12 ms·

U.K. offshore wind park may generate power cheaper than by burning coal

140 points by Anon84 7y ago

tshanmu 7y ago
May be stupid question: I have always wondered if we build enough windmills will it affect the global windpatterns? What will happen to the place where all this wind energy goes if we extract it before there? Could it affect rainfall in directly unconnected places? The butterfly effect?
- remarkEon 7y ago
  I've always wondered if it would affect bird migrations.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  It can, but the change can be a good thing. For instance, enough off-shore wind can reduce the intensity of hurricanes (in places like New Orleans). Farmers plant trees for wind-breaks in the Great Plains to reduce erosion of the soil. Wind turbines can serve the same purpose.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Butterfly effect means, small effects CAN induce big ones. But not necessary in a significant lasting climatechanging way. Windmills do not change much different, than I would say, a city with scyscrapers does. So it is changing, but to affect the global jetstreams, we probably would have to build really big windmills, directly exploiting those winds on a big scale ... So sci-fiction we are talking about, not at all, what we have now...
- Bjartr 7y ago
  Building towns, cities, roads, farms, and other comparatively large surface area artificial structures impact windflow, solar absorptance/reflectance, rainfall absorption/runoff, thermal conduction/convection, and others I'm sure. All of which can have an impact on local and in turn regional and then global climates and winds (although not usually in a way we can trace all the way through). It's worth understanding the impact of all of these in addition to what you ask as well.
ncmncm 7y ago
I look forward to the day when all the windmills have worn out, and the towers are standing around unused, mined out for rare-earth elements, but too expensive to take down. Then, we can stretch cheap mesh between them and generate power with no moving parts, by releasing ions to be carried away by the wind. Alvin Marks (holder of the patent on polarizing sunglasses) got a patent for that back in the '80s. But the most important recent development in wind power has nothing much to do with windmills, as such. Roger Ruan at UMn, and Roger Gordon in Canada have both invented small-scale, efficient reactors that can turn power, water, and air into ammonia. This is important because the overwhelming majority of places with useful wind are nowhere near an electrical grid, but many of them have immediate uses for ammonia. Now, you can put up a windmill anywhere, and it can produce useful liquid fuel and fertilizer any time the wind blows, with no inconvenience to anyone when wind doesn't blow. Farms need large amounts of both fuel and fertilizer, and have lots of space for windmills. Any extra ammonia can be sold to neighbors, so wouldn't need to be transported far. Ammonia is directly useful for fertilizer--you pipe it right into the ground behind plow blades, and soil microbes fix it instantly. Any manufacturer of windmills should be very excited by this development, because it stands to radically increase the market for windmills. A single windmill is now a useful purchase, and any farm can use one. Industrial ammonia production consumes huge quantities of natural gas, and belches 10 megatons of CO2 every year, not counting exhaust from transporting it and processing it to solid form.
graycat 7y ago
It's beyond me why Bloomberg pushes this propaganda: It's totally clear that the power from a wind farm is intermittent, that is, not reliable, and, thus, can't counted on for either a base load plant or a peak load plant. "Cheap as coal"? Coal makes a great base load plant -- even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing, when it's raining, snowing, etc., a big pile of coal out back of the plant is still there and the plant is still a reliable source of base load power, and can't say this about wind power. So, why would an electric power grid want to buy wind power? For base load? Nope. For peak load? Nope. So just why? As the grid buys wind power, they idle their base or peak load plant and, thus, don't get the revenue to pay for the plant, that is, the capital expense. So, for that wind power, we have to pay for the capital expense twice, once for the base/peak load plants and once for the wind power. Similarly, when the wind is not blowing, the base/peak load plants are getting revenue but the wind power does not and is not paying for their capital expense. So, net, "cheap as coal" doesn't mean much. Actually that wind costs the same as coal means that to the electric grid wind is essentially worthless. Or, the wind power will sell at the grid spot price which commonly is just dirt cheap, maybe 0.5 US cents per KWH. The wind power can't pay their capital expense for that. So, we come to some insight into Bloomberg: The justification for wind will be to save on CO2 emissions. For that, maybe Mike should watch the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg IMHO, this documentary is quite credible, especially with the input of Lindzen at MIT. From the documentary, net, so far human activity has had no significant effect on climate. So, trying to reduce CO2 is worthless. And wind power is worthless. But Bloomberg has other goals.
- mc32 7y ago
  One turbine itself may be intermittent, but a constellation of turbines together ought to have a smoother output graph that’s pretty predictable.
- Tade0 7y ago
  Actually this summer my country had to temporarily switch off around 3GW of coal power due to the heatwaves, so no - coal is not as reliable as it's presented by some.
Brakenshire 7y ago
Offshore turbines also access more consistent winds, so not only will the turbines be cheap, they will be reliable, which will reduce grid integration costs. Edit: The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid, this is an extra 6GW of capacity, and goes on top of previous auctions which are currently under development, it looks like we’re headed for 60-70% in the mid to late 2020s.
- isostatic 7y ago
  > The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid In the last year UK produced Coal: 3% Gas: 42% Nuclear: 20% Wind: 17% Solar: 4% Hydro: 1.4% Biomass: 6.4% Pumped 0.66% So 28% renewable, 20% nuclear, total of about half. Wow. The good news is we're not overproducing - even on the most renewable days (Aug 17 at 15:15) when 44% came from wind and 25% from solar, we still had 12% coming from gas, 5% from biomass (edit - looked at wrong row on my spreadsheet!)
  - hollerith 7y ago
    Do you happen to know if all the natural gas used to generate electricity in the UK comes from the UK's territory (e.g., the part of the North Sea where they enjoy mineral rights)?
    - isostatic 7y ago
      We use gas a lot in central heating (and cooking) However looking at https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/uk-natural-gas-imports/ https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/uk-... Looks like equal parts domestic gas, electricity, and industry About half imported, half mined in the UK. From that page: "The vast bulk of imports comes direct from Norway. Technically, Russian gas can only arrive via the Belgian and Dutch pipelines, which amount to 10% of total imports. It is estimated that 35% of Europe’s gas comes from Russia, so in theory about 3% of Britain’s gas comes from Russia."
      - 7y ago
bureaucrat 7y ago
This thing again.... So can wind be consistent? Can it run, non stop, 24/365? Same applies to solar. Hek, it doesn’t matter if it’s free energy. If it has volatility we can’t adopt it. >b...but we can store it on ESS! What about the price of batteries? The operating costs? Environmental impact of producing batteries? And https://lmgtfy.com/?q=ess+fires https://lmgtfy.com/?q=ess+fires
cal97g 7y ago
Can't wait for the atmosphere to be full of the SF6 leaking from the substations these wind turbines will utilise. SF6 is 1000x more potent than carbon dioxide.
persephonee 7y ago
What a surprise, look (((who))) is pushing the agenda. Bloomberg (=Blumberg). Windpower is very expensive. Welcome to the world of surplus interest for SOME people and highest prices for us sheep.
Bjartr 7y ago
There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now. Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.
- concordDance 7y ago
  To see why wind can't get much bigger without a giant breakthrough in storage see these graphs of power production and consumption: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
  - Bjartr 7y ago
    I don't see an obvious connection between those charts and why wind can't get much bigger. It just shows that wind is currently producing ~26% of the power demand. Would you mind spelling it out since it is not self-evident to me?
    - concordDance 7y ago
      Wind varies a lot, we're approaching the point where extra wind turbines will fail to displace other power source capacity (the only power source we can vary is natural gas, which can already get close to zero with our current wind capacity). A doubling of wind capacity will reduce how much gas we'd burn in total, but you'd really start to hit diminishing returns.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Almost all of them are now only visible to people with showdead on.
- danw1979 7y ago
  yeah they're attaching Bloomberg specifically in a couple of the posts too. I wonder if someone somewhere has a large vested interest in fossil fuels and is annoyed about the BNEF and Bloomberg's mostly positive reporting on renewables.
  - 7y ago
danmaz74 7y ago
The money quote: "The price of 39.65 pounds per megawatt-hour ($49.70) was 31% below the level in a similar auction two years ago."
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  The graph below has £120/MWh in 2015, £57.5 in 2017, and £40 in 2019. Gas costs about £50/MWh.
kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
"may" wake me when it does. Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid. A lot of nonsense is going on in that area.
- Bjartr 7y ago
  Wake up "The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :) (1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=21 https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=... " As mentioned by daveoflynn elsewhere in these comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21028451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21028451
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  That sounds bad. Where can I learn more about it?
  - kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
    I couldn't immediately find a good link (via Google). This one mentions unused capacity, but no further background I think https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-capacity/ https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-ca...
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany it sounds like there is just a perpetual lag, where offshore wind is built and then it takes awhile to get it hooked in. It's been going on since at least 2014, and since that time like 5GW of offshore wind looks to have been hooked up, so I'm not sure there's a problem beyond "things take a while to build".
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
  >Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid Source (incl reason for lack of grid connection) please?
Reason077 7y ago
Here's a list of off-shore wind projects in Crown Estate waters. Currently, there's about 8GW of capacity in operation, and a further 19GW in various stages of construction or planning. (This does not include on-shore wind farms, or projects in Scottish waters) https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindprojectlisting_201908.pdf https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindproj...
- tpurves 7y ago
  The british once built an empire with large thanks to off-shore wind power.
stuaxo 7y ago
I read it as " U.K. offshore wind prank may generate power cheaper than by burning coal" which is a much more fun story.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Onshore wind would be even cheaper if the Conservatives hadn't all but banned it to appease NIMBYs.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  You can build bigger, more efficient turbines offshore, and the winds are stronger and more reliable, so offshore being inherently more expensive isn’t actually a solid assumption. All the more so if you include the costs of integrating the generation into the grid.
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    On-shore is bound to be cheaper for a good while, but fortunately offshore is experiencing a big Renaissance, especially in the USA. I would be surprised if offshore wasn't cheaper by the middle or end of the century, as it does have numerous advantages to on-shore.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    It is still a pretty good assumption that on-shore is significantly cheaper, even including grid integration costs. After all, a significant portion of off-shore wind's cost is the expensive seaborne transmission.
KirinDave 7y ago
So just some basics out of the way: 1. Yes, this is good. They should do this and 2. coal is an awful and inefficient power source with lots of carbon emission which is bad. 3. the way we harvest coal is deleterious to humans and bad for the environment even if we ignore carbon. It's an ancient technology we should leave in the dustbin of history next to lead piping. The challenge of wind turbines is that they're actually fantastically plastic hungry things. While inexpensive in their current state, we need to heavily invest in more sustainable turbine blade options that don't contribute to our other problems (carbon emission in plastics manufacturing and huge unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades). [0] Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage (with sodium ion batteries removing our reliance on lithium[1]) and Gallium Arsenide greatly reducing the cost and size of electrical components while increasing their heat tolerance [2]). Essentially what's left here is tooling and contracts and for dinosaur energy providers to be displaced by newer options. [0]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines... [1]: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-ion-battery.html https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-io... [2]: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-applications-limitations-gallium-nitride/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-ap...
- eloff 7y ago
  That's a joke. There's so many things we should worry about before "unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades" become a major issue. It's such a tiny problem even next plastic shopping bags or water bottles. Everything has some drawbacks, but this is so far down the list it's not even worth thinking about.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Given my obvious enthusiasm for the project in hand, I'm not sure why you're so negative about discussing some of the challenges they face.
    - eloff 7y ago
daveoflynn 7y ago
The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :) (1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=21 https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=...

140 points by Anon84 7y ago

May be stupid question: I have always wondered if we build enough windmills will it affect the global windpatterns? What will happen to the place where all this wind energy goes if we extract it before there? Could it affect rainfall in directly unconnected places? The butterfly effect?

remarkEon 7y ago
I've always wondered if it would affect bird migrations.
Robotbeat 7y ago
It can, but the change can be a good thing. For instance, enough off-shore wind can reduce the intensity of hurricanes (in places like New Orleans). Farmers plant trees for wind-breaks in the Great Plains to reduce erosion of the soil. Wind turbines can serve the same purpose.
hutzlibu 7y ago
Butterfly effect means, small effects CAN induce big ones. But not necessary in a significant lasting climatechanging way. Windmills do not change much different, than I would say, a city with scyscrapers does. So it is changing, but to affect the global jetstreams, we probably would have to build really big windmills, directly exploiting those winds on a big scale ... So sci-fiction we are talking about, not at all, what we have now...
Bjartr 7y ago
Building towns, cities, roads, farms, and other comparatively large surface area artificial structures impact windflow, solar absorptance/reflectance, rainfall absorption/runoff, thermal conduction/convection, and others I'm sure. All of which can have an impact on local and in turn regional and then global climates and winds (although not usually in a way we can trace all the way through). It's worth understanding the impact of all of these in addition to what you ask as well.

ncmncm 7y ago

I look forward to the day when all the windmills have worn out, and the towers are standing around unused, mined out for rare-earth elements, but too expensive to take down. Then, we can stretch cheap mesh between them and generate power with no moving parts, by releasing ions to be carried away by the wind. Alvin Marks (holder of the patent on polarizing sunglasses) got a patent for that back in the '80s. But the most important recent development in wind power has nothing much to do with windmills, as such. Roger Ruan at UMn, and Roger Gordon in Canada have both invented small-scale, efficient reactors that can turn power, water, and air into ammonia. This is important because the overwhelming majority of places with useful wind are nowhere near an electrical grid, but many of them have immediate uses for ammonia. Now, you can put up a windmill anywhere, and it can produce useful liquid fuel and fertilizer any time the wind blows, with no inconvenience to anyone when wind doesn't blow. Farms need large amounts of both fuel and fertilizer, and have lots of space for windmills. Any extra ammonia can be sold to neighbors, so wouldn't need to be transported far. Ammonia is directly useful for fertilizer--you pipe it right into the ground behind plow blades, and soil microbes fix it instantly. Any manufacturer of windmills should be very excited by this development, because it stands to radically increase the market for windmills. A single windmill is now a useful purchase, and any farm can use one. Industrial ammonia production consumes huge quantities of natural gas, and belches 10 megatons of CO2 every year, not counting exhaust from transporting it and processing it to solid form.

graycat 7y ago

It's beyond me why Bloomberg pushes this propaganda: It's totally clear that the power from a wind farm is intermittent, that is, not reliable, and, thus, can't counted on for either a base load plant or a peak load plant. "Cheap as coal"? Coal makes a great base load plant -- even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing, when it's raining, snowing, etc., a big pile of coal out back of the plant is still there and the plant is still a reliable source of base load power, and can't say this about wind power. So, why would an electric power grid want to buy wind power? For base load? Nope. For peak load? Nope. So just why? As the grid buys wind power, they idle their base or peak load plant and, thus, don't get the revenue to pay for the plant, that is, the capital expense. So, for that wind power, we have to pay for the capital expense twice, once for the base/peak load plants and once for the wind power. Similarly, when the wind is not blowing, the base/peak load plants are getting revenue but the wind power does not and is not paying for their capital expense. So, net, "cheap as coal" doesn't mean much. Actually that wind costs the same as coal means that to the electric grid wind is essentially worthless. Or, the wind power will sell at the grid spot price which commonly is just dirt cheap, maybe 0.5 US cents per KWH. The wind power can't pay their capital expense for that. So, we come to some insight into Bloomberg: The justification for wind will be to save on CO2 emissions. For that, maybe Mike should watch the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg IMHO, this documentary is quite credible, especially with the input of Lindzen at MIT. From the documentary, net, so far human activity has had no significant effect on climate. So, trying to reduce CO2 is worthless. And wind power is worthless. But Bloomberg has other goals.

mc32 7y ago
One turbine itself may be intermittent, but a constellation of turbines together ought to have a smoother output graph that’s pretty predictable.
Tade0 7y ago
Actually this summer my country had to temporarily switch off around 3GW of coal power due to the heatwaves, so no - coal is not as reliable as it's presented by some.

Brakenshire 7y ago

Offshore turbines also access more consistent winds, so not only will the turbines be cheap, they will be reliable, which will reduce grid integration costs. Edit: The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid, this is an extra 6GW of capacity, and goes on top of previous auctions which are currently under development, it looks like we’re headed for 60-70% in the mid to late 2020s.

isostatic 7y ago
> The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid In the last year UK produced Coal: 3% Gas: 42% Nuclear: 20% Wind: 17% Solar: 4% Hydro: 1.4% Biomass: 6.4% Pumped 0.66% So 28% renewable, 20% nuclear, total of about half. Wow. The good news is we're not overproducing - even on the most renewable days (Aug 17 at 15:15) when 44% came from wind and 25% from solar, we still had 12% coming from gas, 5% from biomass (edit - looked at wrong row on my spreadsheet!)
- hollerith 7y ago
  Do you happen to know if all the natural gas used to generate electricity in the UK comes from the UK's territory (e.g., the part of the North Sea where they enjoy mineral rights)?
  - isostatic 7y ago
    We use gas a lot in central heating (and cooking) However looking at https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/uk-natural-gas-imports/ https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/uk-... Looks like equal parts domestic gas, electricity, and industry About half imported, half mined in the UK. From that page: "The vast bulk of imports comes direct from Norway. Technically, Russian gas can only arrive via the Belgian and Dutch pipelines, which amount to 10% of total imports. It is estimated that 35% of Europe’s gas comes from Russia, so in theory about 3% of Britain’s gas comes from Russia."
    - 7y ago

bureaucrat 7y ago

This thing again.... So can wind be consistent? Can it run, non stop, 24/365? Same applies to solar. Hek, it doesn’t matter if it’s free energy. If it has volatility we can’t adopt it. >b...but we can store it on ESS! What about the price of batteries? The operating costs? Environmental impact of producing batteries? And https://lmgtfy.com/?q=ess+fires https://lmgtfy.com/?q=ess+fires

cal97g 7y ago

Can't wait for the atmosphere to be full of the SF6 leaking from the substations these wind turbines will utilise. SF6 is 1000x more potent than carbon dioxide.

persephonee 7y ago

What a surprise, look (((who))) is pushing the agenda. Bloomberg (=Blumberg). Windpower is very expensive. Welcome to the world of surplus interest for SOME people and highest prices for us sheep.

Bjartr 7y ago

There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now. Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.

concordDance 7y ago
To see why wind can't get much bigger without a giant breakthrough in storage see these graphs of power production and consumption: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
- Bjartr 7y ago
  I don't see an obvious connection between those charts and why wind can't get much bigger. It just shows that wind is currently producing ~26% of the power demand. Would you mind spelling it out since it is not self-evident to me?
  - concordDance 7y ago
    Wind varies a lot, we're approaching the point where extra wind turbines will fail to displace other power source capacity (the only power source we can vary is natural gas, which can already get close to zero with our current wind capacity). A doubling of wind capacity will reduce how much gas we'd burn in total, but you'd really start to hit diminishing returns.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Almost all of them are now only visible to people with showdead on.
danw1979 7y ago
yeah they're attaching Bloomberg specifically in a couple of the posts too. I wonder if someone somewhere has a large vested interest in fossil fuels and is annoyed about the BNEF and Bloomberg's mostly positive reporting on renewables.
- 7y ago

danmaz74 7y ago

The money quote: "The price of 39.65 pounds per megawatt-hour ($49.70) was 31% below the level in a similar auction two years ago."

Brakenshire 7y ago
The graph below has £120/MWh in 2015, £57.5 in 2017, and £40 in 2019. Gas costs about £50/MWh.

kmjg88nvf8 7y ago

"may" wake me when it does. Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid. A lot of nonsense is going on in that area.

Bjartr 7y ago
Wake up "The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :) (1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=21 https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=... " As mentioned by daveoflynn elsewhere in these comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21028451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21028451
Ma8ee 7y ago
That sounds bad. Where can I learn more about it?
- kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
  I couldn't immediately find a good link (via Google). This one mentions unused capacity, but no further background I think https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-capacity/ https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-ca...
- saalweachter 7y ago
  Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany it sounds like there is just a perpetual lag, where offshore wind is built and then it takes awhile to get it hooked in. It's been going on since at least 2014, and since that time like 5GW of offshore wind looks to have been hooked up, so I'm not sure there's a problem beyond "things take a while to build".
rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
>Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid Source (incl reason for lack of grid connection) please?

Reason077 7y ago

Here's a list of off-shore wind projects in Crown Estate waters. Currently, there's about 8GW of capacity in operation, and a further 19GW in various stages of construction or planning. (This does not include on-shore wind farms, or projects in Scottish waters) https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindprojectlisting_201908.pdf https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindproj...

tpurves 7y ago
The british once built an empire with large thanks to off-shore wind power.

stuaxo 7y ago

I read it as " U.K. offshore wind prank may generate power cheaper than by burning coal" which is a much more fun story.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Onshore wind would be even cheaper if the Conservatives hadn't all but banned it to appease NIMBYs.

Brakenshire 7y ago
You can build bigger, more efficient turbines offshore, and the winds are stronger and more reliable, so offshore being inherently more expensive isn’t actually a solid assumption. All the more so if you include the costs of integrating the generation into the grid.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  On-shore is bound to be cheaper for a good while, but fortunately offshore is experiencing a big Renaissance, especially in the USA. I would be surprised if offshore wasn't cheaper by the middle or end of the century, as it does have numerous advantages to on-shore.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  It is still a pretty good assumption that on-shore is significantly cheaper, even including grid integration costs. After all, a significant portion of off-shore wind's cost is the expensive seaborne transmission.

KirinDave 7y ago

So just some basics out of the way: 1. Yes, this is good. They should do this and 2. coal is an awful and inefficient power source with lots of carbon emission which is bad. 3. the way we harvest coal is deleterious to humans and bad for the environment even if we ignore carbon. It's an ancient technology we should leave in the dustbin of history next to lead piping. The challenge of wind turbines is that they're actually fantastically plastic hungry things. While inexpensive in their current state, we need to heavily invest in more sustainable turbine blade options that don't contribute to our other problems (carbon emission in plastics manufacturing and huge unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades). [0] Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage (with sodium ion batteries removing our reliance on lithium[1]) and Gallium Arsenide greatly reducing the cost and size of electrical components while increasing their heat tolerance [2]). Essentially what's left here is tooling and contracts and for dinosaur energy providers to be displaced by newer options. [0]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines... [1]: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-ion-battery.html https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-io... [2]: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-applications-limitations-gallium-nitride/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-ap...

eloff 7y ago
That's a joke. There's so many things we should worry about before "unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades" become a major issue. It's such a tiny problem even next plastic shopping bags or water bottles. Everything has some drawbacks, but this is so far down the list it's not even worth thinking about.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Given my obvious enthusiasm for the project in hand, I'm not sure why you're so negative about discussing some of the challenges they face.
  - eloff 7y ago

daveoflynn 7y ago

The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :) (1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=21 https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=...