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Earth Science Technology

World's First Floating Windfarm To Take Shape Off Coast of Scotland (theguardian.com) 123

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's first floating windfarm has taken to the seas in a sign that a technology once confined to research and development drawing boards is finally ready to unlock expanses of ocean for generating renewable power. After two turbines were floated this week, five now bob gently in the deep waters of a fjord on the western coast of Norway ready to be tugged across the North Sea to their final destination off north-east Scotland. The ~$256 million Hywind project is unusual not just because of the pioneering technology involved, which uses a 78-meter-tall underwater ballast and three mooring lines that will be attached to the seabed to keep the turbines upright. It is also notable because the developer is not a renewable energy firm but Norway's Statoil, which is looking to diversify away from carbon-based fuels.
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World's First Floating Windfarm To Take Shape Off Coast of Scotland

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Installed cost of over $8500 per kW. A gas fired combined cycle plant runs from $500 to $1000 per kW.

    This project will only make money because stupid people will pay extra for the joy of it.

    Absolutely stupid.

    • Is that $8500 per peak watt or after taking into account the "capacity factor" that the wind blows, on average, a certain percent of the time?

      • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Move to areas with better wind if the wind gets to fast, stops or gets too slow?
        • Move to areas with better wind if the wind gets to fast, stops or gets too slow?

          They will be anchored to the seafloor, and once in place they won't move. But it doesn't matter: in the North Sea, the wind never stops, nor does it often even slow down. The whole point of putting the turbines out at sea is for the strong and steady wind.

          • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Except for the cost of putting turbines out at sea...
            • Re:Peak or average? (Score:5, Informative)

              by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @11:10PM (#54702721)

              Except for the cost of putting turbines out at sea...

              Not so bad when you still have the vestiges of an entire industry devoted to building offshore platforms nearby.

            • Except for the cost of putting turbines out at sea...

              Duh. Of course the cost is higher at sea. But the winds are stronger, and power goes up as the cube of the windspeed, so the same size rig can generate far more power. Sea winds are also steadier, which means less expense on peakers [wikipedia.org].

    • Re:30 MW for $256M (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:00PM (#54702479)

      Installed cost of over $8500 per kW.

      It is expensive because it is the first of its kind. We will learn from it, and version 2.0 will be better.

      A gas fired combined cycle plant runs from $500 to $1000 per kW.

      That is the installation cost. You still have to buy gas. Of course the gas will be cheaper because that is mature technology, and many of the costs are externalized.

      Absolutely stupid.

      If you only look at the short term gain, yes. If you consider the long term, including the value of knowledge, then no.

    • Re:30 MW for $256M (Score:4, Informative)

      by jblues ( 1703158 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:05PM (#54702509)

      The first-of-a-kind nature means supply chain complexity, too. “We have 15 main contractors. For the future we cannot have 15, we can have between 5 and 10,” said Leif Delp, project manager for Hywind. Expect costs to come down.

      Bear in mind that it is an Oil & Gas company that decided to pursue this project.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The first chip to roll of an Intel stepper costs a lot too. Doesn't mean Intel should have stuck with the 4004.

    • Re:30 MW for $256M (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:39PM (#54702603) Homepage

      I love the idea of somebody telling an oil company that they don't know how to make money.

      • Companies whore after any big source of paid cash. Oil companies too. Look at Halliburton, not even an oil company - good for at least two wars (LBJ/Vietnam and Iraq),
    • by whitroth ( 9367 )

      Stupid people is right... like you. So you're saying that a first floating windfarm is going to cost about 10 times what gas-fired would.

      There's just one thing wrong with your costing: how much will the gas-fired plant pay for fuel per year? Over the next five years?

      The windfarm pays NOTHING.

  • As usual, TFA is short on some important details. Wind turbines, great. Floating, anchored in (relatively) deep coastal waters, great. How does the power get back to shore? The northern coast of Scotland isn't really a very highly populated area, how does this project tie into the existing power grid?

    T. Boone Pickens had an idea a few yeard ago - build wind farms across the panhandle of Texas, then run the power back along railroad right-of-ways. Trains might run through the middle of nowhere, but thei

    • by hoofie ( 201045 )

      As usual, TFA is short on some important details. Wind turbines, great. Floating, anchored in (relatively) deep coastal waters, great. How does the power get back to shore? The northern coast of Scotland isn't really a very highly populated area, how does this project tie into the existing power grid?

      T. Boone Pickens had an idea a few yeard ago - build wind farms across the panhandle of Texas, then run the power back along railroad right-of-ways. Trains might run through the middle of nowhere, but their destinations are always in towns.

      It's more populated than you think - most of the towns in that neck of the woods are coastal. Also Peterhead has a 3 gas turbine power station plus Aberdeen is just down the road with a population of 200,000. Finally Scotland is criss-crossed by the National Grid distribution system due to amount of Nuclear Stations that were [and some still are] dotted around : a network which is of course tied into the UK as a whole.

    • in the same way they get oil from the the north sea platforms - build a pipeline of some sort, lay a cable (how do you think they started to get telegraph messages between the UK and USA?
    • One detail is that there are only three anchor chains. If that is true, these are a disaster waiting to happen. If three are needed (which they are, to guarantee the position), then you should fit at least five, so that, in the event of failure (remember Murphy?) there is still a spare one.

      Two chains just won't work in the event of an accident. Just imagine monstrosity like this swinging about on one chain until the second one gets pulled tight! Even a boat in harbour is normally moored with four.

      • A ship will have four anchors so that you don't have 150m ships swinging around a single point. I have however seen small ships anchored in the Solent at the bow only, although that's a sheltered area. These anchors will also be - for all intensive purposes* - permanent. The anchors themselves are Suction Caissons [wikipedia.org] (source), not stockless anchors.

        * Obvious troll is obvious :-)

      • I know little about anchoring turbines, but I've never moored a boat with four anchors in my life - and removable boat anchors are much less reliable than permanent mooring systems.

        I'm all in favour of redundancy, but it's not the only solution to making things safe. I've flown in many single-engine aircraft, and I've driven over plenty of bridges which will fall down if any one of their pillars collapses.

        • It takes three points to stop rotation of the platform while allowing movement (you could stop rotation with two but the anchor lines would need to be more taught). That is why three. The likelihood of an anchor break and the consequences are hard to know from information available. Two lines would likely stop any significant movement from its original position.
  • by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2017 @12:36AM (#54702981)

    I imagine some day, electric boats might swap batteries at floating stations that recharge the depleted batteries via wind turbine or tidal power.

    • I imagine some day, electric boats might swap batteries at floating stations that recharge the depleted batteries via wind turbine or tidal power.

      Why would we use boats when we could use a gravity train instead.

  • by Richard Kirk ( 535523 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2017 @01:38AM (#54703075)

    The development is entirely reasonable, and follows the normal pattern of risk reduction in an emerging technology.

    Oil drilling started off on land, then it moved to shallow waters, then it moved to deep waters. The technology developed on the easiest sites then moved to the harder sites when there were not enough easy sites.

    Some of the first wind farms in the UK were on Scottish islands. Not only did they have plenty of wind, the inhabitants of the islands used diesel generators, which were over four times the cost of mainland electricity; so the site was likely to be profitable even if it used first-generation parts. It reduced the risk of a highly visible venture site being unprofitable, and blocking the chance of making others.

    Putting windmills in shallow water is quite like building them on land. You sink piles into shallow water or boggy land. The existing technologies can be used with longer piles, but in the end another solution is going to be cheaper. The cheaper solution is going to be anchored platforms. The people with the most experience of these are oil companies.

    Instead of asking, "why an oil company?", ask "why not all oil companies with offshore drilling?". The US division - fossil fuels are freedom, wind and renewables are tree-hugging socialism - does not hold in Europe.

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      "Plenty of wind" is subjective. Unless it has a constant wind it will fluctuate, making it useless for providing a reliable baseload.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        All power plants fluctuate. Nuke stations need refuelling and maintenance at least twice a year dropping or stopping output. Coal power stations too. Both thermal plants need enough cold water without things like jellyfish clogging the inlets and without that they stop. This variability therefore makes coal and nuclear power useless for baseload....

        • by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2017 @06:38AM (#54703779)

          All power plants fluctuate. Nuke stations need refuelling and maintenance at least twice a year dropping or stopping output.

          Nuclear refueling cycles are almost always 12 or 18 months. Not 6, you have an inaccurate source of info that you should no longer trust or repeat. The outages are planned for low demand times, typically Spring and Fall, and therefore do not present the same problems that widely varying output on an hourly basis that we can see from wind.

    • Oil drilling started off on land, then it moved to shallow waters, then it moved to deep waters. The technology developed on the easiest sites then moved to the harder sites when there were not enough easy sites.

      That's actually what has me wondering why this costs so damn much. Isn't the "technology" exactly the same as a floating oil rig, except instead of doing the considerably harder task of sending a pipe down to a fixed spot on the sea floor, they're just sticking a wind turbine on top of it? The R

      • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        That's actually what has me wondering why this costs so damn much. Isn't the "technology" exactly the same as a floating oil rig, except instead of doing the considerably harder task of sending a pipe down to a fixed spot on the sea floor, they're just sticking a wind turbine on top of it?

        I guess the next question would be, how much does it cost to set up an oil rig? It may be that a floating rig is expensive to set up regardless of what you do with it.

        OTOH, if you're right, and there's no inherent reason for the additional expense, then I would expect costs to come down quickly once it has been established what works and what doesn't work in terms of off-shore wind. Everything costs more the first time, since you are still experimenting and often making sub-optimal or overly-conservative

    • It is reasonable if you don't ask what is paying for it.

        This is government money paying for this project not the oil companies money.

        If private investors had to pay for any of this it would never ever happen it makes no financial sense.

  • Haven't really read it much yet (it's 0400 in the morning and I'm getting ready for work) but as long as the numbers work out let'em go for it. Since "low carbon" is a thing with some they should also factor in the cost of carbon for the steel or aluminum, the oil lubing the bearings, etc. but it could very well be a positive. Certainly that area is DANGED windy!

    Ferret
  • Does it spoil the view from The Donster's golf course? Wouldn't that be a pity!

  • The map has a couple of problems.

    The Hywind project is nowhere near "North east Scotland". It looks to be near Aberdeen. That's east certainly but it is pretty close to the middle north-south of the mainland. The other Dot, next to that claims to be a place called Kingcardine. That is a hundred miles away. This may not seem much to people in the USA but it does here.

    If the map is faulty, how reliable is the article?

  • If we start occupying large open spaces including the ocean with these windmills, I wonder what the environmental impact would be with massive blocking/displacement of the wind around the world.
  • Couldn't help but wonder: if one of them puppies "accidentally" broke free of its moorings and started drifting away .. and I just happened to be there with a tugboat (or a bloody rowboat, for that matter!) and got a line on it ...

    Would it be mine?

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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