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Dogger Bank's giant turbines herald a wind of change in UK industry
- tsherr 6y agoIsn't it a bad idea to build these in a corrosive environment like the ocean? Is there a reason, other than NIMBY to put them in the ocean?
- sefrost 6y agoAs I understand it this technology has developed because the government (David Cameron) essentially banned onshore wind by removing the subsidies for it. They changed the rules back again last year though [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/02/uk-government-lifts-block-on-new-onshore-windfarm-subsidies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/02/uk-governme...
- lizknope 6y agoI've read that the wind is more consistent in the ocean.
- mannykannot 6y agoNot just more consistent, but also usually stronger. Currently, for example, wind speeds over the North Sea and the Baltic are stronger than over the adjacent land, and the change at the coastline is quite striking (I'm assuming that the model behind this map is reasonably accurate in that regard.) https://www.windy.com/53.744/-0.339?53.372,-0.339,8 https://www.windy.com/53.744/-0.339?53.372,-0.339,8
- weego 6y agoPerhaps somewhere during the planning, design, development and testing phases they considered this issue and mitigated it?
- senorjazz 6y agoyou'd think but...
- nicoburns 6y agoIt's possible to build bigger turbines at sea, which are more efficient. The limitation on land is transporting the blades which often requires roads to be modified.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoAnd wind is steadier out a sea plus there is a Nimby aspect in the UK.
- diroussel 6y agoIt’s not so much “not in my back yard” as there is no back yard big enough. The article says the new digger bank wind farm will be as big as Yorkshire, which is really very big (in UK terms)
- japanuspus 6y agoCorrosion on the submerged parts is quite simple to mitigate with sacrificial as also used on ships. The hard part is the splash zone which is only intermittently submerged.
- PLenz 6y agoMore consistent wind due to a lack of elevated land to slow it down via friction.
- gmac 6y agoEspecially in a geographically pretty small country like the UK, NIMBY (or indeed anyone else's back yard) may be a perfectly valid argument. These things are big and somewhat noisy.
- zaroth 6y agoYou also can’t live or work anywhere that would be hit by the strobing shadow cast by the blades.
- jdeibele 6y agoSomebody posted a link to the YouTube video that showed a Dutch turbine exploding. In the description it said pieces went 500 meters. So there probably needs to be a physical safety zone of 1km or more, not that turbines seem to explode very often. Also noise has been mentioned by some people as a consideration. https://www.ramblingsdc.net/wtnoise.html https://www.ramblingsdc.net/wtnoise.html has an interesting page on it (and a 2012 vibe).
- GordonS 6y agoSome oil and gas related gear stays subsea for 20 years before it's pulled up, so presumably similar alloys/paints/techniques are being used. Source: I've worked, within IT, in the oil and gas sector for many years.
- rsynnott 6y agoThere's a huge amount of experience in this area from oil and gas infrastructure; there've been large-scale offshore rigs in the North Sea since the 60s.
- nicktelford 6y agoAs other posters have mentioned, offshore is significantly more economical for a number of reasons (stronger, more consistent wind; large tracts of available area for large-scale farms; the capability to build turbines much taller where they can access stronger winds) - so instead I'll mention another problem facing offshore turbines other than corrosion: the air. It turns out that offshore, the air contains a lot of minerals and water droplets that make it much more abrasive than the air over land. This is a particular problem for turbine blades, as their leading edge is moving through the air at a significant speed: enough to gradually ablate away the leading edge material! Consequently, offshore turbine blades need to be replaced more often than onshore turbine blades. This is one of the reasons that larger turbines are more economical: fewer larger turbines mean fewer, larger blades that need to be periodically replaced.
- robin_reala 6y agoDoggerland (where Dogger Bank is situated) is a pretty intriguing place and worth reading up on. But the general gist is that the UK was landbridged to the Netherlands and Denmark up until relatively recently (10,000BC) when a glacial lake gave way and submerged the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
- pestatije 6y agoThe cool thing about this is trawlers in the area have occasionally hauled man-made specimens from the era (~10,000BC), meaning there could be archaeological remains just there underwater.
- Someone 6y agoOne can also find animal remains there (https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/02/04/fishing-for-fossils-in-the-north-sea-the-lost-world-of-doggerland/ https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/02/04/fishing-for-fossi...) You can even buy them (https://www.northseafossils.com/ https://www.northseafossils.com/). A mammoth molar is a few hundred $. Prices go up for rarer parts ($19,999 for a largely complete skull, for example https://www.northseafossils.com/component/jshopping/product/view/35/5425?Itemid=0 https://www.northseafossils.com/component/jshopping/product/...)
- ncmncm 6y agoThere should be restrictions on building close to now-drowned river courses where archaeological remains are most likely to be found someday.
- pjc50 6y agoStrike price: £40/MWh or in consumer units 4p/kWh. https://www.offshorewind.biz/2019/09/20/uk-offshore-wind-strike-prices-slide-down-to-gbp-39-65-mwh/ https://www.offshorewind.biz/2019/09/20/uk-offshore-wind-str... Strike prices are a form of option or insurance which guarantees income for the producer over the long term regardless of market prices. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-difference/contract-for-difference https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif... By comparison, when Hinckley Point C is finished, it will have a strike price of £92.50. And the solar panels I have on my roof are paying me 14p/kWH in subsides because they were build under the old regime.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- maelito 6y ago> each one can generate enough electricity to power 16,000 homes, at less than the average price of electricity in the wholesale energy market. This is the kind of wishes presented as facts that discredite almost all articles about new renewables. They don't say if this 16k figure is peak charge, they don't say how these homes are powered when the wind is down, if this price includes all costs (transport, subventions, storage...), etc. It gives the impression that electricity works like fuel : you just extract it, then use it when you want.
- bambataa 6y agoThey don’t write “this nuclear power station powers X homes, apart from the 20% of the time when it’s tripped off”, so at least they’re consistent.
- imtringued 6y agoThe 220m turbine is rated for 12MW meaning if it turns at full speed it will provide 12MW of power. What you are worrying about is the capacity factor. The capacity factor is a percentage of the average load on the turbine. Wind turbines generally have around a 50% capacity factor so if you install a 12MW turbine it will generate 6MW per hour averaged over the entire year. The capacity factor entirely depends on location so you cannot make a general statement about the capacity factor just based on looking at the turbine itself. > they don't say how these homes are powered when the wind is down You can run gas plants, which you have to do anyway because they produce less CO2 than coal plants. The nice property of gas power plants is that the fuel is quite expensive, meaning you only run them when you have to. So naturally they will yield to renewables if there is wind available. >It gives the impression that electricity works like fuel : you just extract it, then use it when you want. If you run wind power to avoid CO2 emissions then that's exactly the way it works. It doesn't matter when you stop burning gas. What really matters is that you are burning less gas. CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 280ppm before the industrial revolution. It took much less than 200 years to add another 45% CO2 on top of that. We are at 409.8ppm now. This means 120ppm or around 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man made and that percentage is going to increase in the future. You have to consider that not all of the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. A lot of it is also absorbed by the ocean. It took a lot of human effort to get this far and now we have to stop it from getting worse.
- DrBazza 6y agoThe number of days where it makes no little or no contribution to the UK grid surprises me: https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind In the press, at least, it seems that the UK is consolidating on wind as the 'green solution', when it's clear the UK needs a much more mixed solution. Doggerland is interesting purely for the bones and artefacts that are dredged up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Discovery_and_investigation_by_archaeologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Discovery_and_inves...). It's a shame the article didn't mention anything about that.
- aries1980 6y agoAfaik green energy has never meant to provide standalone, at least until the surplus energy generated at daily peaks can be reasonably stored for days. This paper is a bit dated, but explains well some of the concerns: http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limi...
- qayxc 6y agoCareful there buddy! Take a look at the actual time when wind power contributed little or nothing. It's mostly night hours between 23:00 and 5:00. Contrary to conventional power sources, wind power can be regulated basically "on-the-spot" by turning turbines on and off. Living next to a small on-shore wind farm, I can tell you from first hand observation that most of the time turbines are turned off deliberately, because production simply exceeds demand. A chart like the one you've linked to doesn't tell the whole story and can be very misleading indeed. You'd need to plot the actual load on the grid versus production to get a better picture.
- saargrin 6y agowouldnt the turbines be safer if they are spinning instead of being parked? you could just disengage the dynamo..
- qayxc 6y agoNo, that'd be a bad idea. Keep in mind that the rotors and mechanical parts are subject to wear and tear. A rotor that's feathered experiences less mechanical stress and thus lasts longer. Same goes for any other moving parts. It's a measure to increase the lifetime and reduce the risk of fires (e.g. from spinning too fast due to lack of mechanical load from the generator).
- tda 6y agoThe article is about the 13MW Haliade-X tubine, but on part of the Doggerbank (Sofia wind park) an even larger 14MW Siemens Gamesa turbine will be installed. As short as maybe 5 years ago >10MW turbines were thought of as unlikely in the near time, and look where we are now. And we still haven't hit any hard limits, meaning there is still room to grow! And as the turbines grow, so do the foundations. Most turbines are installed on a single steel tube that is driven into the ground, a monopile. A single one can be 100m long, 10m in diameter and weigh 2000 tons!
- saargrin 6y agowhats the expected lifetime on one of those? does it grow or diminish with size,i.e. do bigger ones last longer? it does seem that maintenance on the bigger ones is more complicated and requires more sophisticated gear ,not to mention difficulties of operating in North Sea
- nicktelford 6y agoYes, but you need fewer of them for the same generating capacity. So instead of having to maintain 10 1.4MW turbines, you only need to maintain 1 14MW turbine.
- itsnot2020 6y agoLike in Palm Springs where they are replacing 460 wind turbines with 11 for the same energy production.
- kitd 6y agoI don't have a link but IIRC a single rotation of the largest turbines can generate enough electricity to supply an average home for a day. edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-wind-farm/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-w...
- jonsen 6y ago
- jack_riminton 6y agoI hope the blades are able to be recycled Apparently GE have announced that they can do this now but there's no specific mention of it on the UK ones https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-announces-first-us-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-program-with-veolia/591869/#:~:text=The%20process%20will%20make%20wind,materials%20in%20the%20cement%20production https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-announces-first-us-wind-... Previously they just had to bury them: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
- nradov 6y agoDiscarded turbine blades are basically inert and won't give off any methane so there's really nothing wrong with burying them in a landfill.
- probablypower 6y ago>there's really nothing wrong with burying them in a landfill And with one comment, 100 circular economists screamed out in pain.
- pjc50 6y agoThe main problem with a hundred meter long blade is going to be finding somewhere to put it. Maybe they'll end up as artificial reefs or polders. Or maybe in the intervening 20+ years somebody will develop a technique for recycling glass-epoxy composites.
- jack_riminton 6y agoJust because something is acceptable doesn't mean its preferable Recycling is clearly the preferable option
- vikramkr 6y agoWhy? Recycling it could be very energy intensive. Recycling is only preferable in particular circumstances, and until you have a specific recycling process to evaluate, you can't make general conclusions about the preferability/environmental superiority of recycling vs landfill disposal
- jbj 6y agothere is also a plan for an artificial island: https://energinet.dk/Om-nyheder/Nyheder/2017/04/25/Kampe-kunstig-o-midt-i-Nordsoen-Tre-lande-undersoger-om-fremtiden https://energinet.dk/Om-nyheder/Nyheder/2017/04/25/Kampe-kun...
- pmuk 6y agoThey hope to increase offshore wind power threefold to 40GW by 2030 creating 27,000 new jobs.... that's 1MW of energy output per job!
- pjc50 6y agoTechnology as force multiplier. If your job was generating energy directly, you'd struggle to manage more than 100W continuous and quickly get bored of pedalling.