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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.
It's a dumb joke... but it's mine.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A typical power plant is often on the order of 100s of MW http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/how-is-electricity-measured.html, but this is of course what will be just the first such, and more will follow. Since they have a large battery farm, it will also not suffer from the general problem that many solar and wind farms have of being essentially intermittent in their production and often producing more power than one needs sometimes with no way to store it. Taken together with the fact that new wind systems are so efficient that many are repowering wind farms early https://electrek.co/2017/10/16/new-wind-turbine-efficiency-so-great-utilities-repowering-farms-early/, it appears that we're finally at a point where wind is starting to be a a serious competitor. Even if natural as were not killing coal and oil, solar and wind would seem to be doing almost as effective a job.
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.
Trolling much?
Firstly, it's not Scotland's use that is important, since the UK has a grid that covers Scotland, England and Wales.
Secondly, and I don't know if this is a good or bad measure, but households in the UK use more electricity per household than in many other European countries. Of course the number is much lower than in the USA, which is profligate in its domestic electricity use.
Note that many people use electricity for heating. They use storage heaters, which store heat when electricity is cheap (at night) and release it during the day.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They were being conservative. 30 MW / 20,000 homes = 1500 Watts per home.
That's higher than the average U.S. home's consumption. 10812 kWh per year / 8766 hours per year = 1233 Watts per home.
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.
If there's a lot of air in that bucket, you're going to have a hard time getting it to the bottom. I'd guess they actually just open the suction hole and let the air flow out and fill it with water as they're lowering it, then once it's on the bottom they suck water out. The flow of water over the bottom edge seems like it would loosen the sand and make it easier for the bucket to sink, at the same time that the water pressure on top of the bucket (due to the pressure differential from the suction) would force it downward.
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Whatâ(TM)s wrong with the summary?
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Salt water and electrical stuff tend to not mix, so how do they send (high voltage?) power - Must be some impressive insulation.
Thanks for dropping by, genius. Electricity has been transmitted underwater for 100 years; offshore wind turbines have been around for 1/4 century. It's all transmitted by pixies.
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
They use cables. You should look them up, it'll blow your mind.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
In the 1970's the lochs (reservoirs) in Argyllshire were converted to hydro electric (with many switched off because the electricity is not required) and the amazing Cruachan hydro scheme can start generating in 25 seconds for burst load on the national grid.
All the social provided housing in my area is being fitted with PV Solar panels and there is huge wind generation offshore with quite a bit onshore as well. Scotland is one of the windiest places in Europe.
see the daily wind generation stats here.
Heating water and installing hot water pipes is boring technology...
Especially in Iceland. When you need hot water, you just drill for it.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't even want to imagine what an âoebucketâ is. Sounds formidable.
Secondly, and I don't know if this is a good or bad measure, but households in the UK use more electricity per household than in many other European countries. Of course the number is much lower than in the USA, which is profligate in its domestic electricity use.
Note that many people use electricity for heating. They use storage heaters, which store heat when electricity is cheap (at night) and release it during the day.
The US has a quite a few cities where the average high is 85F or more for 1/3 to 1/2 of the year. The US also has very low electricity prices, Google tells me that UK electricity costs around 15.5 pence (~$0.20)per KW/hr, which is nearly double my rate.
I live in the southern part of the US, and my electricity cost peaks at ~$200 per month in the summer. The biggest energy saving measure I could take (aside from removing my pool) would be to install double pane windows. The cost for that ranges from $18k to $45k (I have many large windows). If doing that saved $50/month in AC costs , it would pay for itself in 30 years. The US is generally fairly efficient as far as electricity goes. Despite population increases, especially in the southern US, our electricity use has remained flat or decreased over the past 15 years. I would argue we are as efficient as the current economics dictate.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I also live in the southern US, and installed low E argon filled windows two decades ago. They dropped my electricity bill by maybe 10%. My original equipment furnace/AC units failed ten years ago, and I replaced them with ultra high efficiency HVAC (giant outside condensers etc). That cost a lot, but I had no choice about the replacement and the marginal cost of high efficiency was a few thousand each for the three floors of my house. That (plus finishing my attic and adding 16" of insulation under the roof in addition to the floored in attic insulation that was already there) dropped my bill by another 25%.
The problem with all of this is that now my house is down to an EPP payment of $145/month (big house, air conditioning, perimenopausal wife so we keep it pretty cold). This basically means that I have little marginal benefit left to receive if I install something like rooftop solar. The amortization time stretches out to over ten years, and while I've probably amortized the cost of the windows and the extra marginal cost (at least) of the HVAC, rooftop solar plus 30 KWH of battery (or more) would cost more than all three HVAC units combined. I keep looking into ways of doing it at zero out of pocket investment, and NC has just passed a bunch of laws that may make it possible -- basically finance it for the cost of my current electric bill over whatever, ten years. If I can work this out, I'll probably do it.
In other words, I agree that we are as efficient as the current economies dictate, although the rapidly changing CBA for both rooftop solar and commercial solar is going to be changing that over the next three years. Duke Power is planning to install 2.6 GW of solar in NC over the next three years. That is a bit more newsworthy and interesting than installing 30 MW of capacity in Scotland that (I suspect) will amortize "never" unless electricity is incredibly expensive in Scotland. At $0.11/KWH (which is pretty much what I pay in NC IIRC) it takes around 12 years for rooftop solar to pay for itself, assuming it lasts that long without any additional expense, and that is just too damn long.
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