Pretty much says it -- "wind" infrastructure - based in the physical world, the "easy" wind has been captured, off-shore is increasingly expensive - add supply chains and the uncertainties impacting the cost of capital - AND then the wind doesn't blow . . . Read a bit just this past week saying $4.1 TRILLION had been spent on renewables in the last 30 years -- what if we had spent that sum on nuclear instead ?
Great discussion, Angelica did a superb job of explaining the options and downsides. I worked as a marine engineer for 10 years, building technology that operate reliably and be serviceable in a marine environment is really hard. IMO building offshore wind farms is hard^2 and costly^3, it makes no sense to me and the costs of interconnection are also extreme, requiring submarine cables and usually HVDC converter stations at each end, it's all $$$.
"Let's take wind, which is already uneconomical, and put it in the corrosive, abrasive, inaccessible environment of the ocean. That will make it even cheaper!"
Taking the clue from Rosie's Engineering and adding it to this series, offshore wind or solar energy collectors are even less effective than onshore non generators, and it's way past time people in responsible positions did something about the absolute atrocities inherent in first strike nuclear weapons and recognised the absolute defensive necessity of nuclear power generation.
How much of (cheap) manufacturing is based on carbon energy? Renewables is a misnomer - they are replaceable and cost is a poor measure of whether they add to or reduce planetary pollution. And where manufacturing is offshore, the Global North ignores its impact. That lack of accountability for the supply chain has to change.
TBF, offshore oil is facing increasing technical challenges as depletion of older field forces them to drill deeper.Wind doesn't exactly dry out but they could face similar difficulties when all "easy to build" locations has already been saturated with existing turbines.
The UK is aiming for ~70% offshore wind by 2030 which is only 7 years from now (and some 10% from onshore wind on top of this so 80% combined onshore and offshore) We do have enough space to do it almost exclusively from fixed bottom but we will invest in floating offshore wind because they allow a vast more area to be used and can potentially be positioned in even winder locations so the hivher production will make up for the higher costs or at least beidge the differential The biggest factor most people aren't aware of is that far from land offshore locations like the dogger bank using the most upto date turbines are projected to have 60% capacity factors which is gettong close to the French nuclear fleet which is typically 70% capacity factor
@@aliendroneservices6621 Imagine each wind turbine had its own gas fired turbine (jet engine) So when the wind didn't blow they fire up the jet engine to turn the generator You'd say that would work Well that's what we have On land we have 'jet engines' called gas fired power stations which fire up when the wind isn't blowing as much as we need it to
@@aliendroneservices6621 That argument makes 100% sense if the backup for wind was expensive. But gas fired power stations are really cheap to build really cheap to man really cheap to maintain The UK is a gas backed up grid Our marginal cost of eletricity this year has been £97/MWH We are able to build bith onshore and offshore wind for less than this so its the economic decision Which is why in 2030 the UK will be a wind heavy grid producing over 80% of its electricity needs from wind power
@@kaya051285 *_UK Gives Offshore Wind a Boost With Increase in Subsidies_* August 2, 2023 "The UK government will boost the funding for renewables projects in the current subsidy auction by 11%, *_in an attempt to prop up the struggling offshore wind industry."_*
@aliendroneservices6621 The industry isn't struggling. More wind power is being deployed every year in the EU But the electricity generation is very long life assets. Wind farms will last 30 years and perhaps another 30 yesra after that Very few business would invest in a market which needs 30 year payback if the government can ba kript you at a whim. So they seek CFD contracts which guarantees a price for 15 years It is true that the most recent wind auctions in the UK were at a higher price than the auctions two years earlier. But that's pretty much true for everything. Cars cost a good deal more today than they did 2 years before corona and wind turbines also cost more today for similar reasons The cost however is still affordable and less than using natural gas. Mostly becuase natural gas in Europe is 3-10x more costly than the USA
This is quite interesting *****Five 550 kW WindWorld turbines, installed in 1998, off the coast of the island of Gotland, Sweden were re-commissioned in 2018, after undergoing an extensive technological and mechanical upgrade by Momentum Gruppen. The project included the replacement of nacelles, blades, and control systems using newly refurbished parts from five Vestas V47-600 kW. The towers, the foundations, and the subsea cables all passed an extensive durability test. The result was that the turbine’s lifetime was extended by 15 years, and the expected yearly output was doubled from ca. 5,000 MWh to ca. 11,000 MWh.***** Offshore wind is going to be like nuclear with potentiality multiple life extensions that add decades and decades Design for 30 year 'life' The refurbish and extend for another 20 Then refurbish and extend for another 20 The refurbish and extend for another 20 years...... You can probably design the tower and foundations and transmission and distribution to last multi hundred years. The rest youd refurbish/repalace every 20 years at a fraction of the cost as you're only repalcing a fraction of the parts that make up the system Offshore wind is going to be a lot like hydropower. If you have good wind resources once developed, it'll just keep on going and have a quasi infinite life
Clipper ships hit a limit on length; locomotives hit a scaling limit as well in terms of size; airplanes too. The only thing that hasn't yet is Moore's Law. Wind has hit it already...
27:48 are current WT being built whilst trying to cut costs, if the previously ones ( in service for 20 years) are holding up better than expected! Thank you for uploading and sharing.
Its approx 50kg/meter for a 1GW HVDC line and a large part of the cost of an offshore wind farm is the grid links This isnt that negative a thing as HVDC links have very long lives for example the one between the uk and france was built 38 years ago and it will likely still be operational in another 38 years and then another..... This means when wind farms come to the end of their lives in 30 years time. The costly grid connection is still operational that alone will lilely mean the repalcement wind farm in 30 years time will be 1/3rd cheaper. In fact its quite possible the foundation and tower will be okay in which case it might just be the generator and wind blades that need replacing. If that is the case only about 25% of the wind farm needs replacing so in theory the replacement wind farm in 30 years time might only cost 25% of the original build So far there hasnt been this type of rebuild but thats becuase a new wind turbine is 50x better than the 20 year old ones so they havent reused but deoloyed new tech. But at some point the world will settle on a certian size and a few designs so in the very kong term it will likely be a matter of onky reoalcing 25-50% of the wind farm every 30 years at 25-50% of the original cost
The offshore wind turbine is only ~1/3rd of the total cost of an offshore wind farm The infrastructure to send that power onshore sometimes 300km distance is actually a very big part of the cost of an offshore wind farm If we look at the IFA2 interconnector it cost the best part of $1 billion for a 210km interconnector A 1GW offshore wind farm in Europe costs ~$4 billion so 25% of the cost is the electricity transmission infrastructure. While the turbines are about 30% of the cost and the other 45% are other costs like inter array cabling permitting planning insurance etc etc Anyways The electricity transmission infrastructure once built has a long life eg there is a 40 year interconnector between france and the UK and it'll be around in 40 years' time too So even if you assume zero cost and technology improvements over the next 25 years once the wind farm is at end of life itll cost 25% less to renew it for another 25 years as you dont need to pay for the transmission infrastructure twice I would also imagine repalcing a 15MW offshore wind turbine with a new 15MW turnine in 25 uears time probably wont cost as much as you can provably reuse the foundations the tower the inrerarray cables etc If an offshore wond farm costs €70/MWh today its replacement in 25 years time will likely be closer to €40/MWh and thats assuming no progeess in the core technology itself which seems unlikely Once an offshore wind farm is built id wager like a hydropower station it'll have a quasi infinite lifetime at low prices
A turbine has a certain power it can output for example the biggest one built is 15MW (MW = megawatt = 15,000,000 watts) Depending on its location (some locations are more windy than others) it will have a certain annual output. So the 15MW unit in the digger bank in the North Sea is expected to get an annual 80,000 MWh so 80,000 MWh / 365 days / 24 hours = 9.13 MW So this 15MW unit will output sometimes zero. Sometimes 15MW and sometimes anything in between. Bit through the year it will average 9.13MW which is a 60% capacity factor 9.13 / 15 = 60.86% capacity factor to be more accurate
The wind industry like the nuclear industry is fairly young and every new design is an improvement over the last. This type of iteration is to be expected and encouraged in both industries. Leaving aside farming very low density, intermittent wind is just plain dumb.
Floating is not new technology; they have been using it on oil rigs for years also the bigger the turbine the bigger the swept area increasing its power generation capacity and once you have established the grid to shore connection the reduction in cost per kwh reduces. As for the fishing industry, their record for destroying the environment is second to none.
I really appreciate Angelica for her knowledge on the taiwanese offshore wind market. However, I feel like she wasn't very knowledgeable on the state of the art offshore wind in Europe and therefore was unable to defend some of Chris' questions. Also, Chris while very knowledgeable in nuclear is clueless of the current state of technology in renewables. I felt like this podcast did not add much value, it cited a lot of the challenges we are facing in the industry (good) but it left a lot of open questions and did not inform much about the advantages and achievements of offshore wind. I will try to answer some 05:00 - Sure Angelica, on LCOE charts PV is costing down faster than any other technology. But, as it has been made clear in this podcast time and time again in defence of nuclear, LCOE is not everything and offshore wind has much higher capacity factors than PV and the generation profile compliments PV really well in some markets. Therefore the value per MW installed it adds is superior to PV. 11:00 - The industry is working on technologies that eliminate the noise almost completely by not using hammers. I can assure you we go above and beyond to avoid injuring animals and we have super strict legislation in many countries. 15:00 - There is a lot of space in the fixed-bottom range yet to be used in the North Sea. A lot. Some areas might need floating but we can install for the next 10 years and still have space left. Thus, these targets are aimed at fixed-bottom mostly. 25:00 Angelica cites interest rates as hurting wind and she is right, but it affects any technology that is capital intensive. Guess which technology's is the most capital intensive, yep, nuclear. If my WACC has increased in offshore wind for the UK imagine Sizewell C... 30:00 Chris asks about capacity factors, Angelica is unable to answer but in the UK, the existing fleet averages at 42-39% currently. Coming offshore wind farms will be at 45-60% range. Pretty good for wind if you ask me. 35:00 - Chris needs to get informed about renewables... In PV and wind both onshore and offshore we have O&M crews allocated to do maintain periodically. Sure, we don't need to build a town next to the nuclear power plant as it used to be the case for remote power plants. But we rely on local community by creating O&M hubs in a coastal town that services a cluster of wind farms and then we have vessels where the technicians spend up 2 weeks offshore (then they get two weeks off), and/or we fly them in helicopters. 40:00 - Chris asks about jobs. Well it is similar to any other industry. High qualified jobs are based wherever revelan university hubs are or there are existing tech hubs (big cities and near existing offshore oil and gas hub). Some qualified jobs are outsourced that can be done remote are outsourced to cheaper labor countries such as Spain, Greece, India, Malasia, etc. Manufacturing is done as close to the construction site as possible, transport is very expensive. Then O&M is all local. I could go on longer but I have a life :) FWIW, I do work developing large (multi-GW) offshore wind projects. My background is power systems engineering and I wanted to specialise in nuclear as a student, but after doing some systems modelling (technical and economic) ended up accepting that renewables have their limitations but can be cheap. Heck, for many countries having a high penetration of renewables is the cheapest option, even if you count for system costs. In any case I still believe nuclear has its space and I am supporter of it.
Your answers really help me to understand offshore wind. Do you have some good resources that model the costs ? Also - with the big storm this week in the Netherlands - I can't find any articles that describe damaged wind farms - is this your understanding as well?
@@hopliterati61 To see the lowest costs offshore wind can achieve I would say just look at any auction that is coming in mature markets (Europe/UK), that is around 40-50 EUR/MWh in LCOE terms. However, as Angelica pointed out in this podcast we have seen an increase of 20-30% in CAPEX due to supply chain constraints: war with Ukraine, COVID and high competition (basically cannibalisation of the supply chain, too many offshore wind projects and too little components and equipment to install them). Fundamentally these can be solved. Also, due to macro-economic factors we see higher cost of capital, which also will rise the LCOE, but this affects all forms of new energy. To model cost, however, I would not use LCOE and would model entire energy systems. You can detail them as much as you want and it can give an idea of the order magnitude and sensibilities of costs. There are tools like TIMES models to do this, DTU has good course on it, where you get to model an entire country and try to decarbonise it. Here they have some models for DK www.esymodels.man.dtu.dk/times-dk As far as the NL, I have not heard anything regarding damaged assets offshore, I will ask today as we have some operational in the country. Our turbines are made to withstand hurricanes, they will shut down and wait for the weather to pass.
Since you are such a wealth of knowledge you should present yourself to Chris, perhaps he would be willing to interview you for a segment on Decouple Podcast.
@@lo1234-w9r I’m not that great of a communicator and I would end up screwing divulging confidential information from the projects I work with. I think they should just interview someone that is not a die hard nuclear advocate for a change, they could interview Michael Liebreich for example, or if related to offshore wind they could interview Stephen Bull who is an executive at Aker Solutions and a great communicator.
She said she doesn't know the capacity factor. The current existing UK newer wind farms have a capacity factor of 45% the next Gen wind farms due 2025 will have 60% capacity factor due to better wind locations (further out to sea) and bigger higher up turbines reaching higher wind speeds
Up to a point capacity factor is arbitrary because it depends on how the blade size and generator size are matched. Some kind of wind intensity curve would be more telling.
@@Apjooz So far there has been little 'overclocking' of wind turbines whereby they keep the same size generator and increase the blade lengths. But that is a totally legitimate way of increasing wind power capacity factors Most of the improvement of the capacity factors so far is simply going from near shore to much farther offshore where the wind is stronger and more consistent plus with the taller blades catching slightly faster wind speeds People don't realise how good offshore wind in Europe has gotten. Its actually cheaper to do offshore wind in the UK than it is to do onshore wind. Mostly becusse the capacity factor is almost twice as good and the transport and installation costs are probanly lower Also I suspect once a modern wind farm is built it will probably last multiple lifetimes (100s of years) as all the non moving parts will have a much longer than 25 year quoted life For example the UK has a HVDC connection to France its 40 yesrs old and works fine and will probably be fine in another 40 years time. We'll thats about one third to half the cost of a deep offshore wind farm. So in 30 years time when the wind farm is at the end of its life if the HVDC infrastructure is okay (and the 40 year old UK France link suggests it will be) then the replacement offshore wind farm will be at least 1/3rd cheaper and thats assuming no cost or material or tech improvement over the next 30 years.... I think it's quite likely the £60/MWh offshore wind farms in the UK will become £30/MWh offshore wind farms when they get a life extension in 25-30 years time and then maybe even £20/MWh for the extension after that Much like hydropower if you are lucky to have the resources it may seem expensive at first but then has a very cheap almost indefinite life afterwards Indefinite in the sense that 250 year old homes exist obviously they need upkeep but that upkeep is cheap enough whereby 250 year old homes or churches exist 250 year old hydropower stations and 250 year old wind farms will exist on the future imo
@@kaya051285 You're probably correct. I've been thinking about this in terms of solar, if solar cells are easy to replace and they cost 5 cents per watt or something like that in the future then how cheap could it get in the long term.
Your guest regrettably - by her own admission - does not understand power density. This parameter is fundamental to understanding why grid scale wind is a bad idea. Wind is a 1 W/m2 technology. Conventional thermal power plant is a 1500+ W/m2 technology. So the land/surface use is three orders of magnitude larger for wind. This is why it is more expensive and why people are looking to China or Indonesia for manufacturing wind turbines --- these are economies fueled by coal. So in the end what does a wind turbine with enormous embedded CO2 achieve --- absolutely nothing --- in fact it is harmful in terms of environmental impact. One comment on the technical aspects --- wind turbines have a theoretical power limit of around 59% which is the the maximum they can extract from the available wind. Actual values are around 40% for the best turbines. This is present even before one considers the intermittency drawbacks. Grid scale wind ---- makes no sense ---- and for a country like Taiwan which has other pressing priorities like a looming invasion by China --- it would be better served by focusing on its nuclear power plants and territorial defense. They had better wake up to this reality.
The power density argument is irrelevant becuase the area a wind farm harvests from isn't lost to all other uses Also at least here in Europe the offshore wind farm acreage isn't being used by anything else So you aren't displacing farming or homes by building them
@@kaya051285 this comment exposes your deep and distressing ignorance regarding the implications of this parameter. It also seems as if you have been living in a bubble with regard to current events. Rather than try to explain this to the uninformed and unreasonable... I will limit myself to saying that low power density leads to high resource intensity and high environmental impact. You say that you are in the EU.... Instead of writing nonsensical comments why don't you go have a conversation with your German friends who dismantled a wind farm just so that they could mine lignite.
@@srb1855 by your metric hydropower is even worse as its energy density (as defined by the rainfall catchment area) is an order of magnitude less than even wind power..... Your views are only political Minus the politics the energy density (KWh/Year/Catchment area) of solar and wind is basically irrelevant and vastly greater than most hydropower What matters more is the material energy density. That is the mass of the wind turbine divided by the lifetime production. If you do that the energy density of wind is greater than even nuclear at less than 1 gram of materials per KWh
@@kaya051285 there was nothing political in my statement about power density. Regarding hydro you are right it is one of the lowest power density forms available and they take up enormous space. But no one is proposing that the grid should run exclusively on hydropower. This is in direct contrast to your fanatical views and creative accounting that want to force a grid only powered by wind and solar. But when you live in a bubble none of this matters right...
@@srb1855 I didn't suggest a wind and solar only grid. I just said that the energy area density (KWh/yr/catchment area) is pretty irrelevant whereas you suggested it was critical Which you now must agree your statement was 💩 since you accept hydro is even worse on that metric but hydropower if you are lucky enough to have the resource is a great part of a grid Offshore wind in Europe will be like hydropower. Totally non controversial long life very affordable source of energy once built For what it's worth I'd suggest you look at the 15MW reference turbine and how little material it uses relative to the lifetime energy output. An offshore wind turbine in the North Sea is more energy dense than even nuclear. Energy material density. Total mass of the total structure over its lifetime output = less than 1 gram per KWh. And the materials of the wind turbine are not lost at year 30 but can be reused and recycled Like a lot of anti wind people you are just out of date sure the first gen turbines were 💩 but the next Gen ones are gold🏅 in the right locations of which the North Sea is one
Pretty much says it -- "wind" infrastructure - based in the physical world, the "easy" wind has been captured, off-shore is increasingly expensive - add supply chains and the uncertainties impacting the cost of capital - AND then the wind doesn't blow . . . Read a bit just this past week saying $4.1 TRILLION had been spent on renewables in the last 30 years -- what if we had spent that sum on nuclear instead ?
Ah the "what if we had a time machine" argument.
Great discussion, Angelica did a superb job of explaining the options and downsides. I worked as a marine engineer for 10 years, building technology that operate reliably and be serviceable in a marine environment is really hard. IMO building offshore wind farms is hard^2 and costly^3, it makes no sense to me and the costs of interconnection are also extreme, requiring submarine cables and usually HVDC converter stations at each end, it's all $$$.
"Let's take wind, which is already uneconomical, and put it in the corrosive, abrasive, inaccessible environment of the ocean. That will make it even cheaper!"
It might be counterintuitive but it is in certain countries such us the UK. We can build multi-GW wind farms below 60-50 GBP/MWh.
But also much windier.
@@dankspain Name a country powered 50+% by wind. Should be easy, if it's really so cheap.
@@aliendroneservices6621 Denmark, 54% last year.
@@dankspain Wind, solar, etc. accounted for 9.2% of Denmark's total energy supply in 2021.
Taking the clue from Rosie's Engineering and adding it to this series, offshore wind or solar energy collectors are even less effective than onshore non generators, and it's way past time people in responsible positions did something about the absolute atrocities inherent in first strike nuclear weapons and recognised the absolute defensive necessity of nuclear power generation.
How much of (cheap) manufacturing is based on carbon energy? Renewables is a misnomer - they are replaceable and cost is a poor measure of whether they add to or reduce planetary pollution. And where manufacturing is offshore, the Global North ignores its impact. That lack of accountability for the supply chain has to change.
She is very knowledgeable.
Off shore everything, especially maintenance, costs 5 times what it costs on land.
Thank you for your work!
Offshore oil hasn't decreased in price these last 20 years, hard to see why offshore wind would be different.
But it has, will you look at the numbers? From 250€/MWh to around 50€/MWh.
@@dankspain Fair enough.
TBF, offshore oil is facing increasing technical challenges as depletion of older field forces them to drill deeper.Wind doesn't exactly dry out but they could face similar difficulties when all "easy to build" locations has already been saturated with existing turbines.
The UK is aiming for ~70% offshore wind by 2030 which is only 7 years from now (and some 10% from onshore wind on top of this so 80% combined onshore and offshore)
We do have enough space to do it almost exclusively from fixed bottom but we will invest in floating offshore wind because they allow a vast more area to be used and can potentially be positioned in even winder locations so the hivher production will make up for the higher costs or at least beidge the differential
The biggest factor most people aren't aware of is that far from land offshore locations like the dogger bank using the most upto date turbines are projected to have 60% capacity factors which is gettong close to the French nuclear fleet which is typically 70% capacity factor
Offshore wind would need to have 100% capacity-factor, to be useful. 60% is useless, because the other 40% is random.
@@aliendroneservices6621 Imagine each wind turbine had its own gas fired turbine (jet engine)
So when the wind didn't blow they fire up the jet engine to turn the generator
You'd say that would work
Well that's what we have
On land we have 'jet engines' called gas fired power stations which fire up when the wind isn't blowing as much as we need it to
@@aliendroneservices6621 That argument makes 100% sense if the backup for wind was expensive. But gas fired power stations are really cheap to build really cheap to man really cheap to maintain
The UK is a gas backed up grid
Our marginal cost of eletricity this year has been £97/MWH
We are able to build bith onshore and offshore wind for less than this so its the economic decision
Which is why in 2030 the UK will be a wind heavy grid producing over 80% of its electricity needs from wind power
@@kaya051285 *_UK Gives Offshore Wind a Boost With Increase in Subsidies_*
August 2, 2023
"The UK government will boost the funding for renewables projects in the current subsidy auction by 11%, *_in an attempt to prop up the struggling offshore wind industry."_*
@aliendroneservices6621 The industry isn't struggling. More wind power is being deployed every year in the EU
But the electricity generation is very long life assets. Wind farms will last 30 years and perhaps another 30 yesra after that
Very few business would invest in a market which needs 30 year payback if the government can ba kript you at a whim. So they seek CFD contracts which guarantees a price for 15 years
It is true that the most recent wind auctions in the UK were at a higher price than the auctions two years earlier. But that's pretty much true for everything. Cars cost a good deal more today than they did 2 years before corona and wind turbines also cost more today for similar reasons
The cost however is still affordable and less than using natural gas. Mostly becuase natural gas in Europe is 3-10x more costly than the USA
Are wind turbines reducing windspeeds and reducing moisture content, causing Dunkleflaute and drought ?
Energy sucking has to diminish windflow at some scale
@@cisnerosigondaAlso called *_wind shadowing._*
280m is 20m shy of a supertall skyscraper. That's massive!
That's the top of the rotor blade. The tower itself is probably ~165m, still pretty tall.
This is quite interesting
*****Five 550 kW WindWorld turbines, installed in 1998, off the coast of the island of Gotland, Sweden were re-commissioned in 2018, after undergoing an extensive technological and mechanical upgrade by Momentum Gruppen. The project included the replacement of nacelles, blades, and control systems using newly refurbished parts from five Vestas V47-600 kW. The towers, the foundations, and the subsea cables all passed an extensive durability test. The result was that the turbine’s lifetime was extended by 15 years, and the expected yearly output was doubled from ca. 5,000 MWh to ca. 11,000 MWh.*****
Offshore wind is going to be like nuclear with potentiality multiple life extensions that add decades and decades
Design for 30 year 'life'
The refurbish and extend for another 20
Then refurbish and extend for another 20
The refurbish and extend for another 20 years......
You can probably design the tower and foundations and transmission and distribution to last multi hundred years. The rest youd refurbish/repalace every 20 years at a fraction of the cost as you're only repalcing a fraction of the parts that make up the system
Offshore wind is going to be a lot like hydropower. If you have good wind resources once developed, it'll just keep on going and have a quasi infinite life
Clipper ships hit a limit on length; locomotives hit a scaling limit as well in terms of size; airplanes too. The only thing that hasn't yet is Moore's Law. Wind has hit it already...
27:48 are current WT being built whilst trying to cut costs, if the previously ones ( in service for 20 years) are holding up better than expected!
Thank you for uploading and sharing.
Its approx 50kg/meter for a 1GW HVDC line and a large part of the cost of an offshore wind farm is the grid links
This isnt that negative a thing as HVDC links have very long lives for example the one between the uk and france was built 38 years ago and it will likely still be operational in another 38 years and then another.....
This means when wind farms come to the end of their lives in 30 years time. The costly grid connection is still operational that alone will lilely mean the repalcement wind farm in 30 years time will be 1/3rd cheaper. In fact its quite possible the foundation and tower will be okay in which case it might just be the generator and wind blades that need replacing. If that is the case only about 25% of the wind farm needs replacing so in theory the replacement wind farm in 30 years time might only cost 25% of the original build
So far there hasnt been this type of rebuild but thats becuase a new wind turbine is 50x better than the 20 year old ones so they havent reused but deoloyed new tech. But at some point the world will settle on a certian size and a few designs so in the very kong term it will likely be a matter of onky reoalcing 25-50% of the wind farm every 30 years at 25-50% of the original cost
The offshore wind turbine is only ~1/3rd of the total cost of an offshore wind farm
The infrastructure to send that power onshore sometimes 300km distance is actually a very big part of the cost of an offshore wind farm
If we look at the IFA2 interconnector it cost the best part of $1 billion for a 210km interconnector
A 1GW offshore wind farm in Europe costs ~$4 billion so 25% of the cost is the electricity transmission infrastructure. While the turbines are about 30% of the cost and the other 45% are other costs like inter array cabling permitting planning insurance etc etc
Anyways
The electricity transmission infrastructure once built has a long life eg there is a 40 year interconnector between france and the UK and it'll be around in 40 years' time too
So even if you assume zero cost and technology improvements over the next 25 years once the wind farm is at end of life itll cost 25% less to renew it for another 25 years as you dont need to pay for the transmission infrastructure twice
I would also imagine repalcing a 15MW offshore wind turbine with a new 15MW turnine in 25 uears time probably wont cost as much as you can provably reuse the foundations the tower the inrerarray cables etc
If an offshore wond farm costs €70/MWh today its replacement in 25 years time will likely be closer to €40/MWh and thats assuming no progeess in the core technology itself which seems unlikely
Once an offshore wind farm is built id wager like a hydropower station it'll have a quasi infinite lifetime at low prices
Was the movie Pandora's Box or Pandora's Promise in South Korea?
I just want to be sure that I understand capacity. Let’s say a capacity of 35%. So for. 15GW turbine does that mean
(15GW X 24 hrs X 365 days) X 35% ?
A turbine has a certain power it can output for example the biggest one built is 15MW (MW = megawatt = 15,000,000 watts)
Depending on its location (some locations are more windy than others) it will have a certain annual output. So the 15MW unit in the digger bank in the North Sea is expected to get an annual 80,000 MWh so
80,000 MWh / 365 days / 24 hours = 9.13 MW
So this 15MW unit will output sometimes zero. Sometimes 15MW and sometimes anything in between. Bit through the year it will average 9.13MW which is a 60% capacity factor
9.13 / 15 = 60.86% capacity factor to be more accurate
The wind industry like the nuclear industry is fairly young and every new design is an improvement over the last. This type of iteration is to be expected and encouraged in both industries. Leaving aside farming very low density, intermittent wind is just plain dumb.
Floating is not new technology; they have been using it on oil rigs for years also the bigger the turbine the bigger the swept area increasing its power generation capacity and once you have established the grid to shore connection the reduction in cost per kwh reduces. As for the fishing industry, their record for destroying the environment is second to none.
I really appreciate Angelica for her knowledge on the taiwanese offshore wind market. However, I feel like she wasn't very knowledgeable on the state of the art offshore wind in Europe and therefore was unable to defend some of Chris' questions. Also, Chris while very knowledgeable in nuclear is clueless of the current state of technology in renewables. I felt like this podcast did not add much value, it cited a lot of the challenges we are facing in the industry (good) but it left a lot of open questions and did not inform much about the advantages and achievements of offshore wind.
I will try to answer some
05:00 - Sure Angelica, on LCOE charts PV is costing down faster than any other technology. But, as it has been made clear in this podcast time and time again in defence of nuclear, LCOE is not everything and offshore wind has much higher capacity factors than PV and the generation profile compliments PV really well in some markets. Therefore the value per MW installed it adds is superior to PV.
11:00 - The industry is working on technologies that eliminate the noise almost completely by not using hammers. I can assure you we go above and beyond to avoid injuring animals and we have super strict legislation in many countries.
15:00 - There is a lot of space in the fixed-bottom range yet to be used in the North Sea. A lot. Some areas might need floating but we can install for the next 10 years and still have space left. Thus, these targets are aimed at fixed-bottom mostly.
25:00 Angelica cites interest rates as hurting wind and she is right, but it affects any technology that is capital intensive. Guess which technology's is the most capital intensive, yep, nuclear. If my WACC has increased in offshore wind for the UK imagine Sizewell C...
30:00 Chris asks about capacity factors, Angelica is unable to answer but in the UK, the existing fleet averages at 42-39% currently. Coming offshore wind farms will be at 45-60% range. Pretty good for wind if you ask me.
35:00 - Chris needs to get informed about renewables... In PV and wind both onshore and offshore we have O&M crews allocated to do maintain periodically. Sure, we don't need to build a town next to the nuclear power plant as it used to be the case for remote power plants. But we rely on local community by creating O&M hubs in a coastal town that services a cluster of wind farms and then we have vessels where the technicians spend up 2 weeks offshore (then they get two weeks off), and/or we fly them in helicopters.
40:00 - Chris asks about jobs. Well it is similar to any other industry. High qualified jobs are based wherever revelan university hubs are or there are existing tech hubs (big cities and near existing offshore oil and gas hub). Some qualified jobs are outsourced that can be done remote are outsourced to cheaper labor countries such as Spain, Greece, India, Malasia, etc. Manufacturing is done as close to the construction site as possible, transport is very expensive. Then O&M is all local.
I could go on longer but I have a life :)
FWIW, I do work developing large (multi-GW) offshore wind projects. My background is power systems engineering and I wanted to specialise in nuclear as a student, but after doing some systems modelling (technical and economic) ended up accepting that renewables have their limitations but can be cheap. Heck, for many countries having a high penetration of renewables is the cheapest option, even if you count for system costs. In any case I still believe nuclear has its space and I am supporter of it.
Your answers really help me to understand offshore wind. Do you have some good resources that model the costs ? Also - with the big storm this week in the Netherlands - I can't find any articles that describe damaged wind farms - is this your understanding as well?
@@hopliterati61 To see the lowest costs offshore wind can achieve I would say just look at any auction that is coming in mature markets (Europe/UK), that is around 40-50 EUR/MWh in LCOE terms. However, as Angelica pointed out in this podcast we have seen an increase of 20-30% in CAPEX due to supply chain constraints: war with Ukraine, COVID and high competition (basically cannibalisation of the supply chain, too many offshore wind projects and too little components and equipment to install them). Fundamentally these can be solved. Also, due to macro-economic factors we see higher cost of capital, which also will rise the LCOE, but this affects all forms of new energy.
To model cost, however, I would not use LCOE and would model entire energy systems. You can detail them as much as you want and it can give an idea of the order magnitude and sensibilities of costs. There are tools like TIMES models to do this, DTU has good course on it, where you get to model an entire country and try to decarbonise it. Here they have some models for DK
www.esymodels.man.dtu.dk/times-dk
As far as the NL, I have not heard anything regarding damaged assets offshore, I will ask today as we have some operational in the country. Our turbines are made to withstand hurricanes, they will shut down and wait for the weather to pass.
Since you are such a wealth of knowledge you should present yourself to Chris, perhaps he would be willing to interview you for a segment on Decouple Podcast.
@@lo1234-w9r I’m not that great of a communicator and I would end up screwing divulging confidential information from the projects I work with. I think they should just interview someone that is not a die hard nuclear advocate for a change, they could interview Michael Liebreich for example, or if related to offshore wind they could interview Stephen Bull who is an executive at Aker Solutions and a great communicator.
She said she doesn't know the capacity factor. The current existing UK newer wind farms have a capacity factor of 45% the next Gen wind farms due 2025 will have 60% capacity factor due to better wind locations (further out to sea) and bigger higher up turbines reaching higher wind speeds
Up to a point capacity factor is arbitrary because it depends on how the blade size and generator size are matched. Some kind of wind intensity curve would be more telling.
@@Apjooz So far there has been little 'overclocking' of wind turbines whereby they keep the same size generator and increase the blade lengths. But that is a totally legitimate way of increasing wind power capacity factors
Most of the improvement of the capacity factors so far is simply going from near shore to much farther offshore where the wind is stronger and more consistent plus with the taller blades catching slightly faster wind speeds
People don't realise how good offshore wind in Europe has gotten. Its actually cheaper to do offshore wind in the UK than it is to do onshore wind. Mostly becusse the capacity factor is almost twice as good and the transport and installation costs are probanly lower
Also I suspect once a modern wind farm is built it will probably last multiple lifetimes (100s of years) as all the non moving parts will have a much longer than 25 year quoted life
For example the UK has a HVDC connection to France its 40 yesrs old and works fine and will probably be fine in another 40 years time. We'll thats about one third to half the cost of a deep offshore wind farm. So in 30 years time when the wind farm is at the end of its life if the HVDC infrastructure is okay (and the 40 year old UK France link suggests it will be) then the replacement offshore wind farm will be at least 1/3rd cheaper and thats assuming no cost or material or tech improvement over the next 30 years....
I think it's quite likely the £60/MWh offshore wind farms in the UK will become £30/MWh offshore wind farms when they get a life extension in 25-30 years time and then maybe even £20/MWh for the extension after that
Much like hydropower if you are lucky to have the resources it may seem expensive at first but then has a very cheap almost indefinite life afterwards
Indefinite in the sense that 250 year old homes exist obviously they need upkeep but that upkeep is cheap enough whereby 250 year old homes or churches exist
250 year old hydropower stations and 250 year old wind farms will exist on the future imo
@@kaya051285 You're probably correct. I've been thinking about this in terms of solar, if solar cells are easy to replace and they cost 5 cents per watt or something like that in the future then how cheap could it get in the long term.
Does she has twitter?
Cost of offshore maintenance is astronomical....coal is king
smart gal...
12:44 12:45 *Dogger Bank.*
_Doggerel_ is bad poetry.
Go nuclear
You and your buddies are free to build it. Open your wallet.
@@ApjoozDecriminalize it. Then, it will be built.
Did I hear you right, the impact on birds was almost dismissed as an inevitable consequence. So save the polar bear but killing birds is ok?
3📍21:02
Industrialisation of your landscape is not an achievement
Your guest regrettably - by her own admission - does not understand power density. This parameter is fundamental to understanding why grid scale wind is a bad idea. Wind is a 1 W/m2 technology. Conventional thermal power plant is a 1500+ W/m2 technology. So the land/surface use is three orders of magnitude larger for wind. This is why it is more expensive and why people are looking to China or Indonesia for manufacturing wind turbines --- these are economies fueled by coal. So in the end what does a wind turbine with enormous embedded CO2 achieve --- absolutely nothing --- in fact it is harmful in terms of environmental impact. One comment on the technical aspects --- wind turbines have a theoretical power limit of around 59% which is the the maximum they can extract from the available wind. Actual values are around 40% for the best turbines. This is present even before one considers the intermittency drawbacks. Grid scale wind ---- makes no sense ---- and for a country like Taiwan which has other pressing priorities like a looming invasion by China --- it would be better served by focusing on its nuclear power plants and territorial defense. They had better wake up to this reality.
The power density argument is irrelevant becuase the area a wind farm harvests from isn't lost to all other uses
Also at least here in Europe the offshore wind farm acreage isn't being used by anything else
So you aren't displacing farming or homes by building them
@@kaya051285 this comment exposes your deep and distressing ignorance regarding the implications of this parameter. It also seems as if you have been living in a bubble with regard to current events. Rather than try to explain this to the uninformed and unreasonable... I will limit myself to saying that low power density leads to high resource intensity and high environmental impact. You say that you are in the EU.... Instead of writing nonsensical comments why don't you go have a conversation with your German friends who dismantled a wind farm just so that they could mine lignite.
@@srb1855 by your metric hydropower is even worse as its energy density (as defined by the rainfall catchment area) is an order of magnitude less than even wind power.....
Your views are only political
Minus the politics the energy density (KWh/Year/Catchment area) of solar and wind is basically irrelevant and vastly greater than most hydropower
What matters more is the material energy density. That is the mass of the wind turbine divided by the lifetime production. If you do that the energy density of wind is greater than even nuclear at less than 1 gram of materials per KWh
@@kaya051285 there was nothing political in my statement about power density. Regarding hydro you are right it is one of the lowest power density forms available and they take up enormous space. But no one is proposing that the grid should run exclusively on hydropower. This is in direct contrast to your fanatical views and creative accounting that want to force a grid only powered by wind and solar. But when you live in a bubble none of this matters right...
@@srb1855 I didn't suggest a wind and solar only grid. I just said that the energy area density (KWh/yr/catchment area) is pretty irrelevant whereas you suggested it was critical
Which you now must agree your statement was 💩 since you accept hydro is even worse on that metric but hydropower if you are lucky enough to have the resource is a great part of a grid
Offshore wind in Europe will be like hydropower. Totally non controversial long life very affordable source of energy once built
For what it's worth I'd suggest you look at the 15MW reference turbine and how little material it uses relative to the lifetime energy output. An offshore wind turbine in the North Sea is more energy dense than even nuclear. Energy material density. Total mass of the total structure over its lifetime output = less than 1 gram per KWh. And the materials of the wind turbine are not lost at year 30 but can be reused and recycled
Like a lot of anti wind people you are just out of date sure the first gen turbines were 💩 but the next Gen ones are gold🏅 in the right locations of which the North Sea is one