Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain's homes could be lit and powered by wind farms surrounding an artificial island deep out in the North Sea, under advanced plans by a Dutch energy network. The radical proposal envisages an island being built to act as a hub for vast offshore wind farms that would eclipse today's facilities in scale. Dogger Bank, 125km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, has been identified as a potentially windy and shallow site. The power hub would send electricity over a long-distance cable to the UK and Netherlands, and possibly later to Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. TenneT, the project's backer and Dutch equivalent of the UK's National Grid, recently shared early findings of a study that said its plan could be billions of euros cheaper than conventional wind farms and international power cables. The sci-fi-sounding proposal is sold as an innovative answer to industry's challenge of continuing to make offshore wind cheaper, as turbines are pushed ever further off the coast to more expensive sites as the best spots closer to land fill up.

Comments

The Dutch have done this for a while. B-)

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The Dutch have expanded into the ocean and used wind power for quite a while.

They've expanded their country by building dikes, pumping out water using windmill pumps, and reclaiming the seabed.

Building an artificial island and surrounding it with windmills to generate enormous amounts of electrical energy (rather than, say, building nuclear reactors) is right in character. B-)

(Back in the mid 20th century, one of the Lampoon magazines had a joke conspiracy theory article about the Dutch taking over the world by expanding out into the ocean and pushing the water up onto everybody else's country. It somehow involved people in other countries being awakened by the sound of chainsaws, wielded by invading Dutch military squads, being applied to their kitchen doors (to convert them into the two-segment, house-ventilating, "Dutch doors").)

It's all over but the shouting

[hyades1]

It won't be long before wind and solar have reached the point where they won't need any subsidies at all to compete with fossil fuels...which no doubt will still enjoy the billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies they get right now.

It's unfortunate that North America squandered its opportunity to lead the world in developing and manufacturing the means to provide renewable energy, thanks to lobbying by fossil fuel corporations and low-information taxpayers who have never figured out how little they spend subsidizing renewables, and how much they spend subsidizing oil, gas, and coal.

Re:Can someone explain why this is better?

[xlsior]

I mean, I get it's not an eyesore as some people claim, if it's offshore, but surely the cost of shipping the items out there and running a hefty cable back to land is astronomical? Also servicing?

Is there that little free land in the region?

A few things to consider:
- There is indeed little free space the way it is -- the entire country is about twice the size of New Jersey, with similar population density. (16,000 square miles, over 17,000,000 people, 1062 people per square mile). No sky scrapers.
- The Netherlands is *really* flat -- about half is actually below sea level, and probably over 80% at less than 8m / 25 ft above sea level.
- You'll get much higher wind speeds / more energy generation on top of hills (of which there are few), or off-shore in the middle of unobstructed sea.
- The North Sea is relatively shallow (overall mean depth of 300ft/ 90 meters, but much shallower in many areas. Still, I'd expect that they'd use artificial structures similar to oil drill platforms to install the windmills rather than 'true' islands

The U.S. isn't a good site for offshore wind

[Solandri]

Europe is blessed with a massive shallow ocean all around its periphery. Most of it is less than 100 meters in depth, making it relatively easy to build offshore structures like offshore wind farms. The UK and Ireland aren't so much islands, are they are parts of the European continent which just happened to have their surroundings flooded. Scotland and the coast of Spain have some of the strongest and most consistent offshore winds in the world, and the shallow water depth makes it relatively cheap to build offshore wind turbines to harvest that wind energy.

In contrast, the U.S. west coast (where winds from the ocean are strongest and most consistent) pretty much has no continental shelf. I'm in Southern California, and when I go fishing, by the time I'm a half km from shore, the water is already deeper than the North Sea. By about 3-5 km offshore, the water is a half kilometer deep. The east coast is better off, with a continental shelf that extends about 50-100 km out that's about 100-200 meters deep. But the wind blows predominantly from west to east, meaning the wind on this continental shelf is mostly spoiled by land, so is inconsistent and doesn't blow as strongly as off Europe. That's why most of the offshore wind in the U.S. has concentrated off the coast of Massachusetts - the land there makes a sharp turn to the east, providing about 200 km of continental shelf with wind unspoiled by land to the west.

low-information taxpayers who have never figured out how little they spend subsidizing renewables, and how much they spend subsidizing oil, gas, and coal.

The subsidy on oil and gas, if attributed entirely to gasoline alone, works out to about 2.3 cents per gallon. Even if you take the high estimates some people like to use (which includes things like low income assistance to purchase home heating oil), it works out to about 10 cents per gallon. The Federal fuel tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon, plus about 30 cents per gallon at the state and local level. So there's no net subsidy for fossil fuels. Rather there's a huge tax on it (albeit not as big as in other countries). Huge enough to more than swamp out the coal subsidies (which are only about 1/4 that of oil and gas subsidies).

So low-information or not, they're still right. The people complaining about the "huge" subsidies fossil fuels get always look at total dollar amounts. The total amount is huge because the vast majority of our energy is still derived from fossil fuels. If you instead look at the subsidy per unit of energy generated (i.e. how much the subsidy skews the price, depending on the energy source), you can see how massive renewable subsidies are compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.

There's nothing wrong with this - you want to subsidize technologies you wish to develop more quickly. But arguing rewewables subsidies are underfunded compared to fossil fuels based on total dollar amount is just plain ignorant. It's like complaining that California gets $4 billion in federal highway funding while Wyoming only gets $360 million. It's not because Wyoming is being short-changed, it's because California has a lot more roads (and cars) than Wyoming. The proper comparison in that case would be federal highway dollars per mile of road (or perhaps miles driven on said roads). Just like the proper comparison for energy subsidies is per kWh or per megajoule.

Re:The Dutch have done this for a while. B-)

[mvdwege]

Look, the nuclear industry* has promised us a pony that turned out to glow in the dark and have two heads so many times, that the first time I will support a thorium-based reactor is if private industry develops and runs a prototype for 5 years in the CEO's backyard, not a moment sooner.

Meanwhile, in the real world, nuclear power relies heavily on subsidies, has a massive waste problem and is tied in with the political hairy problem of Proliferation.

The money wasted on new powerplants might as well be spent researching power storage solutions.

*NOTE: I said industry. I am not against nuclear power per se, but the current industry is a malicious beast that massively overpromises and underdelivers, and it has to die and reconstructed before I will take nuclear power seriously as an alternative.

Re:The Dutch have done this for a while. B-)

[AmiMoJo]

Aside from the expense of trying to build such a complex device and supply/maintain it on an island, the extreme weather is probably more than anyone can certify a nuclear plant for anyway.

Why bother spending more on a nuclear plant and running and decommissioning costs when you can just build a cheaper, cleaner wind farm? The wind farm won't need subsidies either, and the energy will be cheaper. Much cheaper.

Is it 2013 again?

[Computershack]

Seriously? THIS IS NOT NEW NEWS. I live in East Yorkshire. This offshore windfarm which will be four times larger than the worlds current largest has been planned for over half a decade and already has started to be built a few years ago, being built in four stages. Siemens even built a brand new Wind Turbine factory on Hull docks which was completed 2 years ago to build wind turbines and service the windfarm.