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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.'"
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
Or they could used the Netherlands, as far as I remember most of it is below sea-level anyway :)
As a US DoD acquisitions type ... we do "cost analysis" ... The problem is that we're using cost estimates made by analogy, handcuffed by regulations and instructions that add an order of magnitude to cost and complexity of all projects, working with contractors who are so bad at business that they can only get government contracts.
Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
An environmental impact study isn't a cost analysis so that's irrelevant. They aren't trying to determine the most cost effective method of doing something (in which case spending more on the determining that then a particular method would cost is really stupid), they are trying to determine if they'll screw anything up by doing the work.
You can think it's a silly to do and that there's no need to care what the environmental impact is, or that any impact will worth the benefits, or whatever. But the time and cost compared to the time and cost to do the work isn't an argument for that.