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World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Opens Off Northwest England (reuters.com)
The world's largest offshore wind farm has opened off the northwest coast of England. "The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England's east cost which has a capacity of 630 MW," reports Reuters. From the report: The Walney Extension (as it is called) is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches. The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally. Britain is the world's largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed. Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014. The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years. You can view some drone footage of the offshore windfarm via Orsted.
See also https://www.electricitymap.org... for realtime CO2 intensity of electricity production across a big chunk of the world... e.g. right now (morning peak), the UK's running on 28% gas, 24% nuclear, 19% wind, 8% coal, 4% solar.
Not necessarily. For one thing, we need more power generation that doesn't emit CO2, even at the expense of having to pay for it.
If cost is not a concern then why not use an energy source that is more reliable and emits less CO2? Such as nuclear power.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
Also, consider what happens if we stop these payments: we'll end up with fewer wind generators. This'll save us money at times where the wind is very high and we're generating too much wind power, but what about the rest of the time? We'll end up having to pay to generate that power in gas plants instead. If the extra money spent on gas is greater than the constraint payments being paid to wind farms, then you'd be stupid to stop the latter. It'll cost you more money.
Or, they could use nuclear power. That's what they could use the rest of the time. Nuclear power has lower environmental impact that natural gas so that seems more logical to use nuclear power to cover when the wind doesn't blow.
The article you linked hints at this when it says 'The National Grid said the wind constraint payments were “the most economically efficient way of managing additional green capacity”.'.
I don't have data on how often these payments are being made, but I can tell you that the UK's wind farms spend a significant amount of time generating less than the highest amount they generate, which suggests they don't spend a lot of time in shutdown mode (and it's worth noting that "shutdown mode" doesn't mean they're shut down; it means they're generating lots of power, which is great because that's exactly what you want).
I'm not saying these payments are desirable in and of themselves; obviously the grid needs upgrades to avoid wasting wind power (while considering the cost of doing so, and the impact of reduced constraint payments on the rate of new wind generation capacity, because we still want more of it). I'm just pointing out that this may very well be the overall cheapest option available, even before considering that we want to subsidise wind generation in order to get more of it.
It seems counter intuitive to keep adding more wind generation capacity and pay them to sit idle. It would seem more productive to put that money towards the structures needed to manage the wind power they have now so they can store that excess generating capacity, or do some kind of load shifting. Paying for more and more wind power when it seems they have too much already is just making the problem bigger. If they keep building more wind farms then at some point, or so it seems to me, that this paying wind farms to sit idle will not be so economically viable. Something would have to become cheaper than what they are doing now.
I found a document on the UK nuclear power plans and I didn't read it all just yet as it is very long.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-kingdom.aspx
It appears that the UK is planning on building more nuclear power plants. There must have been a change of heart on nuclear power 10 or 20 years ago. Seems like an awfully long time to build some nuclear power plants while they are spending so much money to subsidize wind power they can't use.
I'm guessing "big wind" has a strong lobby in the government to get such a sweet deal on subsidies.
So why are we paying so much? Denmark are paying half the amount for offshore electricity per MWh. This govt is useless with money.
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This is a huge money pit and the UK should shut this off, or at least dial it back, until they can figure out how to better manage wind power than paying the windmill owners to not produce power.
Here's a suggestion: instead of having multiple private companies involved, this could all be money moving from one pocket of a public energy company to another pocket of the same company, without the tax payer being burdened by the inefficiency of this made-up "competitive market".
Could you quantify that? I'm not sure how much a single gas turbine on one small site should produce, but a quick web search shows that GE's gas turbines produce 34 MW to 557 MW, so even the top end is less than the 659MW output given in the summary above.
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, (etc.)
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate so this new facility will produce, on average about 250MW, not the headline attention-grabbing absolute maximum of 659 MW. Some days it will produce a lot more, some days a lot less even if we need the electricity right then. The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions. Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
I live in Ireland and don't want any radiation in the sea here.
News that may shock you, I know but seawater is naturally radioactive, more than 10,000 Bequerels per cubic metre. Most of that activity is due to naturally-occurring potassium-40, the rest tends to be from various decay products from uranium-bearing rocks and other natural materials. A couple of Bq per cubic metre in seawater is from man-made sources, usually remnants from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Some more is waste isotopes dumped into the sewers by hospitals, ending up in outfalls near the coast in places like Boston (there was a panic by some people when I-131 was found in Boston harbour soon after the Fukushima reactors overheated and leaked radioactive material into the Pacific. It turned out to come from a hospital which didn't have to sequester radioactive waste the way a nuclear power plant legally has to).
So a 145 sq km deployment of almost 100 turbines is equivalent to a single small utility scale power station.
With near as makes no difference zero carbon emissions or other pollutants, free and renewable fuel, uses no arable or otherwise useful land, little/no waste products, eliminates geopolitical influence of fossil fuel producing countries, cheaper if you eliminate subsidies from fossil fuel stations, and the list goes on. Just because we've built bigger fossil fuel plants doesn't mean this wind farm is a bad idea. Furthermore the dispersed deployment has no relevance at all since 3/4 of the earth's surface is water. Exactly what are we losing by using a tiny fraction of that ocean to generate power?
While I won't deny that fossil fuel fired plants maintain some advantages in some circumstances, let's not pretend that a wind farm has no advantages over fossil fuels.
To put that in perspective, the UK has 14GW of active installed coal fired power stations.
Not for long. All coal fired powerstations have to be closed in the next half decade and many of them have already begun to shut down if they haven't already. Near me there are three with a few miles of each other. Ferrybridge C has closed with its coal stockpile nowhere to be seen and a waste/biomass plant has been built on the same site, Eggborough is in the middle of closing down and hasn't generated power for over a year and Drax, which was one of Europe's largest coal fired stations is running at least 50% on gas/biomass/waste.
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It's quite possible that this wind farm will end up producing as much CO2 as if they just burned natural gas in a combined cycle plant.
Some rando person's blog is hardly an authoritative source but I'm sure it feeds your confirmation bias. Plus did you even read your citation? It doesn't support your argument at all. Obviously you are a fan of nuclear and nuclear is fine but it isn't going to replace fossil fuel stations because it has its own severe problems - some political, some economic, and some technical. Nuclear carries risks that too many people are uncomfortable with. Nuclear will (and should) be a part of the solution but the real heavy lifting to reduce our need for fossil fuels is almost certainly going to come from solar and wind plus some battery tech.
Wind power is only "green" if there is access to hydro for storage.
That's is quite simply false. Particularly when you compare it to fossil fuel fired power stations it typically replaces. And hydro isn't particular eco-friendly in a lot of cases.
Maybe batteries could do just as well as hydro, or perhaps even better, but it seems we simply can't build them fast enough.
Sure we can but we've really just gotten started on building the production capacity. It's going to take a minute to get there and it's growing very fast. Not as if we are building nuclear plants left and right either so I'm not sure what you think the viable alternative might be.
https://qz.com/1348969/europes...
Not being dependent on weather conditions my arse.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly.
I don't expect the two reactors at Hinkley C to be throttled at all, they'll run flat out 100% of their uptime since they'll only produce 15% of Britain's electricity demand at its lowest point (midsummer Sunday nighttime). There are a few other existing reactors providing a predictable 7GW or so but most of the on-demand generating capacity is met by fast-start combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which can be brought on-line quickly to meet demand. Most of that 7GW of existing nuclear capacity is going away in the next ten to twenty years as the older AGRs are taken out of service -- there will be a single 1100MW PWR built in the 1990s left operating after the AGRs are shut down until Hinkley Point C comes on-line.
Having too much capacity is a totally different and much less serious problem than having too little (blackouts, rationing etc.) and weather-dependent renewables can't guarantee sufficiency to the same level that nuclear can.
Nice to have as a supplement, to coal, water, nuclear, but, wind/solar is just an ADDED resource, not a REPLACEMENT resource. You have to have some place to STORE the energy created by wind/solar, which is a finite amount of energy. If there is a PEAK demand, and you don't have the SUPPLY capacity, then you have to cut back. With coal/nuclear, you can spin up the generators, to GENERATE more energy on demand. I don't have a problem with wind/solar, but, they cannot be a REPLACEMENT for coal/nuclear.
Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life?
Since it won't be radioactive, their decommissioning estimates should actually be accurate, unlike every nuclear plant that was ever decommissioned.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As it is outside the USA, they will call it football. Actually, I understand the US game of Hand Egg hast a field much the same size as what most humans call a football pitch
So just to be clear, you're complaining about a game where you kick the ball at the end of every play being called "football" when you call the field for a game where you're not allowed to throw anything a "pitch"? You can't even spell Aluminum right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fossil fuels make energy when its needed for a low price.
False statement. Fossil fuels are heavily subsidized to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually (that's 6% of global GDP) and that doesn't even include the costs of dealing with the pollution (including CO2) they are permitted to just dump in the atmosphere and elsewhere. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we subsidize the crap out of them both directly and indirectly. Fully burdened they actually are more expensive than wind in a wide variety of use cases.
Not just when the wind is blowing within set limits.
Have you ever been off shore in the ocean? I'm guessing not because for all practical purposes the wind is ALWAYS blowing in the sorts of places they put a wind farm. There is some variability but it is far less than you are supposing.
Renewable is a subset of low carbon. Low carbon will also include e.g. Nuclear (which is non-renewable because the fuel can only be used once).
lowcarbon - renewable = nuclear
low-carbon could also include e.g. gas with carbon sequestration, but this doesn't really exist on the grid (yet), apart from maybe one or two small demo plants.
Hope and wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.
But being interconnected with the rest of Europe does, and being interconnected with the largest synchronized grid of the planet does.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We need a base load of power generation. Something cheap that will generate a continuous amount of power. Ignore (Shoot) all the Green Peace virtue signalers and nuclear would be perfect for this. We also need peak production, something that can be throttled up and down easily. Hydro is best for this but requires actual geography to have provided it. Coal and natural gas also work. Tide, wind and solar don't actually fit in this model. They don't make power when we need it and we still don't have a good way of storing it. Batteries aren't good enough yet and pump and storage maintenance costs are too high (even if your capital is free and the electricity cost goes negative).
Negative price - The UK government has guaranteed the operators they will pay a fixed price for the electricity produced by these windmills. That means that when the wind blows and no one wants the electricity the price of electricity will go negative. People will be paid to consume electricity. In Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvanian and Michigan we did the same thing. Here the wind blows the most after everyone has gone to bed in January and February. This is also our lowest consumption time.
I've dealt with the bureaucracy in electrical grids in many countries. The stupidity is amazing but the UK is special, they have an extra layer of cronyism and arrogance that no other country has.
Nuclear is more expensive. It's that simple.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper. If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot. That's why we need a mix. Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order. Then comes things like (also not in any particular order) geothermal, biomass fuels, off shore wind, and concentrated thermal solar. (Cite on CO2 emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around. Anyone that thinks that PV is cheap is only looking at the subsidized cost, the real cost is very high except when laid out flat on a field. Putting PV on rooftops might mean not losing any area of value but it can multiply the cost by five times. (cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) Solar power isn't all that safe either, considering how many industrial accidents there are per real energy produced. Solar PV is also very resource intensive. (cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... )
If people believe that solar and wind can get cheaper if we will it so and throw enough money at the problem then we can do the same to make nuclear cheaper.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
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Nuclear is more expensive. It's that simple.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper.
Nuclear has gotten subsidies for more than 60 years.It always ever got more expensive. There is a word for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
No. Why?
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot.
Great. But the problem is that you basically always have to have it running to not make the economics worse.... This means it is not too useful to have nuclear in a modern grid.
That's why we need a mix.
Yes, but a mix without nuclear as nuclear is simply too expensive.
Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order.
No nuclear is not cheap. You said yourself we should just subsidize it until its cheap. So you are even contradicting yourself. If it were actually cheap, people would roll out nuclear and there would be no nuclear fanboys whining on slashdot on how we should have nuclear.
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around.
No, it is a great idea to give it a chance as it is getting cheaper and cheaper. In contrast to nuclear which always got more expensive in the past.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
If it were simple. Nuclear would be cheap by now. It is a very old technology which still isn't cheap. I think this makes it very obvious that it is not simply.