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World's First Floating Windfarm To Take Shape Off Coast of Scotland (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's first floating windfarm has taken to the seas in a sign that a technology once confined to research and development drawing boards is finally ready to unlock expanses of ocean for generating renewable power. After two turbines were floated this week, five now bob gently in the deep waters of a fjord on the western coast of Norway ready to be tugged across the North Sea to their final destination off north-east Scotland. The ~$256 million Hywind project is unusual not just because of the pioneering technology involved, which uses a 78-meter-tall underwater ballast and three mooring lines that will be attached to the seabed to keep the turbines upright. It is also notable because the developer is not a renewable energy firm but Norway's Statoil, which is looking to diversify away from carbon-based fuels.
The first-of-a-kind nature means supply chain complexity, too. “We have 15 main contractors. For the future we cannot have 15, we can have between 5 and 10,” said Leif Delp, project manager for Hywind. Expect costs to come down.
Bear in mind that it is an Oil & Gas company that decided to pursue this project.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Not so bad when you still have the vestiges of an entire industry devoted to building offshore platforms nearby.
All power plants fluctuate. Nuke stations need refuelling and maintenance at least twice a year dropping or stopping output.
Nuclear refueling cycles are almost always 12 or 18 months. Not 6, you have an inaccurate source of info that you should no longer trust or repeat. The outages are planned for low demand times, typically Spring and Fall, and therefore do not present the same problems that widely varying output on an hourly basis that we can see from wind.