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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.