19 ms·

Financing offshore wind

95 points by guerby 4y ago

epistasis 4y ago
I've come across this blog a few times in the past month, and it's excellent.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Jérôme used to hang out on The Oil Drum, back in the Peak Oil days (2006?), and explain the financing of wind power there. I'd say he knows his onions.
- rstuart4133 4y ago
  I've just read this series, and yes for it at least "excellent" is the right word. From this one series I learnt a lot about how bankers, insurance agencies and engineers collaborate to delivery large novel projects. Or at least how the Europeans do it. It's involves a remarkable amount of cooperation and trust building, among many parties, and it delivered. I had no idea it was so complex. I guess it's done in much the same way in the rest of the OECD. Societies (and ergo countries) that can't pull that off must be at a huge disadvantage compared to those who can. So much so, that it seems likely it explains the entire difference between OECD levels of affluence, and societies on the brink in other parts of the world.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
This looks very good and I look forward to reading it more in depth later. I'm from Rhode Island and my father never stops talking about how horrible the Block Island wind farm is. From what he shows me- he's right. The project provides power substantially above market rate so as much as I like wind it seems like a bad deal for Rhode Island.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  My understanding is that the Block Island Wind Farm was essentially a pilot program, no? It's nowhere near the scale of other offshore wind proposals in the US or Europe (NY alone plans to develop 9000MW of capacity in the next 15 years[1], versus the 30MW from Block Island), which makes me think it was more a proof of concept. [1]: https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/offshore-wind https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/offshore-wind
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The series seems to focus mostly on <0.5GW projects. Maybe bigger projects are assembled from those?
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      IIRC part of the idea behind NY launching so much offshore wind is that it wants to amass enough experience and suppliers doing so to become a natural hub of it in the Northeast.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Experience seems to be crucially important in open-sea construction. There is so much that can go wrong, and so much value in judicious prevention and preparation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
It seems the key is non-recourse debt which is a great way to align the goals of the financiers with the owners.
kieranmaine 4y ago
Interesting tidbit. According to Part 6 the lifespan of off-shore wind farms is now considered to be between 30-40 years: "projects in 2011 would typically have assumed a 20 year operational life, but the industry has moved towards 35 years as a standard and some players now even expect that 40 years is achievable" https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/i/51708558/operations-phase https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/i/51708558/operations-phas...
- tomByrer 4y ago
  Unfortunately folks don't want wind farms disturbing their views, like the current US Global Warming Czar: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/04/03/massachusetts-affordable-energy-prospects-are-blowing-in-the-wind/?sh=77d08d287c09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/04/03/massachuse...
  - pstuart 4y ago
    Fortunately they're getting better and and bigger and farther away.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    "This article is more than 10 years old"
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- epistasis 4y ago
  In the US, a lot of wind farms are getting repowered with bigger turbines, even when they have many more years left on their current equipment. The advances in turbines means more power per turbine, and higher capacity factors. Though it's hard to imagine much beyond these 15MW offshore beasts, only time will tell what tech improvements we see.
- adrianN 4y ago
  It makes a lot of sense to build turbines with a lower expected lifespan while the technology is still rapidly improving. Nobody wants to operate 30 year old 1MW turbines when 15MW turbines are available.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tialaramex 4y ago
"on the basis of ongoing market prices, without any medium term revenue stabilisation mechanism." This looks clever when market price is 50 per MWh, but when Putin decides to cut off the cheap gas you were using to make a lot of electricity and the market price rises to 500 per MWh, suddenly revenue stabilisation looks very different. The UK has a bunch of wind farms which are quite old (up to about 30 years), and so even if they were subsidised when built the subsidy has expired but the wind farm is still there and still making electricity (typical design life is 25 years, in most cases as lifespan approaches the owners want to build a taller wind farm). However today the market price they're selling electricity for is far higher, as much as ten times. Newer wind farms have a Contract for Difference as revenue stabilisation, with the actual price they're paid fixed (a "strike price") and of course those strike prices are far lower than today's gas shortage market prices. So there's pressure for government to agree that old wind farms get a CfD, with a price lower than today's market price but higher, perhaps much higher than future market prices, since now stabilisation is supporting a different government policy (don't let voters starve or freeze to death) rather than the original one (subsidise "green" energy solutions) The irony is that if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the early 2000s, using more subsidies, that would actually save money today, even though it would have outraged fiscal conservatives at the time who imagined it would never pay off.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > The irony is that if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the early 2000s, using more subsidies, that would actually save money today, even though it would have outraged fiscal conservatives at the time who imagined it would never pay off. Most self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives I cone across don't seem to grasp the difference between spending and investment. When they do understand investment, they want to attract private capital at a cost of 5% yoy, when government could borrow money at 0.1% yoy (Uk Hincley C debacle)
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    In other words, "fiscal conservatives'" chief desire is to move government money into private pockets at maximum rate in exchange for little or no value. "Fiscal responsibility" is just their smokescreen. They certainly understand the difference between spending and investment. They just want to own the investment part, while government does the spending part.
ncmncm 4y ago
This is an excellent series. Important: several of the "next installment" links point to the same one, instead, and you have to hand-edit the link to get to the next one. Something not mentioned that I found surprising was the very large fraction of construction cost consumed by zinc, for corrosion control, vs copper and steel. I guess that for finance purposes, zinc is considered part of the steel. Maybe availability and price of zinc is stable enough not to need separate attention, unlike copper.
- baking 4y ago
  Part 10 has the whole list: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-10 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... (or you can just change the number in the URL.)
rr808 4y ago
One of the problems is that its so dependent on government policy its difficult to predict. Eg right now France caps its electricity prices so power generators aren't making the profits they would in a free market. Also who knows what will happen down the road when cheaper renewables or nuclear comes online.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Renewables, anyway.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Why would cheaper nuclear come online anytime the next 2 decades? Serious question, is there any indication that this is likely to happen? More nuclear, sure, maybe even small reactors sometime 2030, but much cheaper?
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    If anything nuclear keeps increasing in cost while renewables keep getting cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Small reactors might start to get economy of scale in manufacture, but operators would see the opposite result, either the same attention needed for much less power, or the same power but many times the work. Nukes' operation is a minority cost only by comparison to monstrous capital cost. It is way more than for, e.g., coal, fuel aside. The manufacturer might instrument it heavily, and take up remote and semi-automated management of the whole fleet, but that also raises total cost vs. big reactors. It is impossible for mature tech to keep up where the competition's cost falls at a relentlessly exponential pace. Reactors are, unavoidably, about massive steel and concrete, plumbing, valves, pumps, and steam turbines, none of those getting cheaper.
- jopsen 4y ago
  Cheaper renewables might be a risk... Well, even more wind might be.. because the price for electricity will be low for all wind farms when the wind is blowing. It seems like there might be a lot of debt here exposed to a risk that the prices for electricity drop when it's windy.
ncmncm 4y ago
Offshore wind is interesting to compare to tidal power and wave power. Tidal projects seem to go OK, while wave power companies as a rule go bankrupt without ever finishing a utility-scale installation. Looking at failed wave-power startups, I find some common features: - surface-level equipment exposed to breaking waves, - complicated mechanical parts, - electrical equipment on or under water, - expensive parts (turbine, generator) duplicated for each unit - a heavy, expensive to build bunker. In offshore wind, the expensive parts -- turbines -- are both offshore and duplicated, and the tower is very big and expensive. On the plus side, the turbines are held well away from salt water, and their mechanical operation is simple (although feathering the blades adds complexity). The power transmission tie-in is at or under the water, but has no moving parts, and can be shared with lots of turbines. It is not surprising that the bigger and taller wind turbines are, the better they get. One big turbine a mile high ought to do best, if you could build it. Tidal has underwater turbines with expensive generators inside, duplicated, but it is anyway protected from surface insults. Are tidal projects mainly government sponsored? It strikes me that the sweet spot for wave power would be a system where moving parts are under the surface and protected from breaking waves, where any needed mechanical parts are extremely simple and reliable, and where any expensive, fragile or high-maintenance parts are onshore and indoors. Thus, I would have high hopes for a system anchored sub-surface that pushes air or water through a culvert/plenum to a turbine in a regular building on-shore. A single plenum, turbine, and generator could serve a whole fleet of energy-collection units out in the water. Closed-loop air, or at least dry air sourced from on shore, is appealing vs. moving sea water or sea air through a turbine, which turbines don't like so much. Thus, I like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6MJpiUEKaU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6MJpiUEKaU and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfSAN-2pz9w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfSAN-2pz9w although I would want the turbine part moved onshore and shared. The latter is uniquely interesting as it takes advantage of not just waves' vertical motion, but their horizontal progression. The V shape is interesting as it takes energy from a wide front of the wave. This one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehT-ZTHFGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehT-ZTHFGg is getting hype lately, but checks all the loser boxes.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  I live in Tasmania, and was certain one of your YouTube links would be to Wave Swell Energy / UniWave200. I helped build this - no affiliation, just happened to be in a place at a time whereby I participated in a small way. Thanks, I hadn't seen 4ehT-ZTHFGg - posted only 6 days ago.
kevinak 4y ago
Another idea: 1. Build turbines 2. Stick Bitcoin miners in them (or the off-shore substation?) 3. Disconnect Bitcoin miners when export cable is complete 4. Repeat 5. Save the world
- Klaster_1 4y ago
  This has already been happening for a while with cheap hydro electricity from Siberia, if I understand the situation correctly. Did anyone perform a comparison of Bitcoin vs batteries vs new electricity lines yet, is it a viable replacement under certain conditions?
  - kevinak 4y ago
    What would the batteries do?
    - Klaster_1 4y ago
      Analogous to Bitcoin, batteries store the value to be used at a later point in time.
Roark66 4y ago
>"projects in 2011 would typically have assumed a 20 year operational life, but the industry has moved towards 35 years as a standard and some players now even expect that 40 years is achievable" I wonder how does the real lifetime look like, especially in cold seas where the blades have to deal not with just salty water droplets hitting their tips at very high speeds, but ice too. I've seen a video few years ago that said the blade lifetime in reality is shockingly worse than the estimates due to delamination, composite deterioration etc. As a proof they showed videos taken from air showing large amount of those blades being buried in the soil by huge bulldozers that looked very tiny in comparison to the size of the mountain of blades they were burying. I'm really curious if they resolved the problem by now.
- brazzy 4y ago
  The solution is simply ongoing inspections and repair of such damagen when it's found, before it becomes so bad the whole blade has to be replaced: https://www.fullcirclewindservices.com/wind-turbine-blade-repair-when-why-and-how/ https://www.fullcirclewindservices.com/wind-turbine-blade-re...
evaneykelen 4y ago
Tiny nitpick on an otherwise good article: IJmuiden is spelled with both a capital I and J in Dutch since it’s a digraph[1]. This also is an good example why user interfaces should be careful to override the user’s capitalization of names. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Tiny nitpick... Irrelevant nitpick is what I would call it and it's not correct. It has nothing to do with ij being a digraph, the following are also digraphs au, ou, ei, eu,... in Dutch. You don't write AU or OU at the beginning of a sentence or in a name.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Interesting tidbit on why the oil & gas construction sector didn't do too well in offshore wind work, while the dredging industry seems to be doing well there: > "Unfortunately, it quickly appeared that offshore wind was quite different from offshore oil & gas – serial construction rather than large bespoke structures, a capped revenue structure that means that cost discipline is a lot more important than simply getting things done (in oil & gas, the cashflows from a producing well are such that it is almost always worth it to spend more to get things done faster; in offshore wind, this is not the case)" These are the kind of details that make the reader think, "This person knows what they're talking about, read more of their stuff."
guerby 4y ago
Report direct link: https://wfo-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WFO_FinancingOffshoreWind_2022.pdf https://wfo-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WFO_Financ...
- dang 4y ago
  The blog seems more readable than that pdf so I've changed the URL above from https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind to the first blog post. Part 2: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-2?s=w https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 3: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-3 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 4: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-4 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 5: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-5 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... (you're on your own after that)
  - mcint 4y ago
    Part 1: https://wfo-global.org/financing-offshore-wind-part-1/ https://wfo-global.org/financing-offshore-wind-part-1/ > first part of what will be a 10–part series of blog posts,
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    For later entries, you probably want to make your own URLs, because the links in the pages are messed up. Or, just start here: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-10 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-...
- Archelaos 4y ago
  What I find revealing is that the section about the "The offshore wind project cycle" does not cover the dismantling of the installation. I had once to evaluate the offer of a local project for an (onshore) solar park in Germany. The lease offered was about 4 times the current usual land lease rates for 30 to 40 years with inflation adjustments. The solar park company should be responsible for the complete dismantling of the installation afterwards. In case of an insolvency of the company a bank guarantee would step in. However, the (inflation adjusted) bank guarantee was only €10,000 per hectare (10,000 m^2), which seemed extremly low to me. This must cover everything from removing the panels and sockets, all the power lines in the ground, the transformer installation on the field, the removal of asphalt roads, etc., etc. I could not find any detailed studies about the likely dismantling costs for solar parks. Bank guarantee prices are so high that a guarantee of between €30,000 and €50,000 per hectare (depending on the current bank rate) would have eaten up the entire surplus lease. So if my guess is correct and the actual deconstruction costs are well over €10,000 per hectare, in 30 to 40 years there will be a high incentive for solar park companies to move solar parks that are to be phased out into equivalents to bad banks and threatening insolvency, so that either the land owners need to step in with their private savings after the bank guarantees where used up or the state needs to pay to prevent this from happening. Does anyone here know of any reputable calculations for the deconstruction costs of solar parks?

95 points by guerby 4y ago

epistasis 4y ago

I've come across this blog a few times in the past month, and it's excellent.

tuatoru 4y ago
Jérôme used to hang out on The Oil Drum, back in the Peak Oil days (2006?), and explain the financing of wind power there. I'd say he knows his onions.
rstuart4133 4y ago
I've just read this series, and yes for it at least "excellent" is the right word. From this one series I learnt a lot about how bankers, insurance agencies and engineers collaborate to delivery large novel projects. Or at least how the Europeans do it. It's involves a remarkable amount of cooperation and trust building, among many parties, and it delivered. I had no idea it was so complex. I guess it's done in much the same way in the rest of the OECD. Societies (and ergo countries) that can't pull that off must be at a huge disadvantage compared to those who can. So much so, that it seems likely it explains the entire difference between OECD levels of affluence, and societies on the brink in other parts of the world.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

This looks very good and I look forward to reading it more in depth later. I'm from Rhode Island and my father never stops talking about how horrible the Block Island wind farm is. From what he shows me- he's right. The project provides power substantially above market rate so as much as I like wind it seems like a bad deal for Rhode Island.

woodruffw 4y ago
My understanding is that the Block Island Wind Farm was essentially a pilot program, no? It's nowhere near the scale of other offshore wind proposals in the US or Europe (NY alone plans to develop 9000MW of capacity in the next 15 years[1], versus the 30MW from Block Island), which makes me think it was more a proof of concept. [1]: https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/offshore-wind https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/offshore-wind
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The series seems to focus mostly on <0.5GW projects. Maybe bigger projects are assembled from those?
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    IIRC part of the idea behind NY launching so much offshore wind is that it wants to amass enough experience and suppliers doing so to become a natural hub of it in the Northeast.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Experience seems to be crucially important in open-sea construction. There is so much that can go wrong, and so much value in judicious prevention and preparation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

bombcar 4y ago

It seems the key is non-recourse debt which is a great way to align the goals of the financiers with the owners.

kieranmaine 4y ago

Interesting tidbit. According to Part 6 the lifespan of off-shore wind farms is now considered to be between 30-40 years: "projects in 2011 would typically have assumed a 20 year operational life, but the industry has moved towards 35 years as a standard and some players now even expect that 40 years is achievable" https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/i/51708558/operations-phase https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/i/51708558/operations-phas...

tomByrer 4y ago
Unfortunately folks don't want wind farms disturbing their views, like the current US Global Warming Czar: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/04/03/massachusetts-affordable-energy-prospects-are-blowing-in-the-wind/?sh=77d08d287c09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/04/03/massachuse...
- pstuart 4y ago
  Fortunately they're getting better and and bigger and farther away.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  "This article is more than 10 years old"
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
epistasis 4y ago
In the US, a lot of wind farms are getting repowered with bigger turbines, even when they have many more years left on their current equipment. The advances in turbines means more power per turbine, and higher capacity factors. Though it's hard to imagine much beyond these 15MW offshore beasts, only time will tell what tech improvements we see.
adrianN 4y ago
It makes a lot of sense to build turbines with a lower expected lifespan while the technology is still rapidly improving. Nobody wants to operate 30 year old 1MW turbines when 15MW turbines are available.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tialaramex 4y ago

"on the basis of ongoing market prices, without any medium term revenue stabilisation mechanism." This looks clever when market price is 50 per MWh, but when Putin decides to cut off the cheap gas you were using to make a lot of electricity and the market price rises to 500 per MWh, suddenly revenue stabilisation looks very different. The UK has a bunch of wind farms which are quite old (up to about 30 years), and so even if they were subsidised when built the subsidy has expired but the wind farm is still there and still making electricity (typical design life is 25 years, in most cases as lifespan approaches the owners want to build a taller wind farm). However today the market price they're selling electricity for is far higher, as much as ten times. Newer wind farms have a Contract for Difference as revenue stabilisation, with the actual price they're paid fixed (a "strike price") and of course those strike prices are far lower than today's gas shortage market prices. So there's pressure for government to agree that old wind farms get a CfD, with a price lower than today's market price but higher, perhaps much higher than future market prices, since now stabilisation is supporting a different government policy (don't let voters starve or freeze to death) rather than the original one (subsidise "green" energy solutions) The irony is that if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the early 2000s, using more subsidies, that would actually save money today, even though it would have outraged fiscal conservatives at the time who imagined it would never pay off.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> The irony is that if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the early 2000s, using more subsidies, that would actually save money today, even though it would have outraged fiscal conservatives at the time who imagined it would never pay off. Most self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives I cone across don't seem to grasp the difference between spending and investment. When they do understand investment, they want to attract private capital at a cost of 5% yoy, when government could borrow money at 0.1% yoy (Uk Hincley C debacle)
- ncmncm 4y ago
  In other words, "fiscal conservatives'" chief desire is to move government money into private pockets at maximum rate in exchange for little or no value. "Fiscal responsibility" is just their smokescreen. They certainly understand the difference between spending and investment. They just want to own the investment part, while government does the spending part.

ncmncm 4y ago

This is an excellent series. Important: several of the "next installment" links point to the same one, instead, and you have to hand-edit the link to get to the next one. Something not mentioned that I found surprising was the very large fraction of construction cost consumed by zinc, for corrosion control, vs copper and steel. I guess that for finance purposes, zinc is considered part of the steel. Maybe availability and price of zinc is stable enough not to need separate attention, unlike copper.

baking 4y ago
Part 10 has the whole list: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-10 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... (or you can just change the number in the URL.)

rr808 4y ago

One of the problems is that its so dependent on government policy its difficult to predict. Eg right now France caps its electricity prices so power generators aren't making the profits they would in a free market. Also who knows what will happen down the road when cheaper renewables or nuclear comes online.

ncmncm 4y ago
Renewables, anyway.
geysersam 4y ago
Why would cheaper nuclear come online anytime the next 2 decades? Serious question, is there any indication that this is likely to happen? More nuclear, sure, maybe even small reactors sometime 2030, but much cheaper?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  If anything nuclear keeps increasing in cost while renewables keep getting cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Small reactors might start to get economy of scale in manufacture, but operators would see the opposite result, either the same attention needed for much less power, or the same power but many times the work. Nukes' operation is a minority cost only by comparison to monstrous capital cost. It is way more than for, e.g., coal, fuel aside. The manufacturer might instrument it heavily, and take up remote and semi-automated management of the whole fleet, but that also raises total cost vs. big reactors. It is impossible for mature tech to keep up where the competition's cost falls at a relentlessly exponential pace. Reactors are, unavoidably, about massive steel and concrete, plumbing, valves, pumps, and steam turbines, none of those getting cheaper.
jopsen 4y ago
Cheaper renewables might be a risk... Well, even more wind might be.. because the price for electricity will be low for all wind farms when the wind is blowing. It seems like there might be a lot of debt here exposed to a risk that the prices for electricity drop when it's windy.

ncmncm 4y ago

Offshore wind is interesting to compare to tidal power and wave power. Tidal projects seem to go OK, while wave power companies as a rule go bankrupt without ever finishing a utility-scale installation. Looking at failed wave-power startups, I find some common features: - surface-level equipment exposed to breaking waves, - complicated mechanical parts, - electrical equipment on or under water, - expensive parts (turbine, generator) duplicated for each unit - a heavy, expensive to build bunker. In offshore wind, the expensive parts -- turbines -- are both offshore and duplicated, and the tower is very big and expensive. On the plus side, the turbines are held well away from salt water, and their mechanical operation is simple (although feathering the blades adds complexity). The power transmission tie-in is at or under the water, but has no moving parts, and can be shared with lots of turbines. It is not surprising that the bigger and taller wind turbines are, the better they get. One big turbine a mile high ought to do best, if you could build it. Tidal has underwater turbines with expensive generators inside, duplicated, but it is anyway protected from surface insults. Are tidal projects mainly government sponsored? It strikes me that the sweet spot for wave power would be a system where moving parts are under the surface and protected from breaking waves, where any needed mechanical parts are extremely simple and reliable, and where any expensive, fragile or high-maintenance parts are onshore and indoors. Thus, I would have high hopes for a system anchored sub-surface that pushes air or water through a culvert/plenum to a turbine in a regular building on-shore. A single plenum, turbine, and generator could serve a whole fleet of energy-collection units out in the water. Closed-loop air, or at least dry air sourced from on shore, is appealing vs. moving sea water or sea air through a turbine, which turbines don't like so much. Thus, I like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6MJpiUEKaU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6MJpiUEKaU and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfSAN-2pz9w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfSAN-2pz9w although I would want the turbine part moved onshore and shared. The latter is uniquely interesting as it takes advantage of not just waves' vertical motion, but their horizontal progression. The V shape is interesting as it takes energy from a wide front of the wave. This one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehT-ZTHFGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehT-ZTHFGg is getting hype lately, but checks all the loser boxes.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
I live in Tasmania, and was certain one of your YouTube links would be to Wave Swell Energy / UniWave200. I helped build this - no affiliation, just happened to be in a place at a time whereby I participated in a small way. Thanks, I hadn't seen 4ehT-ZTHFGg - posted only 6 days ago.

kevinak 4y ago

Another idea: 1. Build turbines 2. Stick Bitcoin miners in them (or the off-shore substation?) 3. Disconnect Bitcoin miners when export cable is complete 4. Repeat 5. Save the world

Klaster_1 4y ago
This has already been happening for a while with cheap hydro electricity from Siberia, if I understand the situation correctly. Did anyone perform a comparison of Bitcoin vs batteries vs new electricity lines yet, is it a viable replacement under certain conditions?
- kevinak 4y ago
  What would the batteries do?
  - Klaster_1 4y ago
    Analogous to Bitcoin, batteries store the value to be used at a later point in time.

Roark66 4y ago

>"projects in 2011 would typically have assumed a 20 year operational life, but the industry has moved towards 35 years as a standard and some players now even expect that 40 years is achievable" I wonder how does the real lifetime look like, especially in cold seas where the blades have to deal not with just salty water droplets hitting their tips at very high speeds, but ice too. I've seen a video few years ago that said the blade lifetime in reality is shockingly worse than the estimates due to delamination, composite deterioration etc. As a proof they showed videos taken from air showing large amount of those blades being buried in the soil by huge bulldozers that looked very tiny in comparison to the size of the mountain of blades they were burying. I'm really curious if they resolved the problem by now.

brazzy 4y ago
The solution is simply ongoing inspections and repair of such damagen when it's found, before it becomes so bad the whole blade has to be replaced: https://www.fullcirclewindservices.com/wind-turbine-blade-repair-when-why-and-how/ https://www.fullcirclewindservices.com/wind-turbine-blade-re...

evaneykelen 4y ago

Tiny nitpick on an otherwise good article: IJmuiden is spelled with both a capital I and J in Dutch since it’s a digraph[1]. This also is an good example why user interfaces should be careful to override the user’s capitalization of names. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)

cinntaile 4y ago
Tiny nitpick... Irrelevant nitpick is what I would call it and it's not correct. It has nothing to do with ij being a digraph, the following are also digraphs au, ou, ei, eu,... in Dutch. You don't write AU or OU at the beginning of a sentence or in a name.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Interesting tidbit on why the oil & gas construction sector didn't do too well in offshore wind work, while the dredging industry seems to be doing well there: > "Unfortunately, it quickly appeared that offshore wind was quite different from offshore oil & gas – serial construction rather than large bespoke structures, a capped revenue structure that means that cost discipline is a lot more important than simply getting things done (in oil & gas, the cashflows from a producing well are such that it is almost always worth it to spend more to get things done faster; in offshore wind, this is not the case)" These are the kind of details that make the reader think, "This person knows what they're talking about, read more of their stuff."

guerby 4y ago

Report direct link: https://wfo-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WFO_FinancingOffshoreWind_2022.pdf https://wfo-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WFO_Financ...

dang 4y ago
The blog seems more readable than that pdf so I've changed the URL above from https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind to the first blog post. Part 2: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-2?s=w https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 3: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-3 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 4: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-4 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... Part 5: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-5 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... (you're on your own after that)
- mcint 4y ago
  Part 1: https://wfo-global.org/financing-offshore-wind-part-1/ https://wfo-global.org/financing-offshore-wind-part-1/ > first part of what will be a 10–part series of blog posts,
- ncmncm 4y ago
  For later entries, you probably want to make your own URLs, because the links in the pages are messed up. Or, just start here: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-part-10 https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-...
Archelaos 4y ago
What I find revealing is that the section about the "The offshore wind project cycle" does not cover the dismantling of the installation. I had once to evaluate the offer of a local project for an (onshore) solar park in Germany. The lease offered was about 4 times the current usual land lease rates for 30 to 40 years with inflation adjustments. The solar park company should be responsible for the complete dismantling of the installation afterwards. In case of an insolvency of the company a bank guarantee would step in. However, the (inflation adjusted) bank guarantee was only €10,000 per hectare (10,000 m^2), which seemed extremly low to me. This must cover everything from removing the panels and sockets, all the power lines in the ground, the transformer installation on the field, the removal of asphalt roads, etc., etc. I could not find any detailed studies about the likely dismantling costs for solar parks. Bank guarantee prices are so high that a guarantee of between €30,000 and €50,000 per hectare (depending on the current bank rate) would have eaten up the entire surplus lease. So if my guess is correct and the actual deconstruction costs are well over €10,000 per hectare, in 30 to 40 years there will be a high incentive for solar park companies to move solar parks that are to be phased out into equivalents to bad banks and threatening insolvency, so that either the land owners need to step in with their private savings after the bank guarantees where used up or the state needs to pay to prevent this from happening. Does anyone here know of any reputable calculations for the deconstruction costs of solar parks?