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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Fossil fuel infrastructure costs just as much to build as does nuclear. This will just take longer to return the investment in terms of power that is paid for. Without value applied to pollution, cost of waste products, etc we can't measure the savings from using a non-polluting system (exclusive of the pollution costs to build it). If we did the return on investment could be seen as much higher than investment in other energy generation systems.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
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