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Best news is that cost of these installations is now quite low: less than $1.5 per watt peak. What about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbine
by anovikov 5y ago
Best news is that cost of these installations is now quite low: less than $1.5 per watt peak.
What about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbines? Does it trend downwards? Which means, are we close to exhausting potential of wind?
PS: It's not, it's actually trending a bit up. Which is explainable because average capacity of a turbine trends up -> the turbine is bigger and taller -> wind blows faster and more consistently on higher altitude.
- google234123 5y agoAlso, how useful is peak wind power? Often is it not peak?
- adrianN 5y agoIt is useful because the energy produced by a wind turbine at a certain location is proportional to its peak output.
- lrem 5y agoIt really depends on the terrain I guess. Having lived all my life either on the shore or in the mountains, I've always seen winds to be pretty stable in a given season.
- sparsely 5y agoIt depends on the region obviously, but often peak wind power is in mornings and evenings, which complements solar nicely.
- Gibbon1 5y agoThe short answer scaling heavily favors huge turbines. The taller they are the larger swept area of the blades. More are more wind energy captured. (Good old area = distance squared) And higher up the more consistent the wind, higher the average wind speed, and thus higher capacity factor.
- kumarvvr 5y agoRecently read in an article about turbine scaling, that an 18% increase in blade length translates into 45% increase in power output. Scaling is extremely lucrative. And break even for these turbines is aroun 5 to 8 years, with active life of around 30.
- lostlogin 5y agoIt may have been from this (it says 45% more from a 19% increase): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273504
- kumarvvr 5y agoCapacity utilization factors on land are 0.26 to 0.52. They are around 0.5 on offshore installations. https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet
- vixen99 5y agoDoes that figure factor in the eventual heavy cost of de-installation?
- anovikov 5y agoWhy do you think there will ever a need for it? Just leave it where it is when it's no longer needed. Someone will eventually sell it for scrap metal making money on it.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThe move to offshore is another big factor as wind there is more consistent and its a bit easier to spread them out. Theres a lot of other small things contributing to the capacity factor increases too: computer modelling of how the wakes of different turbines interact with each other and the labdscape, energy market changes to penalise slow reacting coal plants and or reward flexible demand, better weather prediction, grid and battery integration, HVDC, marginal engineering and business process improvements as you get companies, technicians and tools dedicated to this industry. Having said all that, I'm not sure how useful a number it is, but nice that it's going up as generally it tracks the price going down as fixed costs get spread further. But if the price is low enough, then low capacity factors still make sense. Not sure if theres a stat that captures both of those things at the same time though and also considers the full system costs. There's almost certainly times and places that a low capacity factor producer that hits your system peak is going to be the best option. Demand response, for example, could be modelled as very low capacity factor generators that only supply when you actually need the extra power.
- VintageCool 5y agoTurbines are being built in slower wind-speed areas but are producing more power because they're bigger and taller.