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The US's First Offshore Wind Farm Will Cut Local Power Prices By 40%
merbs writes: The U.S. is finally getting its first offshore wind farm. Deepwater Wind has announced that its Block Island project has been fully financed, passed the permitting process, and will begin putting "steel in water" this summer. For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates. The company has secured $290 million in financing, with funding from the likes of Key Bank and France's Société Générale, in part on the strength of its long-term power purchase agreement with US utility National Grid. Block Island has thus surpassed the much-publicized Cape Wind project, long touted as "the nation's first offshore wind farm," but that has been stalled out for over a decade in Massachusetts, held up by a tangle of clean power foes, regulatory and financing woes, and Cape Cod homeowners afraid it'd ruin the view.
My problem with wind turbines isn't the dead birds.
Coal kills 13000 humans in the USA alone every year, 200k yearly worldwide.
I'd rather kill 20000 birds than kill 10000 humans.
I hope they make this endeavour happen. Offshore wind farms are the only type of wind farms that produce electricity with some real consistency. Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, do you know what that means for the grid ?
Without economical, large scale energy storage, wind can't scale. Right now that means pumped hydro, which is very limited depending on geography.
In the meantime, wind+solar helps take the focus away from the real problem, which is ending coal burning in the world without increasing natural gas consumption. Only nuclear can do that right now.
If you really are concerned about climate change, you should be demading solar+wind+nuclear+biomass+geothermal, aka all of the above solution.
You are wrong about offshore wind. It does not fluctuate in the same way as wind over land. Also the term 'unreliable' is completely wrong. Wind is reliable. For that you have a weather/windforecast, that is updated every 15 mins and is used to adapt the plant and the grid for the next few hours.
Storage at a plant side makes no sense at all, for that you have a grid.
Demanding storage is just utter nonsense. No one would build a renewable plant if the plant itself would be required by law to have a fall back (be it storage, magic or a nuke plant) means of energy production.
The whole point of a power grid is that many plants together are orchestrated to provide the power for that grid.
Mandatory storage would only complicate that orchestration instead of helping.
Also, get a clue about terminology: e.g. read up what base load is. Wind plants are by definition base load, as you can not 'dispatch' them. That means: they are not load following, nor are they used for balancing (peak) power, so: they are base load plants. Hint: base load does not mean what you think it means.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Solar in Ontario is suicide... Above 40N, bellow 40S solar is crazy stupid, yeah, that includes you Germans. Between 30N and 30S its good specially on a country that has lots of hydro to load follow.
I would imagine that wind up in Ontario would be more economical with the very strong winter winds.
But I do prefer nuclear and hydro anyhow. Ontario has one of the most rational electricity mix in the world. And the greenies keep insisting nuclear is too expensive.
China is building new nuclear reactors in a little over 5 years.
And its not just China, South Korea, India, Russia, are all doing nuclear at sane costs and sane schedules. That's called have a rational nuclear regulator.
I'm not a nuclear professional, but after all the anti nuclear crap that hit the media after Fukushima that got me so pissed off I decided to study nuclear, and all I studied showed me nuclear is being unfairly targeted. Massive lies and miss information.
Even today, the most expensive nuclear project in the world, Olkiluoto in Finland is still cheaper then energiewende, with all of its overruns. And I've heard plenty of arguments why Areva EPR is likely the most expensive reactor on the market today. GE ESBWR and Westinghouse AP1000 seems much cheaper. Yet the anti nuke types take Olkiluoto as the reference to discuss.
Wind $1.25 per peak capacity Watts... If your effective capacity factor is 20%, then you're up to $ 6.25 per Watt, and then you must add the fossil backup costs. Must talk levelized costs.
Then you need to account for the fact that a nuclear reactor can be built fairly close to its primary market, while wind turbines must be built where the wind is, then you must add transmission line costs, substations, lots of things the greenies conveniently ignore in their calculations. When you add all of that up, even with wind capacity factor of 30% it is more expensive even than Olkiluoto that you love to quote as poster child of nuclear too expensive.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
The current Westinghouse reactor offering, the AP600 and AP1000 started development work before Chernobyl. It took 26 yrs from conception to certification of the AP600 cause the US NRC didn't know how to certify a passively safe reactor, so it took them 16 years to certify it.
This isn't an intrinsic, unavoidable nuclear problem, but rather how the US NRC is setup to certify it, it can be improved.
There is a lot of vested interest in nuclear failing, or at least not innovating and continuing to be expensive.
You can either pretend we don't need it like the Germans, do nothing to help like American politicians or demand we make it more rational which will reduce nuclear costs substantially in the short term.
If you listen to actual energy professionals even those that do utility scale solar and wind, the actual technical professionals admit the same problems I'm pointing out to you. It's a fact.
Nuclear doesn't need GW scale to be economical.
Water cooled nuclear likes GW scale plants.
Gen IV reactors work just fine at 250MW scale, and they do load following, so a site with 4x 250MW reactors can reliably supply power to a market with 1GW demand without need for fossil backups while load following wind/solar if needed. But once you have a nuclear reactor, wind and solar aren't useful.
It's helpful to actually learn about nuclear from factual nuclear sites, instead of from anti nuclear sites, those are not environmentalists, but rather shills paid to bash nuclear to keep coal and natural gas in power for as long as possible.
I sugest:
https://www.coursera.org/cours...
BRAZIL has all the load following it needs. Its called big hydro. Brazil's peak electricity demand is around 100GW, with over 80GW of installed big hydro generation capacity. The critical aspect is water supply (reservoir status). Its what pumped hydro should be instead, an actual generation asset instead of a purely storage solution.
We don't have a boatload of wind cause our govt is very inefficient to do its thing. Matter of fact in many ways I'm ashamed of being Brazilian. But we could easily add 30 GW worth of nameplate wind. We also have the big advantage of the wind being the strongest when its dry, so it compliments hydro perfectly.
We also have 2GW of nuclear (2 reactors), another 1.3GW nuclear in construction, and tens of GW in various fossil plants (mostly natural gas).
This storage argument is very interesting. You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. Local storage is far from sufficient.
The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
I'm not making up lies, you're the one ignoring the inconvenient facts to your side.
I wish solar+wind could do the job, but it cant. The problem is the side that can't recognize that nuclear is essential to get rid of fossil fuels worldwide. China is burning more coal than the entire rest of the world combined. Still they are doing solar,wind,nuclear and hydro as fast as they can. They are adding clean electricity to their grid much faster than Europe or the USA, cause the govt doesn't care about NIMBY nonsense.