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The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes
- psadri 7y agoI’m curious what’s the effect of interfering with the wind patterns?
- weego 7y agoPossibly localised ground level temperture increase of a fraction of a °C due to air turbulence relocating warm air.
- ljcn 7y agoFair question. Some rough maths incoming.. There are 174 turbines in an area of about 300 sq km. If they were laid out on a grid the grid size would be about 1.3 km. The blades have a diameter of about 24 m. Feels to me like that's far enough apart to not massively affect the wind.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI have never felt the wind reduce around a wind farm before. Each wind turbine is like needle in a haystack of wind, I can’t imagine anything actually measurable.
- rando444 7y agoThey said in the article that this wind farm is the size of Malta.
- Tade0 7y agoMalta itself is pretty small - smaller than many European cities.
- abugheratwork 7y agoHow much does Malta slow down the wind?
- benj111 7y agoI'm curious. Have you actually done some formal measurement in front of and behind the wind farm? Because the way you're writing suggests not. Btw turbines do slow down the wind and it is measurable, turbines at the back produce less energy than those at the front, wind farms are laid out specifically to try and avoid this. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242580464_The_Wind_Farm_Layout_Optimization_Problem https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242580464_The_Wind_...
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSure, if the turbines are spaced too closely they will lose efficiency. But as far as the surrounding environment is considered, existing wind farms don’t have any noticeable effects on the wind. Perhaps when we start building bigger more consequential wind farms we will notice something.
- bilbo0s 7y agoAt our current level of technological know how, we could never hope to capture that much wind.
- dawnerd 7y agoJust a wild guess, but probably no where near as much as large buildings or large power plants with cooling towers.
- moate 7y agoI find it very strange that this comes up from time to time with windmills, but not say, New York City. I'm sure it does something but it feels like "an extremely fluid material being redirected in a relatively small way in an extremely localized area" isn't really super important? I could be entirely wrong and maybe changing the wind pattern will be the "pulling hydrocarbon liquids out of the ground and burning them" of 2119.
- brianwawok 7y agoI thought of this too. One way to approach it, is what % of the total wind in the world would it take to power 100% of our energy needs? If it is something like 50%, it seems like it would be very possible for large scale wind to eventually do something to our wind patterns. If it is something like 1% or .01%, it seems pretty unlikely to do much. (part of this assumes you would never power 100% of your energy needs with wind due to variability).
- throwawaysea 7y agoI agree that if we were to supply significant portions of our energy need with wind power, we would be taking that amount of energy out of the global climate system and therefore alter temperature/air pressure/wind in some combination (that is, alter currents). We could also look at it as a percentage of available energy in global wind (see http://www.wse.ie/how-much-wind-energy-is-there http://www.wse.ie/how-much-wind-energy-is-there for a take on this). That said, I don't think we can necessarily assume that 1% or 0.01% would have a small effect. Small perturbations can have large impacts in complex systems. It is possible impacts could be significant in localized ways as well (for instance low change in global average temperature but greater incidence of hurricanes).
- kerkeslager 7y agoGosh, there are currently 5 responses to your question and every one is pure speculation. Folks, if you don't know the answer, don't answer.
- moate 7y agoAnd now there's one scolding people for commenting...and one pointing out that scolding. Helpful!
- kerkeslager 7y agoSaying something true is more helpful than speculating without any data whatsoever.
- srbby 7y agoIt's an attack on clean energy... I'm sure there's got to be a way to discredit it... it doesn't matter if I make it up!
- bilbo0s 7y agoI don't know man? In this case, giving the numbers of how much we'd need to harness to have an effect is pointless. We aren't really in any kind of a place to grasp the enormity of the numbers. Numbers that big really do become meaningless. Wind is just second order solar energy. Massive amounts of solar energy make it to Earth in a given year. I suppose if you must have a number, we can work in either kWh or BTUs. Won't really make a difference to the enormity of the outcome though. For instance, in BTUs, about 80 million british quads of the energy that the sun gives earth will make it to the surface in a year. (I know the sun delivers more than 80 million british quads, but I'm not counting the 30% that gets reflected). Now I'll be nice, and say an additional 10-20% of that is absorbed by biomass. (It's not, it's way closer to 10%, but I'm being nice.) And an average American home uses what? say 50 million BTUs a year, (About 12 - 15 thousand kWh), if they're being profligate? So the wind is coming from the interplay of the solar energy absorbed by different areas of the ocean and different areas on land. (Another caveat, our atmosphere can trap some of the energy, which will add to new energy sent by the sun, and kind of spiral in that fashion. This is what happened to Venus, which is why they have like 500 mile an hour winds there.) In any case, ignoring the climate warming, we'd have to find some way to harness enough wind to make an impact against, say, 20 million british quads of BTUs. Yeah. That's not gonna happen. This is what I mean by incomprehensibly massive numbers. Basically, we'd have to harness enough wind to power roughly 5 billion groups of US homes, where each group would contain about 1 trillion US homes each. That would be just to have a 1 percent impact on the energy in the winds on this planet in a year. And the required number goes up with global warming, because more wind. At this point we're talking monopoly money man. It's meaningless. Again, we don't have the smarts or technological know how to do anything even close to that, and don't really have any kind of frame of reference as a species to meaningfully ponder the implications of such enormous numbers and amounts of energy. Even thinking about it only makes you consider the smallness of mankind.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoIIRC, there's a theoretical limit to how much energy even the most efficient windmill can take from the wind. It's close to 50% - maybe 53%? That's one turbine taking energy from the cross-section of the wind that intersects the area of the turbine's blades. You'd have to look at what fraction of the air you care about intersects the turbines, and multiply that by that 50% (or whatever the real value is for the actual turbines in question). That's if you care about energy. If you care about vortexes and disturbed flow... I have no information.
- Tade0 7y agoBetz's Law, and the figure is 59.3%.
- Retric 7y agoIt has ~zero impact on wind patterns. They have a tiny reduction in wind speed, but the moving column of air is generally 10 to 100+x as tall and very wide. https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp More critically they have zero impact on the forces that actually generate wind in the first place.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoWow, a seven-megawatt wind turbine is ~9300 max horsepower. Looks like the capacity factor is around 38% so the turbines are making ~3500hp avg. http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
- kerkeslager 7y agoThis commentary is a bit humorous. Is there some purpose for which the alternative to using a wind turbine is using a herd of 3500 horses? "Horsepower" as a unit made sense when it was being used to market steam engines as an alternative to horses, because it made the tradeoffs obvious: it's clearly cheaper and easier to maintain steam engine than the 20 horses needed to do the same work. It might still be relevant for something like tractors where horses would be a reasonable alternative, but something like "carbon tons" (the tons of carbon produced by fossil fuel production of the same electricity) might be a more useful comparison for wind power.
- metalliqaz 7y agohorsepower was always just marketing bunk, with no actual work equivalence
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIt was a decent approximation of a the level of continuous work output you could expect out of a horse without taxing it too much.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoA 3500hp diesel engine will burn around 197gal (745L) of fuel per hour. One gallon of diesel when burned makes around 10.336kg of co2. So each turbine is preventing around 2 tons per hour of co2 emissions. Could be as much as 5 tons if it is replacing coal. Apologies for use of freedom units; habits are hard to break. https://barringtondieselclub.co.za/technical/fuel/diesel-fuel-consumption-nat-aspirated.pdf https://barringtondieselclub.co.za/technical/fuel/diesel-fue...
- Symbiote 7y ago> Just a single rotation of one of the turbines can power the average home for an entire day That is incredible!
- z2 7y agoBy my power-wasting standards, I use about 8 KWh a day. A max 7 MW(h?) turbine generates at most 1.94 KWh of electricity a second. It seems to take 3-4 seconds for a single turn. The math checks out and this is, as you say, incredible.
- verall 7y agoThis math checks out but the way you present the units is deeply confusing. It's not your fault though, I blame watt-hours. You use 8kwh==28.8MJ of energy per day. 28.8MJ/7MW turbine is about 4 seconds, as a watt is a joule per second.
- jessriedel 7y agoI found his units to be significantly more clarifying than yours. There's nothing wrong with having units of time (or distance) in both the numerator and the denominator, depending on the context. For instance, the Hubble constant is commonly expressed in km/s/Mpc, and astronomers purposefully don't cancel the units of distance. In this case, there are two distinct timescales involved: the scale on which the energy is used (an hour or day) and on which it's generated (a second). It's ok to keep track of those separately.
- verall 7y agoThere's nothing "wrong" with the units, besides that it is easy to get confused, evidenced by GP calling the turbine "7MW(h?)". If you want to compare, however, you will have to convert to common units, and I at least find it easier to use watts and joules than watt-hours/second and watt-hours. By all means convert to stationary-bike-hours and big macs or whatever unit at the end but calculations are easier in the SI units. Hubble's constant is expressed like that because it is a nice unit for the math.
- growlist 7y agoSomething many people are not aware of is that the UK is a lucky country in terms of natural resources, with these resources playing a critical role in the development of the country over thousands of years. Wind power is just the latest example, and there's still plenty of resources left underground for the future, should the economics turn positive. Somewhat ironically, one factor that has greatly facilitated the development of offshore wind in the UK is the world leading expertise in offshore construction gained through decades of exploitation of North Sea oil and gas.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoWind particularly. There are nine licences agreed for farms as large or larger than Hornsea One, including Hornsea 2 and 3. Another licence round due in a couple of years, and a lot of coastline to go...
- davedx 7y agoYep! I remember being amazed at how long Scotland's Cruachan hydro plant has been in operation.
- ascorbic 7y agoIt certainly helps that the North Sea is very shallow. Lots of it is only 25 or 30 metres deep.
- sbhn 7y agoOMG, what happens if China, Russia, Iran and Syria start creating off shore wind farms.
- metalliqaz 7y agowut
- sabertoothed 7y agoWhat weird list is this?
- pytester 7y agoMy local constituency was going to achieve this honour but unfortunately the local MP Robert Syms (known to be somewhat corrupt) killed the project on utterly bullshit grounds (it would barely have affected the view): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm As a contrast, it was also reported today that Hinkley point will be £2.9 billion over budget: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305 luckily for them, they get to charge £92.50 per megawatt hour upon completion - locked in for 10 years. While wind power is costing us £40 per megawatt hour, not guaranteed, and likely to decrease.
- Krasnol 7y agoThe "World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019" says that: > even the extended operation of existing reactors is not climate effective as operating costs exceed the costs of competing energy efficiency and new renewable energy options and therefore durably block their implementation. Mycle Schneider concludes: “You can spend a dollar, a euro, a forint or a ruble only once: the climate emergency requires that investment decisions must favor the cheapest and fastest response strategies. The nuclear power option has consistently turned out the most expensive and the slowest.” https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2019-Assesses-Climate-Change-and-the-Nuclear-Power-Option.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2019-Assesses-Climat...
- j9461701 7y ago>The World Nuclear Industry Status Report is a yearly report that explores the global challenges facing the nuclear power industry. It is produced by Mycle Schneider, a professional anti-nuclear activist, and gives a detailed overview of the global nuclear industry and special analysis on key events and trends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Nuclear_Industry_Status_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Nuclear_Industry_Status_... Hardly an unbiased source it seems. Regardless, the issues facing nuclear power could be quite easily solved with simple political will. Unlike those of renewable energy, which still do not have economical or technologically feasible solutions to the storage and base load problem. We need only look to France to see the path forward. After the 1973 oil crisis, they resolved never again to be beholden to foreign oil for their grid needs. So they undertook the Messmer Plan, which mass produced a single standardized reactor design in bulk. France converted itself almost entirely over to nuclear power for its base load requirements in just 15 years, with the project coming in under budget and ahead of schedule. Now France has so much electricity it sells excess to Germany for profit. Taking advantage of economy of scale, slicing through red tape and NIMBY-ism with political willpower, using a standardized design to expedite the engineering and approval processes of every individual plant - none of these require some amazing new technology or some new economic system be developed. We could literally start tomorrow, and have the entire first world swapped over to nuclear by the 2030s.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThe engineer in me wishes there were more hard numbers, like "what is the operational cost of the wind farm?" One of the fun exercises to run would be a win farm that was powering a submerged data center (so that it could dissipate heat into the ocean).
- foota 7y agoThe Google data center in Hamina, Finland makes use of seawater for cooling, I believe. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/
- driverdan 7y agoGoogle also had experimental sea cooled servers in the bay for a while. I'm not sure if they're still running that program.
- nikanj 7y ago1M homes, or three bitcoin mining ops.
- rwmj 7y agoThe economist had an article about this too: https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/09/21/lessons-from-britain-the-worlds-biggest-offshore-wind-market https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/09/21/lessons-from-br...
- frankharv 7y agoGreat spell checking CNN Business. "is located farther out to see than any other wind farm"
- hexo 7y agoHow many birds is this going to kill? I've read somewhere it's not that nice to them.
- sabertoothed 7y agoIf that's the metric, we need to outlaw letting cats outside.
- RickJWagner 7y agoTrue, wind farms kill birds. But other things do too. (Apparently birds have a lot of things out to kill them.) https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
- rsynnott 7y agoDon’t believe everything you read. Bird death from turbines is essentially nothing next to bird death from hitting buildings, or, worse, cats. It’s a persistent myth, and recently back in vogue due to the tweeting of a certain orange personage, but wind farms as bird-destroyers are not worth worrying about.
- cameronh90 7y agoAgree that the wind turbine thing is overblown. However, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there's no evidence cats are causing problems for bird populations in the UK at least. https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/ https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-... This might be different elsewhere though.
- jweir 7y agoNot a myth. Look at the birds being killed, not the numbers. Not the same bird species being killed by wind farms and buildings (or house cats) And the bats are at risk too https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2019/09/oregon-state-study-says-wind-turbines-threaten-migrating-bats.html https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2019/09/oregon-state-...
- tunesmith 7y agoSo... average household (in America, anyway, don't know about UK) uses a little more than 10,000 kwh of electricity per year... one kilowatt-hour of electricity creates 1.1 - 1.2 pounds of carbon dioxide... so each household emits maybe 6 tons of CO2 per year from electricity usage. So if this is 1 million homes, that's 6 megatons of CO2 saved per year. The world emits 37 gigatons per year. So this saves 6/37,000, or ... I just got depressed. Every (very little) bit helps, right?
- tlb 7y agoYes, we just need to build about 5000 more of them. Or 2500 wind and 2500 solar. It's possible -- there are lots of facilities we have 5000 of in the world. For example, there are more than 5000 airports with passenger service, all built in the last 110 years.
- tunesmith 7y agoIf you go by number of turbines (which you shouldn't since these are probably way bigger than average), the US currently has about 325 of these farms.
- flukus 7y agoAccording to the google summary of this paywalled article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/08/all-of-the-worlds-power-plants-in-one-handy-map/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/08/all-o...) there are 62,500 plant in the world, so 5000 more of these seems pretty doable. And most of the world uses less energy than an average American, so it would be less on average.
- adrianN 7y agoYour calculation is a bit pessimistic because electricity is a much higher quality energy than what you get from burning fossil fuels. For example, electric cars, from wind turbine to movement, are maybe 70-80% efficient. ICE cars from gas station to movement are maybe 30% efficient (now add in the cost of extraction and refining). Similarly, heating your home by burning oil you get a little less than 1J of heat per Joule-equivalent oil burned. But with a heatpump you get 2-4J of heat for every Joule of electricity.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoIt's clear now that we'll be able to power much more of our power needs by using wind and solar. More 'exotic' schemes today like using the tides might not even be needed, but we'll see.
- jweir 7y ago"On the other hand for offshore wind farms in Denmark the normalised load factor falls from 39% at age 0 to 15% at age 10." https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19.12.12.pdf https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19... The title should say has the capacity to power 1M homes. No wind farm ever generates to capacity. And they age very quickly. This tech maybe better and last longer than in the quoted, but it will still degrade over time. So in 10 years maybe it will be 20%? Wind is not reliable – so where does the power come from when the wind is not blowing? If you say batteries, then you need excess generation (a lot) and a lot of batteries.
- konschubert 7y agoWait, they lose 60% of their energy production potential within 10 years? This number seems unbelievable. Are the rotors falling off the towers and not getting replaced? Are you sure that number is correct ?
- konschubert 7y agoI suspect that these numbers simply reflect the fact that recent installations have higher capacity factors than installations 10 years ago. These numbers seem to show the progress in wind power technology over the past 10 years and not a degradation of existing installs
- llukas 7y ago"There are two plausible explanations for the observed decline in average load factors as wind farms age. The first is that the turbines become less efficient over time as a result of mechanical wear and tear, erosion of the turbine blades and related factors. The second is that the turbines experience more frequent breakdowns and their operators take more time to bring them back into service because they are less concerned about the performance of older plants. Both reasons may be relevant in different circumstances and it is not possible to identify a primary explanation from the data. "
- davedx 7y ago> Where does the power come from when the wind is not blowing? * Gas peakers * More interconnects, particularly to places with pumped hydro resources * Batteries (yes, it needs a heck of a lot. But battery tech & economics are still improving) * Solar PV (we can build interconnects to the larger installations being built closer to the equator in places like N Africa) Also worth noting the citation you posted is from 2012. Wind turbines have changed significantly just in the last 5 years. I wonder what the numbers look like today, in particular load factor decay?
- generatorguy 7y agoIncidentally this wind farm was the largest contributing factor to the blackout in London a few weeks ago when it decided to shutdown during a transient cause by a lightning strike, subsequent transmission line trip, and 200 MW of generation tripping. Then Hornsea wound down 700 MW. Some software change performed the next day apparently fixed the problem.no details on what it was though yet, or why the 200MW steam turbine also tripped.