduce nuclear capacity.
Dont forget that electricity currently accounts for only about 20-30% of energy use. to go carbon neutral we need to electrify home heating/cooking and transport. even if we make everything more efficient as we do this, we still need to double electricity generating capacity.
Why not just reduce price and thus not "loose" energy? Why whenever I come to Europe, all I hear is "energy saving" by all means, when it turns out they just loose the energy instead of selling it cheaper? There could be a special, cheap night tariff for electricity, and it would solve the problem way better than spending huge amount of money on building an artificial island.
Some time ago I read an article where a German professor suggested to dig out a cylindrical hole of some 100 meters across and lift it with the excess energy. There was a nice mock up picture going along with it, showing a house and a cow being lifted ;-)
Pumped storage hydro is a superb way to store and retrieve electric energy. Indeed it is the only proven way to do it on a massive scale.
Power engineers love pumped storage facilities because of a long list of desirable properties they have. From the power grid point of view, they blend well with everything ever done in the past or contemplated in the future.
USA slashdotters may be interested to hear that the Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility has been aiding the reliability and affordability of electric power in New York State and New York City for decades.
The innovation in the Belgian case is to do it using a hole in the water instead of a lake on a mountain top. I'm sure that it will present it's own engineering challenges, but nothing insurmountable comes to mind. We should all wish them good luck.
no shit, sherlock.
Perhaps you shouldn't concentrate so much on electricity directly.
Rebuild your wind farm to produce compressed air instead of electricity.
Couple of years ago the nearby town of Knokke was trying to build a yacht-harbour and build a similar construction along the Zeebrugge harbour. Their intention was to finance the needed dike by selling premium apartments (with a premium sea-view). They could never convince the politicians, public and the investors together. Maybe the socialist Vande Lanotte should look at raising some "different" money for raising money for his "green" idea ?
I've been told that the power required to make enough aluminium for a windmill exceeds what that windmill can generate in its service life. Even if those things didn't kill wildlife and break down all the time they'd still be a pretty stupid idea. And now we want to use water pumps and turbines to use that overpriced electricity to try and empty a pool out in the north sea. Every time it rains you'd basically lose energy and most people who've worked in the north sea will tell you rain isn't really rare out there. Why not scrap the windmills altogether and /collect/ rainwater in that pool instead, then use conventional hydro power to generate electricity? Oh I know, because it doesn't generate nearly the same amount of meaningless jobs.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
I've been told that the power required to make enough aluminium for a windmill exceeds what that windmill can generate in its service life..
Does that make even a little bit of sense from an economic point of view? If the power is X kWh to create the windmill, then the cost of creating the windmill would be X kWh * Y $/kWh (plus lots of other costs for transportation, installation, maintenance). What you are saying is that the most money that the windmill could ever produce would be some number less than that cost (since it would produce Z kWh * Y $/kWh, where Z X). Even with a large subsidy to offset the non-creation costs, it would be a money losing proposition and nobody would do it.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
The ROI should be justifiable by the data on this website: http://belpex.be/index.php?id=5 Electricity prices rise and fall during the day, between high and low values. The interview talks about 300 MW of power inside the island. During a total of 3 Hours every day, two times 1.5 hours per day. How much return for the invested energy, is this at 100 % or maybe only 80 % or 40 % "Dredgers" should be facing some return for their investment like this. Not enough parameters to make a full scale bet I would say. Right now wind energy is increasing the spread on the Belpex prices. How much lower will the spread become if the "island" is introduced, are there other technologies to achieve the same??
I've been told that the power required to make enough aluminium for a windmill exceeds what that windmill can generate in its service life.
Windmills are, and have been for quite a while, profitable over their lifetime, even if you discount any subsidies.
Since the energy cost of all the materials in a windmill are built into the overall cost of a windmill, it becomes obvious you've been misinformed.
Also, the meme that windmills kill wildlife is just hype. You've been misinformed there, too.
It sounds to me like you need to listen to more reputable sources. Yours are misleading you, or just plain lying to you, for whatever reason.
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.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
While that may be true about the amount of energy in the wind, our earth sciences aren't advanced enough to go further with it anyway. If we take 10% of the energy out of the wind over a large area not knowing how it effects global weather patterns, we're playing russian roulette.
where they used these floating islands to dissipate the residual energy of moving someone from point A to point B. The idea being that the moving the person without doing so would be fatal to them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Belgium? I thought pumping donuts was a Greek thing.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Actually, we do.
Wind is, directly and indirectly, powered by the sun heating our atmosphere. The total power received by the earth from the sun is 1.7×10^17 watts. 29% of this is immediately reflected back to space by the surface and clouds, so this leaves 1.2x10^17 watts to actually interact with our atmosphere somehow. Let's take that as an upper limit for wind power.
In 2008 the average global electricity power generated was 2.3x10^12 watts. 2.5% of that is generated from wind power, call it 5x10^10 watts. Considering losses in generation, I'll assume we are actually taking twice that from the wind so about 10^11 watts.
Which is about 1 millionth of that upper limit for available wind power, or "1% of 1% of 1%" as you would put it.
Now factor in that wind power generation is growing exponentially, doubling every 3 years, and then it starts to become more plausible that there will be local climate effects within a few decades.
I saw something like this 3 years ago. The idea was to pump air into a large cave for storage. The air pressure would power the electric turbines on demand. They figured it was overall more efficient for the wind turbines to run mechanical pumps rather than generate electricity to run the air pumps.
Not sure how closely this applies
So they want to store energy in a hole in the water. I thought Holy Water was patented by the Catholic Church.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
90 miles in 30 minutes? Damn...Belgium has some crazy speed limits
People constantly trash the government because it is the cool thing to do, but really, what do you know at how well the government operates compared to a fortune 500? Nothing? I used to work for both, and can say firsthand that there is plenty of institutional madness to go around.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's turtles, all the way down.
No brain, no pain.
Belgium is one of only 15 nations in the world with a debt to GDP ration of about 100% or higher (the US is another by the way). Their credit rating was recently downgraded, and last year the EU forced them to implement austerity measures. Might be tough to fund something like this.
Not saying that I agree with your parent poster (actually, I'd guess the assertion to be utter BS), but your reasoning does consider all of the necessary factors to determine that windmills could not make money under those conditions (producing less energy than required to construct).
Cost of energy changes radically based on market environment--a large scale Hydro facility can generate electricity for 10% of the cost of a smaller diesel-fueled power plant. Even in the same physical location, if the cheap coal-fired plant operating today has to shut down because of environmental impact 3 years from now, it may make sense to take advantage of today's cheap energy to manufacture windmills to profit off of tomorrow's soaring energy prices.
Basically, if you manufacture the wind mill in a cheap energy environment and then operate it in an expensive energy environment you can still make a profit even if it generates less energy than it took to build. From an economic perspective it is basically a device by which you can perform energy arbitrage across energy market A and temporally (and possibly physically) displaced market B. Market distortions such as subsidies and cheap capital (minimizing the negative time-value of money impact caused by the temporal displacement of returns) make it easier to make a profit.
what can possibly go wrong.
Also, the meme that windmills kill wildlife is just hype. .
Not entirely. It does seem that bats have a problem with windmills in some locations.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That is the most insightful posting I've read about renewable energy in a long while.
It's much cheaper to smelt the steel for the turbine towers using coal-electricity than using wind-electricity, so it must be built *RIGHT NOW*.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You don't need rock (see example (Palm Jumeira)). Sand is O.K. and easier to handle. The "low lands" Belgium and Netherlands have some experience handling sand.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Not entirely. It does seem that bats have a problem with windmills in some locations.
So that's what's happened to the lesser north sea bat! Or not.
Wind turbines at sea can get much larger than on the land, have far fewer problems with turbulence and shear forces, and are generally a lot more cost effective. Combining them with localized power storage seems like a sensible approach (the one thing you can say for sure is that wind power isn't constant).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I've heard the similar comments about solar cells, and if you think about it, it's bs. I can buy a solar panel that produces 250W for $400. Figure an average of 8hrs a day so that's about 2000kWh/day. Figure that it costs about $0.12/kWh from the power company, so $0.24/day*365 = $87/year. Typical estimates for solar panel lifetime is 20 years, so that far exceeds the amount paid for the panel. Now, keep in mind that the cells are just part of the cost of the panel, there's the frame, glass, and other parts, so say that the solar cells cost $200. Probably high; the $400 quoted is from Home Depot--not the cheapest source. Now, do you really think that if it took more than $200 worth of energy to make the solar cells for that panel, the company making the cells would have to charge more? Yes, my estimates are pretty rough, but I think I'm in the ballpark here. There are, of course, a lot of variables such as latitude, reduced output due to cloud cover, lower efficiency due to average angel of incident during the day, etcetera. If someone has better estimates, feel free to comment.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Have you ever seen one of those windmills? They are huge. They have stairs on the inside. I wouldn't be surprised if they had some kind of rudimentary elevator.
But the giant smokestacks dumping heat and CO2 into the air have no effect??
In 1996 I did a bit of work at a fairly small pump storage plant (something like 2 x 250MW units). The casing had been removed and I entered the pipework by climbing without difficulty between two turbine blades. That's how large these things are.
They had steel mesh at the lake end of the inlet up above but I'm sure plenty of small fish get through. The number of cormorants and the large numbers of the biggest freshwater turtles I've ever seen patiently waiting at the outlet net (cormorants perched on the floats) implied that a lot of very confused little fish get dumped out of the outlet when it's running.
I know it's an easy mistake to make, but it does look very stupid misinformation just the same to anyone with a rough grasp on the chemistry.
The reason coal is used to produce iron and steel is mainly due to the chemical reaction of carbon in the coal and the oxygen in the iron ore and not the actual heat input. Typically natural gas or electricity is used for any later steps where only heat is required. For example, at the steelworks where I worked in the 1990s which was built almost on top of a coal mine the blast furnace was run on coal (to give that chemical reaction I mentioned above), but the billets were reheated in a gas furnace to be rolled into steel rod or bar. There were a variety of reasons as to why it was cheaper and more convenient to use gas (not gasoline) piped in from the local refinery and made from imported crude for heating instead of the coal that was almost underfoot. Other places that actually melted and cast the steel used arc furnaces. Outside of China (and maybe not even there these days) coal is rarely used to melt steel for casting, just used to make it out of iron ore and make it into billets of steel in the first place.
So even if the last coal fired power station shut down tomorrow we'd still need to dig some coal up if we want iron and steel.
Man! There's always some Joker that brings up problems with bats.
For those who think the above makes sense, consider how buildings or a few trees do a lot more to airflow than the world's largest windmill. It doesn't take more than a couple of seconds thought to expose the lie above.
To the poster above, are you some silly parrot that didn't put in the two seconds of thought before repeating a lie or are you a liar looking for some suckers to mislead? WTF is it with this luddite bullshit? My paycheck comes from resource industries, so oil, coal and even uranium, but if you think you want to help me and the industries I work for by telling such stupid lies you can just go and fuck off and try to "help" somebody else.
The shuttle in terms of its engines are far more efficient than the merlins on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Yet, the F9/dragon takes a crew of 7 to LEO for 120M, and the FH takes 54 tonnes to LEO for 100 M. OTOH, the shuttle being more energy efficient could take 7 ppl and 25 tonnes in one trip. Of course, it cost 1.5 BILLION per launch.
So, you tell us, what matters more: the efficiency of the storage, or the costs of the storage?
That is why I keep saying that we should be pushing thermal storage combined with a Natural Gas boiler back-up. The thermal storage will have be around 50% efficiency. However, it is a CHEAP means of storage, with the ability to provide load balancing for a variable grid. Yes, you lose about 50% of the energy stored, HOWEVER, this is still cheap while building out AE systems (geo-thermal, wind, solar, etc) AND getting cheaper storage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
when it rains? And fills your donut hole in?
Seems like a better idea to use the windmills to pump water into elevated tanks. Put the tank on a hill and you can get a larger pressure differential than seems possible with this method. Make a grated roof and take advantage of the rain...
Howdy howdy howdy
If you check the map, you'll see that the IJsselmeer is actually a sea bay that's been closed of with a dam (the Afsluitdijk). It used to be called the Zuiderzee (South Sea).
Which brings me back to my original plan: Why not just use the Netherlands?
(1) Large parts of the Netherlands are below sea level, so there would be no risk of flooding neighboring areas.
(2) There are already pumps and dike-systems everywhere, so the conversion costs would be minimal.
(3) Houseboats, Barges, swimming apartments are really cool.
(4) For starters one could do peak use in the summer months only. And the Dutch wouldn't really mind, because they're in Italy at that time.
From Wikipedia:
At the start of 2012, there were 498 operational wind turbines in Belgium, with a capacity of 1080 MW. [2] The amount of electricity generated from wind energy has surpassed 2 TWh per year. [1]
and
Electricity consumption in Belgium has increased slowly since 1990 and nuclear power provides 54%, 45 billion kWh per year, of the country’s electricity.[1]
Excluding some magical increase of wind conditions to radically change capacity factor, 2.3GW would just raise those 2-odd TWh/year to somewhere near 5 TWh/y, thus making the dent rather unimpressive. And that's without counting in the intermittency of wind which would need to be balanced by pumped storage plants which are quite lossy not to mention nonexistent (at least in the required capacity) and based on a completely different economic model (pump up using cheap night electricity and generating during peaks).
The artificial island as pumped storage is indeed cool and useful idea but its 300 MW for 5 hours are not gonna make that much of a dent.
Sorry for being uncool and boringly realistic spoilsport, but seriously people, there would be no need for it if you just did your math (and fact checking) for yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generation_in_Belgium.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Belgium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Typical_capacity_factors
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