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First Floating Wind Farm Delivers Electricity (arstechnica.com)
The world's first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid today. "The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible," reports Ars Technica. "At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20,000 Scottish homes." From the report: The installation, called Hywind Scotland, is also interesting because it was built by Statoil, a Norwegian mega-corporation known for offshore oil drilling. Statoil has pursued offshore wind projects in recent years, using the companyâ(TM)s experience building and managing infrastructure in difficult open sea conditions to its advantage. Hywind Scotland began producing power in September, and today it starts delivering electricity to the Scottish grid. Now, all that's left is for Statoil and its partner company Masdar to install a 1MWh lithium-ion battery, charmingly called âoeBatwind,â on shore. Batwind will help the offshore system regulate power delivery and optimize output. After a number of small demonstration projects, the five 6MW turbines are the first commercial turbines to lack a firm attachment to the seafloor. They're held in place using three giant suction anchors, which are commonly used in offshore oil drilling. Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment. The report mentions a 2013 video that shows how offshore wind farms work.
There's probably no A/Cs in Scotland... and who knows maybe they don't use electricity for heating either. Oh, and it's the EU so energy saving light-bulbs are mandatory.
There are quite a few brilliant heating systems around the world that use excess heating from electricity production, or waste incinerators... When heating is supplied to your house through a hot water pipe it's possible to get a very impressive efficiency.
Heating water and installing hot water pipes is boring technology, but well proven and probably one of the more cost efficient ways to reduce greenhouse emissions. Even if the heating origins from burning stuff.
Homes in the UK mostly use natural gas for heating.
The UK's average household electricity consumption is slightly below the EU average - which, in turn, is less than half of the US average.
Wind has been competitive or on the cusp of being competitive for about 5 years now. Especially off of Scotland, which has the highest capacity factor for wind in the world (capacity factor = ratio of actual electricity produced to peak production capability). In most of the world, onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 0.2-0.25, offshore wind about 0.3-0.4. Off Scotland it's closer to 0.6, with some locations going over 0.7. So if there's one place where wind will be viable and competitive, it's Scotland. (Not true for solar, which still relies heavily on subsidies to be cost-competitive.)
The 1 MWh battery they have is laughably tiny. For a typical power plant churning out 500 MW, that's 7.2 seconds worth of electricity. Even for a 30 MW wind farm with 0.6 capacity factor, it's only 3.3 minutes worth of electricity. What's going to save them is that the winds off Scotland are very consistent so they're not going to need that battery much.
Also, as stated in summary, these floating wind turbines borrow a lot of technology from oil platforms - anchorage, stability in heavy seas, survivability against ice floes, and underwater pipe/cable for pumping the oil/electricity back to shore. Some people like to think nothing good comes from oil, but that's simply not true. If it weren't for the R&D done by the oil industry, it probably would've taken 20 more years to get this floating wind farm working. This isn't an Us vs Them situation. This is simply All of Us finding the most cost-effective and least damaging forms of energy generation. Most oil companies are also heavily invested in renewable energy technology. Because they're not really oil companies; they're energy companies.
Here's a photo of the cross-section of a similar cable. It's pretty impressive.
The above cable contains 3 wires, each 500mm^2 in cross section. It's rated at 245kV, but I think it runs at 230kV, meaning it can carry 860A at full capacity.
dom