It does, actually. Bigger is better for wind. A lot of the costs scale with the width of the tower (more expensive tower, tougher to build, bigger generator, etc) but the power output scales with the area covered by the blades, so the power output grows more quickly than the size/cost.
What's the limiting factor in wind turbine size? Is it regulatory, construction capital, materials technology, supportive infrastructure, something else?
Generally construction and materials. Particularly for offshore the supportive infrastructure and maintenance takes up a big chunk of the cost - the expectation is that those costs won't scale with turbine size.
Not an expert, but the blades are already tricky to transport on land. If they keep increasing in length, it might be only feasible to transport them via ship or transport helicopter. There’s a new planned wind turbine factory on the coast of north east England where they can pump out turbines and deliver via ship.
Turbine factories are near where the wind farms are for shipping reasons. For offshore wind you need to be at a good port so you can get the blades directly to a ship. For inland wind farms you locate near where someone is willing to make a long term commitment to buy your windmills.
I have no idea what current numbers are, but I expect long term most factories will be inland and produce wind turbines of a size that is limited by local transport roads/laws. At sea might be better, but one factory can produce windmills for any ocean in the world. Inland shipping is far more expensive and so we need more factories scattered around.
If your country is near the sea then off-shore wind is best. However a lot of land isn't close enough to the sea to make off-shore practical and so they need a different option.
The biggest turbines stopped being land based years ago. Onshore wind caps out around 6 MW, while offshore wind is pushing 16 MW. There's just no practical way to handle these huge turbines (and their massive blades) onshore.
one funny limitation for US only is the Jones Act from 1920, it requires that the vessels that install these offshore wind turbines to be built, owned, crewed and registered in US. And there aren't many boats that can install turbines the size of modern offshore wind turbines.
So I don't believe the Jones Act would come into play in this situation. The Jone Act controls shipping between US ports, so if all you are doing is taking the pieces of the turbines out to be installed and coming back to the same port you haven't shipped anything between ports. It would fall under the same loop hole that cruise ships use, which is since they drop of passengers at the same port they picked them up at nothing has been "shipped between ports".
For land based installations, start as simple as transportation. You certainly don't want to assemble the blades on-site and the contortions they go through for trucking the finished blades are already quite crazy. Had the Cargolifter airship not been abandoned, I'm sure it would be used exclusively as a wind turbine parts carrier.
I was thinking of portable autoclaves. What about manufacturing blades on-site?
Large scale composites are still largely manual labour, and there are few pieces of tooling which themselves need to be one big piece. Mould can be split into sections rather easily.
Manufacturing needs a highly controlled environment. The industry's trend has been towards simplifying the installation process as much as possible. Smaller crew, simpler equipment, less that can go wrong on-site, etc.
You want as few humans off the ground as possible for safety reasons. Someone needs to get to the top of the tower to attach things, but as little as possible.
Most wind farms (on shore) are in fields that the farmer has planted. you want to disturb the crop as little as possible while installing which means the factory will be elsewhere so that you don't need to tear up more crop in manufacturing.
No, not baseload energy, but there is presumably an optimum overall mix (ideally one that prices in externalities appropriately, non-negligible in nuclear’s case)
Thanks for the link, it nicely explains what I tried to summarize in my posts about the misconceptions of base load.
May be it should be added that of course renewables can be dispatchable if not all of their available capacity is used all the time. The typical gas peaker plans are idle 90% of the time. But people complain less about that, as gas plans consume gas to run, while e.g. solar cells don't have any additional costs for producing electricity vs. not producing electricity. So it seems like a waste to not operate them at full capacity. Yet, the situation isn't that different from a gas plant idling most of the time.
Annectodal, the French grid is mostly nuclear and they of course face the problems with running a varying grid load with "base load" power plants. The solution is, to run their nuclear power plants at an average of 75% of their full power, this gives them more ability to regulate the output, but of course it means, that the cost per energy produced raises, as they usually are not fully utilized.
Which probably is the reason, why France is exporting a lot of electricity - with the European grid it is cheaper to have a varying export than a variable production.
I think we will see much more integration across the European electricity grid in the near future, which makes production fluctuations less and less relevant (they just average out over a large grid). I didn't know how many impediments still existed for an integrated european grid. I only found out when reading up on things today, that Scandinavia operates on a different frequency to mainland Europe, which has been an obstacle for Norway to sell their surplus to the rest of Europe (they are now building a connection to Germany and are bridging the operating frequency so that should be better in the future).
The first DC connection between Germany and Norway has been put into operations some months ago. Which also solves all frequency problems :).
If you look on www.electricitymap.org, you can see how much electricity is already shifted around in Europe. Like with car traffic, Germany is a country which distributes electricity across Europe. Especially France often exports to many European countries, a lot through Germany.
(Which creates an inflated impression about how much French electrictiy is exported to Germany, because it is often overlooked that at the same time Germany exports the same amount or even more to neighboring countries).
Frequency doesn't matter because at a large scale you can't match AC frequencies anyway so you go to DC for transmissions. There are other advantages to high voltage DC over AC as well that I don't remember.
You will not have operational grid scalw storage for a days worth of output any time soon, the only way to compensate for intermittency of renewable is to have massive overcapacity - we will havw a grid where peice can change sharply, and sometime be deeply negative.
That can still be fine as the cost of renewables keeps falling, but complainig about capacity factor of nuclear in this context is laughable
We don't need grid scale of storage for a days worth of output any time soon. And I have not complained about the capacity factor of nuclear, I just have described what France has to do to be able to run a grid with varying loads with nuclear power.
that article is full of gaping holes and is often used by renewable energy proponents to shut down valid criticism of renewable technologies. Here are just two faults with it:
>First, the fluctuations in variable wind and solar PV are balanced by flexible renewable energy sources that are dispatchable, i.e. can supply power on demand. These are hydro with dams, Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGTs) and concentrated solar thermal power (CST) with thermal storage, as illustrated in Figure 2. It ‘s not essential for every power station in the system to be dispatchable.
Gas turbines are flexible renewable energy? Concentrated solar power is a fringe technology that is highly dependent on geography. How this is taken seriously i do not understand.
The article goes on to make a rubbish point about "green" gas while completely ignoring that gas in any form is neither "Green" nor renewable.
>In the USA a major computer simulation by a large team of scientists and engineers found that 80-90% renewable electricity is technically feasible and reliable (They didn’t examine 100%.)
Gee, i wonder why 100% wasn't examined. Perhaps it points to an uncomfortable conclusion that solely variable, renewable energy cannot work at scale as the sole source of energy for gigawatt scale grids. The reality is that a combination is required and this reality upsets those who believe the pie-in-the-sky dream that solar and wind can power the entire grid if you only overbuild and dispatch them.
As the February event in Texas demonstrated, all generation can underperform at the same time leading to near disaster. We would be wise to hedge our bets on generation sources.
Depends what gas you burn and how it was generated, but yeah as long as the source isnt adding fossil carbon to the air then they're part of the solution.
In fact, after reading the article, the next paragraph after your quote says exactly that:
> Incidentally the gas turbines can themselves be fuelled by ‘green gas’, for example from composting municipal and agricultural wastes, or produced from surpluses of renewable electricity. More on this below …
The "more on this below" refers to later parts of the article that cover making syngas from water using electricity supplied by wind power
"Baseload energy" is a completely misguiding term. The base load is a purely statistic artifact. Operating the grid means, that the electricity generation exactly matches the consumption at all times. For this it doesn't matter, whether the demand is close to the base load or high above it. If the electricity generation doesn't match the consumption, you get grid failures. Overproduction can be as problematic as underproduction.
The base load is nothing especial, only the fraction of the maximum load of the grid, that is always drawn and can be served by power plants which cannot be regulated well. Which most of the time of the day is a big disadvantage of those power plants. If there is a demand peak, they can't serve it. If their overall output is too high, you cannot turn it down quickly enough. As coal and nuclear power traditionally had a large part of the supply and both are quite slow, for decades the net was designed to raise the "base load". Like in Belgium, where all highways were illuminated at night to consume excess nuclear energy...
The good news about wind and solar is, they can be switched off quickly at any time. Their disadvantage is, and that probably is, when you talk about base load, that the maxim power output depends on the weather. With a coal plant, you can put more coals into the fire, with solar, you need to wait for sunrise. That is indeed a challenge and requires storage and grid planning to compensate. Larger scale grids which mix wind and solar are much less affected by the.
But nothing of this has to do with the base load.
And with nuclear: yes, wind should beat nuclear easily in the aspects of cost and CO2. But the most important metric is: the cost of building new nuclear plants is prohibitive. Just compare the costs of the most recent English nuclear plant with new wind installations. They are about 1/3rd of the cost and not have any of the problems of nuclear energy attached (operation risk, nuclear waste).
Yes, CO2 matters. But with a given amount of money, we have to see how to reduce more CO2. Nuclear power plants, which take 10-15 years to build, are to slow to set up and way to expensive.
Also the wind speed and capacity factor increase with height. Because as you go higher the wind speed increases. And becomes more consistent. That was a problem with early wind turbines.
If it improves, it would certainly improve also vs nuclear.
Also regarding CO2 cost, nuclear vs wind is certainly not clear cut. This [1] reference says wind is somewhat worse than European nuclear but better than US nuclear. It's also worth pointing out that lifecycle CO2 analysis of Nuclear often consider only ~50 years of nuclear waste storage [2], which is somewhat misleading considering that we have to store some of the waste for thousands of years.
They face more turbulence and greater stresses, and less efficient combined with being more expensive from the start.
Efficiency in price per kwH is more important and big turbines have claimed their crown here. Given that stresses are behind size limits the strategy is clear here.
Interestingly, vertical designs have been proposed for Mars, because space for shipping them is at a serious premium, and the much lower atmospheric density reduces the stress considerably. (Hollywood depictions of destructive Martian sandstorms are quite exaggerated for effect.)
The pole in the center of the VAT generates a turbulent wake that the blades pass through once every rotation. This wake shakes the blade and causes extra stress. The blades themselves make a wake also, though not as much as the pole.
The horizontal turbines put the pole behind the blades. The pole does make a bow wave, but it is not as bad as the VAT wake. The pole/blade interaction is not as severe.
All engineering at sea costs more. Seabed anchoring is a thing, and a higher degree of wind offshore is a thing, but if you do the linear optimisation of the different cost benefit lines I suspect scaling up traditional fan style 3 blades just wins.
It's a "perfect is the enemy of good enough" thing. Better designs along one axis with a multi axis problem won't be best overall.
One of the reasons may be a problem with "disabling" vertical turbines during high winds. With properller-like turbines, blade can rotate to move edge-on towards the wind direction or move parts of blades in the opposite direction, so that the overall torque in each blade is zero regardless of the wind speed.
There are a whole series of problems. Darrieus turbines and their variations are fun to watch.[1] But they have structural strength problems. Also, they're hard to stop. Large bladed turbines have variable pitch, and are set to neutral during high wind conditions to prevent overspeeding. Most of the vertical designs can't do that.
In the early days of California wind power, there were some Darrieus turbines at Pacheco Pass. They're probably gone now. In those days, 30KW was a big turbine.
The standard horizontal three-blade upwind turbine design seems to have been the one that scaled up the best; you can just keep making them larger and larger and they get more cost-effective.
I don't know anything more than what Wikipedia would tell you but I was driving out east one summer when I saw the largest one ever built in Cap-Chat, Québec. Very cool looking, I thought I was seeing the future. Apparently not though.
They look cool, but the standard three blade turbine is by far the best for engineering reasons. With vertical turbines you always have a blade going against the wind. With vertical turbines you get variable power from the wind depending on where the blade is in relation to the wind. Engineering can work around these to make the work, but in the end the standard 3 blade turbine is more efficient in both theory and practice.
They are considerably more complicated to build and their main benefit is efficiency in turbulent flows, however it turns out that also turbulent flows tend to be slower in practice so there's less energy to get out of them anyway. This reduces your margins to zero if not negative unless you scale them up to sizes that are not practical for places that actually do have turbulent wind conditions. (e.g. cities.)
Source: I worked for a micro generation helical VAWT startup for 5 years.
It's a hybrid design. It's got a single planetary gear and a medium speed medium sized generator. High speed designs have multiple gear stages that enable a small high speed generator. And direct drive turbines don't have gears at all but the generator needs to be massive.
It very much depends on which location you are talking about. Different locations favor different forms of energy creation. Solar very much depends on the climate and laltitude. Even across Germany there are significant local differences.
Yes, wind, like solar, is intermittent. But you can combine it with batteries like you could do with solar. The great thing is, wind follows a different weather pattern than solar. It is available at night or when there is cloudy weather. Usually it is strongest at times, when solar doesn't deliver much. A fully renewable grid requires a combination of solar and wind.
In Germany, on-shore wind is cheaper than solar and delivering a larger fraction of the total energy consumed than solar, but as said, there is a clear separation by region, what is the prominent form of energy.
And I personally think that most of them do look good. I am fond of technology and wind turbines are especially elegant and spectacular looking. I can see that too many of them can be seen negatively. Solar cells can be hidden better.
Unfortunately, some interesting countries (e.g. Sweden, Germany,...) are missing. I am wondering how electricitymap.org gets their data from there for those countries? But there are also other sources, e.g.:
I am using electricitymap for the daily distribution in Germany and energy-charts.info for longer term statistics. While they are not perfectly aligned, it is nice to see how wind often is strong when there is no sun and vice versa, both in the daily and the yearly run.
Unfortunately I haven't seen many statistics how large an European grid would have to be to achieve a perfect wind distribution as weather systems pass over europe. But just connecting France and Germany for wind power would reduce the weather influence a lot (requires France to build more wind power first, of course).
These are offshore turbines, so looks would hopefully be less of a problem (and, I guess, so would noise which is often mentioned as a problem too) at least.
Which is why French energy is the cheapest and least-carbon-intensive in Western Europe?
Nuclear is cheap when not operated in a hostile regulatory environment and built at scale, even while setting aside tens of billions for decommissioning and waste management.
Yeah it's too bad the world didn't go nuclear as France did. iirc they have a standardized way of making power plants off site and then assembling on-site, vs. the bespoke custom way they build them in the US (part of the bonkers cost overruns).
It's cheap coz they built their nuclear plants ~50 years ago and front loaded the capital expenditure.
They're sort of in a sweet spot right now financially but once their plants start aging out - which is soon - the costs will jump a lot if they try to extend their life or build brand new plants.
The best time to go zero carbon with nuclear was 50 years ago. The second best time is never.
"The best time to go zero carbon with nuclear was 50 years ago. The second best time is never"
This makes no sence, and if wealthy countries of this world actually got their head out of their collective asses and built a system like the french one, we would avoid climate change almost entirely - france emits 3 or 4 times less per persom than the US does
The plant in Belarus was arguably made in a very, ahem, friendly regulatory environment(finished in less than 6 years!) and it still was $11bln for a 2GW unit.
But the most important thing is the opportunity cost - a typical nuclear power plant takes 7 years to complete.
For this reason in terms of GWh delivered in China, wind overtook nuclear in 2012 or so and the gap has been widening ever since.
France's most recent experience with expanding nuclear production, Flamanville 3, has turned out to be anything but cheap.
Nearly 6 times over-budget and yet to provide a watt nearly 10 years after its initially projected completion date. Most recent cost estimates are for over 19B euro - $22B. This buys you a single 1.6GW reactor.[1]
The same amount of money would buy 20GW of onshore wind. Even adjusting for capacity factors - about 70% for French nuclear, about 40% for well positioned modern turbines - the cost per MWh is about 7 times higher for nuclear.
Geo - like hydro-power - is only suitable in very particular geographies and so has relatively tiny scope for decarbonizing electricity generation. Solar is on average cheaper but the cheapest wind is cheaper than the cheapest solar[1]. Nuclear just isn't in the ballpark in terms of cost or utility or project risk.
Intermittency is a problem for all generation types - they just have different modes. The average nuclear reactor in the US, for example, spends about 10% of it's time off-line, coal generation is even worse - about 15% unavailable with 10% unscheduled. So you still need backup idling capacity for thermal generation. Particularly nuclear requires a great deal of complimentary dispatchable sources given you need to be able to match demand which can have a daily peak 2 or 3 times higher than trough and nuclear reactors can take a day or more to vary their output.
No comment on the looks - to me they aren't ugly.
There is a plausible route for wind - at least to get to 70% or so supply. There are a few countries in Europe already over the 35% mark for wind and grid engineers seem confident that much more can added with current tech.
Wind complements solar as their output is generally not correlated - combining both reduces the overall output variance.
Wind has higher capacity factor than solar[2]. In more northern latitudes solar capacity factor can be as low as 10%. While in some places on-shore wind capacity factors can be higher than 40%. 1GW of installed capacity wind will, on average, provide 40% more electricity than 1GW of solar based on the US Energy Information Agency figures.
That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter.
So I think that their point is that the energy output goes up more (45%) than the diameter (19%), i.e. it's not linear, which is what "proportionality" [1] seems to mean.
Well, the wind energy captured depends on the surface area covered by the blades, not the diameter. So let's first check for that:
1.19 * 1.19 = 1.4161
That's still 4% unaccounted for, so there are some efficiency gains there.
The question then becomes how building materials and energy required to build one of these scales with size. If that is linearly with blade diameter/turbine height, then yes, the efficiency increases quickly the larger you build them.
The remaining 4% are likely due to the higher and steadier winds at the higher altitude.
And the cost savings are likely less about building materials which likely scale at more than quadratic pace with height, but about labour and maintenance. Each trip out to an offshore base is costly, fewer trips made both for building and for maintenance saves a lot of money.
which to be honest is less of a testament to increased efficiency and more of a mathematical effect of circle area growing to the square of the diameter.
The other main reason to get bigger that‘s not even discussed is increased capacity factor. That doesn‘t have to do with efficiency, but with effectiveness, as the turbine will simply run more days of the year.
> MingYang says the MySE 16.0-242 is just the start of its "new 15MW+ offshore product platform," and that it's capable of operating installed to the sea floor or on a floating base.
Am I reading that right? A tower 242 meters tall (read: a 70-floor skyscraper), with moving 118 meter blades, and they're proposing anchoring it to a floating base!?
Granted, it's a factor 2.5 difference in height, 1.6 in rotor radius and 6 in rated power, but Equinor operates a floating wind farm with 100 meter hub height outside of Scotland.
(I'm assuming that the article reported hub height and not the highest point of the rotor).
Interesting: not a wide base, but instead a very deep one. Build the tower twice as tall, fill the bottom with rocks: now you have a structure whose center of gravity is very low, and the hollow column gives it buoyancy.
Hundred meter turbine just bobbing in the water like a cork.
Yes, floating wind is a growing research area that may be successfully commercialized within the next 10 years. There are a variety of different substructure concepts, some of which have been tried at full-scale, though not quite this large. A recent example is the Tetraspar project [1]. The primary motivation for floating wind is the ability to access areas of the ocean with high levels of wind resources that have water depths which make it uneconomical to construct and install a monopile foundation.
"The XF-84H was almost certainly the loudest aircraft ever built, earning the nickname "Thunderscreech" as well as the "Mighty Ear Banger".[16] On the ground "run ups", the prototypes could reportedly be heard 25 miles (40 km) away.[17] Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards."
>"The best way to get the correct answer on the internet is to give the wrong one". I look forward to be
Depends on the site and readers. As we've seen recently, wrong answers take on a life of their own and become gospel or canon to eliminate religious overtones.
So only 125 of these mega turbines to replace one nuclear power plant? Amazing.
France produces 75% of their electricity with 56 nuclear power plants, which - if the above is broadly correct - you would be able to replace with 7000 of these wind mills. That's a lot, but on the other hand, Germany has already installed 20k wind turbines so far, so it seems within reach. Obviously you still need to think about matching supply and demand, but I'm surprised by how feasible this appears.
The 20k in Germany are much much smaller. The big ones require more space and can be built in less places due to how gigantic they are. On the other hand, placing them at sea is great for having more wind. And the main objection to sea based wind energy so far is the cost of construction which with a smaller number of them could decrease.
Not that much smaller, actually. A typical run-of-the-mill turbine will have a capacity of 2.5MW. You can easily get up to 5MW onshore (but that's often constrained by proximity to villages or towns - renewable energy does not happen in or close to cities).
The nuclear situation is terrible, whether in USA or France (don't know about other countries). There's plenty of unplanned incidents happening all the time, plenty of scandals around waste management and safety concerns.
They're supposed to prove the supremacy of french engineering companies with the new EPR design, however all it's shown so far is the many inadequacies of any institution we've known so far to respect basic security/operating principles.
There are many, many EPR-related scandals to explore if you speak french, and even more scandals relative to french engineering companies if you're curious like Lafarge, Areva, Bouygues..
125 would be sufficient to replace one 1200MW reactor. A nuclear power plant usually consists of more than a single reactor.
In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract
There was a nuclear power station that shutdown in Texas this past winter after its cooling system malfunctioned in the extreme (for Texas) cold weather.
Thermal power stations face a panoply of potential malfunctions, regardless of their heat source. They are very, very complex.
> nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes
Is that the case though? To my knowledge nuclear reactor heat is only used to produce electricity and kill biodiversity in rivers so far.
Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns. Are there adequate mechanisms for transporting heat over long distances? That's already a problem for electricity, which incurs huge losses (heat dissipation).
That's an interesting project, but it's a little short on technical details. It mentions heating capabilities without a 100km radius but nothing about thermal losses on the way and how that model compares to municipal heating as is usual with waste burning (not saying burning trash is a better idea than nuclear fission, just listing options here).
> my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
It makes sense that mutualizing efforts to produce heat is gonna have a better yield/efficiency. I'm just sure nuclear energy is a disaster (at least all known and planned implementations so far) and i'm not sure whether using that excess heat in this manner is efficient. I'm very sure, though, that it's considerably better than rejecting very hot water into natural streams where it destroys ecosystems.
By French safety standards, that's pretty crazy stuff. Leaks and other middle-seriousness incidents are rather common around nuclear sites. Why people would build it in the first place is a risky tradeoff, but why they would place it in a highly-populated area is outright madness.
In any case, in that model, heating housing using nuclear sites heat makes perfect sense.
The big thing is that nuclear is more predictable. Downtime is scheduled most of the time. Wind is weather dependant and can be producing noting even if demand is high. This can be mitigated with storage like the 2 dam systems where you pump water uphill when there is a surplus (but that cost efficiency).
So where do you get power during the 50% of the time when there is no wind? What is the other generating infrastructure that needs to be built out for 100% coverage?
I have no major problem with more renewables per se, but unless you're in the Orkneys or a dessert/Mediterranean climate, it appears to me that there are always times when they're not available and so you have build out something as a back-up.
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we have nuclear plants providing >10,0000 MW continuously (click "Supply"):
Hydro and gas area scaled up as needed (especially over the last few days with >30C weather), and wind is very "random". (We have only a token amount of solar.)
The obvious answer is to store the surplus energy in batteries and use it later. And yes, it won't be long until we have enough batteries at low enough cost to make this feasible.
You might want to add, that for stationary batteries, where size does not matter so much, you do not need fancy lithium, cobalt or nickel. Plain iron, natrium and copper is enough to build as much storage as you want and can.
you are being downvoted - as am i - for raising valid questions about the blind belief that renewable energy is the sole, viable replacement for our current generation mix.
Goes to show that many here do not fully understand the challenges of running an electric grid and also that far too many have bought into the propaganda of wind, solar and battery storage being the sole path forward.
Not large enough. There isn't enough space on earth for all the lakes needed to make pumped hydro work. Sure where there is unused potential we should use it, but there isn't a whole lot of places left where we can do it - even before we get into how hydro tends to destroy ecosystems.
Batteries are already there. We can get them at $100/kWh now. Also generally these wind turbines cost a million US$ per MW, so this turbine is around US$16 million. A day of storage at 50% capacity factor for this would then cost US$ 19 million.
The problem with battery energy storage is not cost but scale. There isn't a battery in the world that can power a gigawatt scale electric grid for more than a few minutes. The original point is a good one - no renewable generation technology is a replacement for coal/gas/nuclear simply due to the unpredictable and variable nature of renewable generation.
Edit - it is very telling that information and views that go against the grain of "renewable energy is the sole future" are instantly downvoted. Shame on you.
I suspect you’re being downvoted because it isn’t a very well formulated negative. The problem is indeed scale, but there not being a battery setup in the world that could singlehandedly fix the issue isn’t the problem. You can have a lot of smaller battery setups if the batteries are cost efficient enough and you have a suitably flexible grid.
The actual issues are the cost efficiency of batteries, the amount of batteries that can be produced in total, and the flexibility of the power grid. Flexibility of the power grid is a known solvable problem, although how much it will cost to improve our infrastructure there is an important question. The point you were responding to was presumably arguing that $100kw/h batteries exist, and that that’s cost efficient enough. The questions are A) Is it true batteries at that cost exist, B) Is that actually cost efficient enough, and C) Can we produce enough of them to deal with the scale of batteries needed. Your post didn’t really argue against any of those points, just stated vacuously that current setups aren’t sufficient. Obviously current setups aren’t sufficient, the question is if we are approaching the cost point where they could be.
Used car batteries are much, much cheaper. So as more BEVs come on road, that's obviously one way forward. Also $100/kWh is today. However, given how rapidly costs have declined over the past three decades, nothing suggests that this is the final number.
Finally, these are just Li-ion prices. Na-ion and Fe-ion are also very close to deployment now. Both of them cannot match the energy density of Li-ion, but that's fine. Grid storage depends on cost, not energy density anyway
Storage batteries are going to fill gaps in generation swings, not power gigawatt scale grids for more than a few minutes. This is the crux of my point and i stated it as such.
A lot of smaller batteries is effectively equivalent to a single larger battery and that does not get around the problem from above - they simply cannot store enough energy for more than short periods. A handful of large hydro reservoirs store more potential energy than all chemical batteries in the world combined.
Meanwhile, extreme weather events are getting more common. Texas - for example - had a nearly 10,000 MW shortfall between their forecast and the actual, served demand. Is a battery every going to supply capacities like that for hours on end? No. During that cold snap, some wind turbines froze, some didn't see enough wind and much of the solar wasn't generating at full tilt. What then? Do we shrug our shoulders and say "no heat, too bad"?
Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
The problem with HN is that people do not think outside their silicon valley and techbro bubble. Another comment here suggested that domestic loads can be served with a battery. Sure, if you live in California and don't need much heat. This is the problem - when someone points out that what is proposed is not viable everywhere and that a mix of solutions is needed, it gets downvoted because it doesn't follow the "renewable energy is the be all and end all" argument.
Define short periods. Also gas lines froze more than turbines did BTW at Texas, just FYI. Very few conventional sources can also backstop 10GW of demand mismatch. Which is why having a national grid is so much better, power from Arizona can be used to top up shortfalls in Texas and vice versa.
> Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
You are being downvoted because this is just an opinion, not backed by any facts on the ground. Most solar installs today itself come with 4 hours of battery backup. Also, several posters and I have given cost figures on how much multi-day battery backups would cost even at current prices. So your insistence that batteries only last for a few minutes is getting downvoted, and calling people techbros isn't helping either.
I think there are two tracts to this discussion: industrial and residential energy.
Solar + Storage 100% can replace residential power usage. Ask anyone with a home battery and solar. Density is obviously a factor, but seems straight forward to solve.
Industrial energy usage, I think it’s seperate, but also is very moveable. Ie we can change how industry works to surge production at peak solar and wind, and then reduce when that power is not available.
Plus battery storage still works here (Not just lithium either, hydro, thermal, compressed a air, gravity store).
Where exactly do you see “unpredictable” energy problems that storage or shifting doesn’t solve?
> The problem with battery energy storage is not cost but scale.
I'd posit that it's mostly cost, otherwise it would be a solved problem now.
Certainly we can scale - even if it means putting low-cost batteries behind the meter (that solves, for a very modest sum, 90% of power consumers' problems). That's a horizontal scaling, obviously.
For the consumer types that need a lot of energy, then we need to come up with more imaginative solutions for their requirements. These types of turbines are almost definitely part of that.
Aside - complaining about downvotes is bad form. My feeling is your myriad comments on this article exhibit vehemence, and imply everyone else is ill-informed. It's possible we all have something to learn.
People here are indeed ill-informed. Silicon valley has a recent obsession with battery tech and seems to believe that batteries can scale like software. Spoiler - this is not the case.
As i said originally, the technical problem is scale. Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen? There is a lot to learn but the solution - and this the part that people don't like hearing - is a mix of technologies. Batteries are a thin slice of the solution. We need more hydro generation, more nuclear, more wind and more solar PV. It is not a binary choice as many here seem to believe.
Overbuilding solar and wind have been long suggested. But your insistence that batteries will only provide power for a few minutes is honestly not backed up by any data.
> Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen?
In an emergency the primary focus isn't, for example, on powering offices, powering every single thing you can. The focus should be on powering homes for a relatively short duration at reduced consumption. The goal is survival, not keeping everything on the grid powered up 24/7. Two Powerwalls can power a home for two to three days at reduced energy consumption (rationing). There's no reason we can't get to that type of outcome as routine in the next 10-20 years, given the cost of homes today (nearing $400,000 median sale price) and the continual decline in battery costs (and that's assuming no great battery breakthroughs). There's no reason all new homes built in the US shouldn't come with the equivalent of at least three Powerwalls of energy storage 20 years out.
It's possible that the phrase 'behind the meter' isn't universally understood - what I meant by that is that we can put storage systems (Lithium, Flow, etc) on the customer premises - on their side of the electricity meter.
This gives the power consumer an energy cache, effectively, with 2-3 days of self-reliance.
That's why I suggested that your insistence that we need one stonking large battery sitting somewhere is misguided - we can distribute, today, relatively cheaply (compared to the cost of a house build / maintenance) short-term independence from the grid supply.
Yeah. And for big power banks, there are several options beyond Li-ion. There are sodium, iron and magnesium chemistries for one.
Compressed air storage is another option, that is quite cheap and scales extremely well. The one being built by Hydrostor now in California is 4GWh, for example [0].
One thing is pretty sure - we need to overbuild solar and wind. The total annual energy consumption in the US is around 15 PWh. Notably, the per capita energy consumption has essentially remained flat for four decades now.
This energy consumption thus translates to an averaged power requirement of 4TW. Notably, while peaks are local, however nationally, extremes are not that higher than average. The average capacity factor is a third for renewables, so 12TW of nameplate renewable capacity is enough for the vast majority of the time - to power the entire nation's complete energy requirements through renewables.
Let's go with a 50-25-25 mix of solar-onshore-offshore wind. Thus solar nameplate needs to be 6TW, and both onshore and offshore wind needs to have 3TW nameplate capacity installed each. Solar PV generates 10W per square foot. That's 22,000 square miles. A lot of that can come from rooftop solar. Onshore wind turbines are 2.5MW each, which translates to 1.2 million turbines, while with the offshore turbine designs that this article shows - this is 200k turbines. The cost of such turbines (onshore+offshore) with installation would come to 9 trillion USD. Solar would cost a similar amount. Battery costs for storing 96TWh (a day's worth of energy consumption - averaged) would be 10 trillion dollars more.
Thus, building the nameplate capacity for the entire US to be powered by renewables is approximately 30 trillion dollars, where the GND price tag originated. However, all of these are at current solar/wind/storage prices. Each of those three is falling, and if the market becomes this big, economies of scale will drive costs down further.
To put some numbers to this. France produced 537.7 TWh of electricity in 2020. That's 537,700,000,000 kWh. Let's say you want battery capacity that can cover this for one day - divide it by 365 - 1,473,000,000 kWh. At $100 per kWh that would cost $147 billion.
That's actually not that outrageous. In reality you would probably want more battery capacity than that, but at the same time you'd probably have other forms of power generation too. Those other forms of power generation probably aren't going to be off when wind power isn't being produced, which means that they don't need to be covered by the battery capacity.
France's budget in 2021 was $755 billion.
Edit: I forgot about batteries wearing out. If they have to replace the batteries once a year then this would still be prohibitively expensive.
Batteries easily last a decade now. LFP chemistries easily will do 1000+ cycles. Also 24 hours is a huge amount - you actually don't need more than that, especially if you have offshore wind in your mix, as they blow pretty much all the time.
I heard a solar project is over-provisioning the battery and planning to replace it every 5 years as they must be able to deliver some amount of MWh 4 years down the road.
Yes - but you are never really cycling all the way. Draining them down completely and filling them all the way up. Rather they are often smoothing out power supply.
So a cycle is a full discharge and if you get at least 1000 cycles but never go below 10% discharge you would get 10000 10% discharge/charge cycles from a battery?
> You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle.
There are currently 32 millions passenger cars in France, so for 1,473,000,000 kWh by 32 millions that's ... 46 kWh per car.
Most cars have more than that as battery so when all car are electrified, put together and filled up they can power France for a day without any other generation source.
France peak demand is about 100 GW so that's 3.2 kW per car.
It's a tiny amount relative to the power of the motor.
It can flow through a nearly normal plug (16A 230V).
> So where do you get power during the 50% of the time when there is no wind?
A 50% capacity factor does not mean there's no wind 50% of the time. It only means that, averaged over a whole year, the power produced is 50% of the maximum the generator is rated to produce. This includes periods of time when there's wind, but wind that's not strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator.
And the wind not being strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator is probably the most common situation, since it makes sense to design the generator to reach its maximum output at the strongest normal wind on the region; when the wind is stronger than that maximum, the generator has to shut down (feather the blades and brake the rotor), otherwise it will get damaged.
They don’t have the data posted yet but there was an event in Alberta recently where there was no wind and this caused the price to be very high. So you either don’t use your AC on a hot still day or you get a giant bill.
Looking through may 2021 I see instances in which actual wind power delivered is zero.
Building transmission lines is a technical solution but not an economic or socially viable one. The amount of permitting required only makes it worthwhile if it is unlocking a great resource. It is not viable to build transmission lines that usually operate with no load just in case it is windy at location A one day but not at B.
Extreme prices in Alberta were recently caused by a lack of wind across the province. Turns out sometimes it isn’t windy anywhere! Similar can happen for sun. A big storm can move in and it is dark and cloudy and you get 10% of nameplate for 5 days.
I think ammonia production by solar power near deserts is going to be the missing link that provides the flexibility we need to keep the grid reliable on a cloudy windless day.
On https://www.electricitymap.org/map you can see the transfers between national (ish) grids, and that the transmission lines aren't idle. You can slide the map to North America, but the data is very incomplete.
I wonder how much of the efficiency is due to the height/altitude and how much is due to blade surface area. Does it make sense to build super tall towers to put medium sized wind turbines up higher? Interesting idea
Interesting links! Spacing and layout are obviously more dimensions that can be optimized.
The blades in the original article are 118m long so they would have a diameter of 236m, and according to your first link the "usual" spacing is 7x the diameter so they'd need to be at least 1.6km apart?
For 250 turbines, based on your own links we need 444 sq km. That's like half the area of the whole of New York City.
Not a small country.
So based on offshore capacity factors, an area of NYC will generate 500160.5 = 4000MW continuous power. NY state consumes approximately 200 TWh of power annually. Thus, this setup itself will contribute to 1/6th of the whole state's power consumption.
True. However NYC also has a huge population and enormous energy footprint. The population of all those countries combined is around 5 million, less than a third of NYC.
I specifically chose NYC, as it's one of the most densely populated areas, so its energy requirements are that much higher.
This doesn't have anything to do with my original point.
400 square kilometers is a huge area.
But sure. You "only" need one of those to match the output of a nuclear power plant. You "only" need to fully clear that area of all obstacles (including trees, for example), and provide that area with roads, access points, battery storage, power transformers...
You don't need to clear trees and build roads for offshore wind. Nobody is denying that nuclear is concentrated. However, this concentration also misses one step - when calculating areal requirements you should also calculate land needed for waste disposal.
> You don't need to clear trees and build roads for offshore wind.
As if that makes problem go away.
Type Isle of Wight into Google Maps. Its area is 384 square kilometers. Then zoom out. And then zoom out again. You can still see it at a zoom level that encompasses all of Europe. That's the area you need to cover in these megaturbines.
And no, you can't just plop them down anywhere:
- they have to be sufficiently close to the shore (you can't expect power cables to be infinitely long, you need easy access for maintenance etc.)
- the seabed has to allow for construction: even if you don't embed it into the seabed, you at least have to anchor it. And you have to be able to lay down or anchor power cables.
- there has to be place on-shore for power infrastructure: from management to transformers to batteries, as you don't just dump megawatts of power directly into the grid
> when calculating areal requirements you should also calculate land needed for waste disposal.
I doubt any nuclear waste disposal takes up 400 square kilometres.
Singapore is building HVDC lines from Australia as we speak. We have been building underwater cables for a very long time (100+ years now) so it's pretty much a solved problem currently. Deep sea oil rigs have existed for decades at this point. Turbines in comparison are easier than oil rigs.
So tl:dr; we can absolutely plonk them down everywhere, and in fact we should.
I wonder if that's really the right direction to go. Admittedly, the gains in output are impressive for comparatively small increases in size (I think there's a cubic growth somewhere). But the main problem with offshore wind energy currently seems to be installation. It might be economically better to produce more small turbines and install them much more efficiently instead of doing fewer, more complicated installations. One could, for instance, create 6MW floating in a large factory near the cost turbines and literally ship them to their location.
I mean, we have small wind turbines already but the industry keeps moving to larger ones. That says to me that the economics favour the fewer-but-large approach.
I can see why this would be - it has to be nontrivial to anchor an object of any size to the sea floor (not to mention maintenance and inspection) and doing that ten times at a large scales sounds easier than doing it hundreds of times at smaller scales.
The article states the opposite - that fewer bigger turbines are overall cheaper to install than many smaller ones to reach the same capacity
No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity
Pizza prices don't seem to track the same trend. An extra large is generally just a dollar or two more than a large, etc. I guess this is because dough and sauce are cheap so the cost impact is negligible from a manufacturing standpoint, so those few extra dollars are essentially pure profit.
Hmmm so they haven't even built the prototype yet, and it won't be built for another year, it won't be installed for another 2 years, and they won't start actual commercial production of these things for another 3 years. So this is pretty much just a CAD design / simulation. This is pure PR until all of those are accomplished.
Well, GE's Halide-X in Rotterdam has 107-meter long blades, and this company's new one will have 118-meter long blades, so objects of similar scale do already exist.
Will wind leave behind countries with narrow roads that wouldnt acomodate large trucks? My place in India has highways with 30kph curves and walls at the very edge.
This may seem like a silly question but I'm genuinely curious... are there are concerns about harnessing too much power from wind and affecting global climate, air currents, etc? It seams far fetched, but we are removing energy from the atmosphere.
Most people would consider the impact of planting a forest with tall trees on air currents to be mostly benign. I imagine this is the same, except with less fire risk.
I seem to recall reading something along these lines from those anti-wind power tirades. They claim they have affects on birds. There's pretty much all sorts of claims. They are claims and not necessarily based on reality, but you could probably find something along these lines if you searched hard enough.
Wind is caused by the sun.
In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.
Humans are currently using nearly as much energy, as 0,011% of sunlight.
Initially I thought this seemed like a silly question too given the enormous amount of kinetic energy available in the atmosphere. But...someone did the research and produced a paper:
In agreement with observations and prior model-based analyses, US wind power will likely cause non-negligible climate impacts. While these impacts differ from the climate impacts of GHGs in many important respects, they should not be neglected. Wind's climate impacts are large compared with solar PVs. Similar studies are needed for offshore wind power, for other countries, and for other renewable technologies. There is no simple answer regarding the best renewable technology, but choices between renewable energy sources should be informed by systematic analysis of their generation potential and their environmental impacts.
I wonder how these huge structures would stand up to the increasingly powerful storms the world is experiencing. Presumably they wouldn't get built if they weren't up to the task.
If there is too much wind they stop the blades, but that brake can sometimes fail. There are some good videos out there of turbines failing catastrophically :)
Along the length of a wind turbine blade, the conditions vary widely. Near the pivot, the blade needs to be really strong, moves slowly and has a steep angle of attack. Near the tip the blade moves hundreds of mph, needs not much strength and has a very shallow angle of attack.
Having such widely varying conditions would seem to be very hard to optimise for - only one position along the blade can be at optimal conditions.
I would expect that there might exist another design of wind turbine not having this downside - perhaps with a linearly moving blade.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadI have no idea what current numbers are, but I expect long term most factories will be inland and produce wind turbines of a size that is limited by local transport roads/laws. At sea might be better, but one factory can produce windmills for any ocean in the world. Inland shipping is far more expensive and so we need more factories scattered around.
If your country is near the sea then off-shore wind is best. However a lot of land isn't close enough to the sea to make off-shore practical and so they need a different option.
https://www.theverge.com/22296979/us-offshore-ships-wind-boo...
New Details on First Jones Act-Compliant Wind Turbine Installation Vessel:
https://gcaptain.com/new-details-on-first-jones-act-complian...
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Expressly Applies Jones Act to Offshore Wind Projects in U.S. Waters:
https://gcaptain.com/u-s-customs-and-border-protection-expre...
Large scale composites are still largely manual labour, and there are few pieces of tooling which themselves need to be one big piece. Mould can be split into sections rather easily.
Most wind farms (on shore) are in fields that the farmer has planted. you want to disturb the crop as little as possible while installing which means the factory will be elsewhere so that you don't need to tear up more crop in manufacturing.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...
May be it should be added that of course renewables can be dispatchable if not all of their available capacity is used all the time. The typical gas peaker plans are idle 90% of the time. But people complain less about that, as gas plans consume gas to run, while e.g. solar cells don't have any additional costs for producing electricity vs. not producing electricity. So it seems like a waste to not operate them at full capacity. Yet, the situation isn't that different from a gas plant idling most of the time.
Annectodal, the French grid is mostly nuclear and they of course face the problems with running a varying grid load with "base load" power plants. The solution is, to run their nuclear power plants at an average of 75% of their full power, this gives them more ability to regulate the output, but of course it means, that the cost per energy produced raises, as they usually are not fully utilized. Which probably is the reason, why France is exporting a lot of electricity - with the European grid it is cheaper to have a varying export than a variable production.
Here is an interesting article about this: https://www.power-technology.com/features/how-norway-became-...
The Continental European grid covers 400 million people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
That can still be fine as the cost of renewables keeps falling, but complainig about capacity factor of nuclear in this context is laughable
>First, the fluctuations in variable wind and solar PV are balanced by flexible renewable energy sources that are dispatchable, i.e. can supply power on demand. These are hydro with dams, Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGTs) and concentrated solar thermal power (CST) with thermal storage, as illustrated in Figure 2. It ‘s not essential for every power station in the system to be dispatchable.
Gas turbines are flexible renewable energy? Concentrated solar power is a fringe technology that is highly dependent on geography. How this is taken seriously i do not understand.
The article goes on to make a rubbish point about "green" gas while completely ignoring that gas in any form is neither "Green" nor renewable.
>In the USA a major computer simulation by a large team of scientists and engineers found that 80-90% renewable electricity is technically feasible and reliable (They didn’t examine 100%.)
Gee, i wonder why 100% wasn't examined. Perhaps it points to an uncomfortable conclusion that solely variable, renewable energy cannot work at scale as the sole source of energy for gigawatt scale grids. The reality is that a combination is required and this reality upsets those who believe the pie-in-the-sky dream that solar and wind can power the entire grid if you only overbuild and dispatch them.
As the February event in Texas demonstrated, all generation can underperform at the same time leading to near disaster. We would be wise to hedge our bets on generation sources.
Depends what gas you burn and how it was generated, but yeah as long as the source isnt adding fossil carbon to the air then they're part of the solution.
In fact, after reading the article, the next paragraph after your quote says exactly that:
> Incidentally the gas turbines can themselves be fuelled by ‘green gas’, for example from composting municipal and agricultural wastes, or produced from surpluses of renewable electricity. More on this below …
The "more on this below" refers to later parts of the article that cover making syngas from water using electricity supplied by wind power
you can turn on a nuclear reactor anytime you want, but not a solar panel/wind turbine. that is what baseload is about.
The base load is nothing especial, only the fraction of the maximum load of the grid, that is always drawn and can be served by power plants which cannot be regulated well. Which most of the time of the day is a big disadvantage of those power plants. If there is a demand peak, they can't serve it. If their overall output is too high, you cannot turn it down quickly enough. As coal and nuclear power traditionally had a large part of the supply and both are quite slow, for decades the net was designed to raise the "base load". Like in Belgium, where all highways were illuminated at night to consume excess nuclear energy...
The good news about wind and solar is, they can be switched off quickly at any time. Their disadvantage is, and that probably is, when you talk about base load, that the maxim power output depends on the weather. With a coal plant, you can put more coals into the fire, with solar, you need to wait for sunrise. That is indeed a challenge and requires storage and grid planning to compensate. Larger scale grids which mix wind and solar are much less affected by the. But nothing of this has to do with the base load.
And with nuclear: yes, wind should beat nuclear easily in the aspects of cost and CO2. But the most important metric is: the cost of building new nuclear plants is prohibitive. Just compare the costs of the most recent English nuclear plant with new wind installations. They are about 1/3rd of the cost and not have any of the problems of nuclear energy attached (operation risk, nuclear waste).
Also regarding CO2 cost, nuclear vs wind is certainly not clear cut. This [1] reference says wind is somewhat worse than European nuclear but better than US nuclear. It's also worth pointing out that lifecycle CO2 analysis of Nuclear often consider only ~50 years of nuclear waste storage [2], which is somewhat misleading considering that we have to store some of the waste for thousands of years.
[1] https://escholarship.org/content/qt5fw407kf/qt5fw407kf_noSpl... [2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the...
I remember reading an article in popular mechanics about them years ago (found it [1]) and it seemed like a superior turbine…
[1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a246/128...
Efficiency in price per kwH is more important and big turbines have claimed their crown here. Given that stresses are behind size limits the strategy is clear here.
Vertical still only makes sense in limited space.
The horizontal turbines put the pole behind the blades. The pole does make a bow wave, but it is not as bad as the VAT wake. The pole/blade interaction is not as severe.
It's a "perfect is the enemy of good enough" thing. Better designs along one axis with a multi axis problem won't be best overall.
This had me really scratching my head for way too long, I laughed out loud when I realised my error.
“They are bolted down surely?”
Where it will land is still up in the air
Me: "Well, thats f**ing no good"
In the early days of California wind power, there were some Darrieus turbines at Pacheco Pass. They're probably gone now. In those days, 30KW was a big turbine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine
The standard horizontal three-blade upwind turbine design seems to have been the one that scaled up the best; you can just keep making them larger and larger and they get more cost-effective.
Source: I worked for a micro generation helical VAWT startup for 5 years.
More info at http://www.myse.com.cn/en/jtxw/info.aspx?itemid=825
- intermittent
- expensive (more than solar)
- look bad (worst of all energy sources)
- no plausible route for it getting a significant fraction of the energy mix (nuclear or solar+batteries do)
I mean having some wind seems cool for some situations, but I just can't get excited about it.
It has a good location for wind, which many countries couldn't match, but it clearly an effective source in this case.
And I personally think that most of them do look good. I am fond of technology and wind turbines are especially elegant and spectacular looking. I can see that too many of them can be seen negatively. Solar cells can be hidden better.
Some data to explore:
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Unfortunately, some interesting countries (e.g. Sweden, Germany,...) are missing. I am wondering how electricitymap.org gets their data from there for those countries? But there are also other sources, e.g.:
https://www.windjournal.de/erneuerbare-energie/aktuelle_eins...
Nuclear is cheap when not operated in a hostile regulatory environment and built at scale, even while setting aside tens of billions for decommissioning and waste management.
They're sort of in a sweet spot right now financially but once their plants start aging out - which is soon - the costs will jump a lot if they try to extend their life or build brand new plants.
The best time to go zero carbon with nuclear was 50 years ago. The second best time is never.
This makes no sence, and if wealthy countries of this world actually got their head out of their collective asses and built a system like the french one, we would avoid climate change almost entirely - france emits 3 or 4 times less per persom than the US does
But the most important thing is the opportunity cost - a typical nuclear power plant takes 7 years to complete.
For this reason in terms of GWh delivered in China, wind overtook nuclear in 2012 or so and the gap has been widening ever since.
The new Flamanville project is plagued by budget and time overruns.
Nearly 6 times over-budget and yet to provide a watt nearly 10 years after its initially projected completion date. Most recent cost estimates are for over 19B euro - $22B. This buys you a single 1.6GW reactor.[1]
The same amount of money would buy 20GW of onshore wind. Even adjusting for capacity factors - about 70% for French nuclear, about 40% for well positioned modern turbines - the cost per MWh is about 7 times higher for nuclear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Intermittency is a problem for all generation types - they just have different modes. The average nuclear reactor in the US, for example, spends about 10% of it's time off-line, coal generation is even worse - about 15% unavailable with 10% unscheduled. So you still need backup idling capacity for thermal generation. Particularly nuclear requires a great deal of complimentary dispatchable sources given you need to be able to match demand which can have a daily peak 2 or 3 times higher than trough and nuclear reactors can take a day or more to vary their output.
No comment on the looks - to me they aren't ugly.
There is a plausible route for wind - at least to get to 70% or so supply. There are a few countries in Europe already over the 35% mark for wind and grid engineers seem confident that much more can added with current tech.
Wind complements solar as their output is generally not correlated - combining both reduces the overall output variance.
Wind has higher capacity factor than solar[2]. In more northern latitudes solar capacity factor can be as low as 10%. While in some places on-shore wind capacity factors can be higher than 40%. 1GW of installed capacity wind will, on average, provide 40% more electricity than 1GW of solar based on the US Energy Information Agency figures.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper...
It scales "vertically" (bigger turbines!) while solar scales horizontally (more roofs).
That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter.
So I think that their point is that the energy output goes up more (45%) than the diameter (19%), i.e. it's not linear, which is what "proportionality" [1] seems to mean.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)
1.19 * 1.19 = 1.4161
That's still 4% unaccounted for, so there are some efficiency gains there.
The question then becomes how building materials and energy required to build one of these scales with size. If that is linearly with blade diameter/turbine height, then yes, the efficiency increases quickly the larger you build them.
And the cost savings are likely less about building materials which likely scale at more than quadratic pace with height, but about labour and maintenance. Each trip out to an offshore base is costly, fewer trips made both for building and for maintenance saves a lot of money.
The other main reason to get bigger that‘s not even discussed is increased capacity factor. That doesn‘t have to do with efficiency, but with effectiveness, as the turbine will simply run more days of the year.
Am I reading that right? A tower 242 meters tall (read: a 70-floor skyscraper), with moving 118 meter blades, and they're proposing anchoring it to a floating base!?
(I'm assuming that the article reported hub height and not the highest point of the rotor).
https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/floating-wind/how-hywi...
Hundred meter turbine just bobbing in the water like a cork.
I'm a subscriber so I don't know how soft the paywall is:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/07/21/...
[1] https://www.stiesdal.com/offshore-technologies/the-tetraspar...
But that does remind of Thunderscreech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech
"The XF-84H was almost certainly the loudest aircraft ever built, earning the nickname "Thunderscreech" as well as the "Mighty Ear Banger".[16] On the ground "run ups", the prototypes could reportedly be heard 25 miles (40 km) away.[17] Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards."
(I use to work on utility scale wind farms with 100+ x 2.1MW turbines)
[0] https://www.semprius.com/how-fast-do-wind-turbines-spin/ [1] https://www.windpowerengineering.com/calculate-blade-tip-spe...
A quick google says large turbines can rotate up to 20 rpm, so once every 3 seconds, that's 710/3 = 236m/s, so Mach 0.68
(edit) I think 29rpm is when the tips of blades go supersonic for that turbine.
"The best way to get the correct answer on the internet is to give the wrong one". I look forward to being corrected...
Depends on the site and readers. As we've seen recently, wrong answers take on a life of their own and become gospel or canon to eliminate religious overtones.
0:https://www.airspacemag.com/how-things-work/zwrrwwwbrzr-4846...
EDIT: Taking operational capacity (26% for wind, 86% for nuclear) into account, you arrive at about 250 to replace one nuclear plant. Still insane.
Source: https://qr.ae/pGWlu4
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...
Mostly because at such heights wind is generally higher and more consistent.
France produces 75% of their electricity with 56 nuclear power plants, which - if the above is broadly correct - you would be able to replace with 7000 of these wind mills. That's a lot, but on the other hand, Germany has already installed 20k wind turbines so far, so it seems within reach. Obviously you still need to think about matching supply and demand, but I'm surprised by how feasible this appears.
Sadly, not everything is so green here, like it may sound.
They're supposed to prove the supremacy of french engineering companies with the new EPR design, however all it's shown so far is the many inadequacies of any institution we've known so far to respect basic security/operating principles.
There are many, many EPR-related scandals to explore if you speak french, and even more scandals relative to french engineering companies if you're curious like Lafarge, Areva, Bouygues..
Operators just hope it doesn't get as bad as the case in England, where they could barely move certain metal containers without them shattering.
In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract
https://www.climateforesight.eu/energy/nuclear-power-feeling...
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-...
Thermal power stations face a panoply of potential malfunctions, regardless of their heat source. They are very, very complex.
Is that the case though? To my knowledge nuclear reactor heat is only used to produce electricity and kill biodiversity in rivers so far.
Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns. Are there adequate mechanisms for transporting heat over long distances? That's already a problem for electricity, which incurs huge losses (heat dissipation).
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Haiyang-begins-c...
For net heating climates, my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
> my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
It makes sense that mutualizing efforts to produce heat is gonna have a better yield/efficiency. I'm just sure nuclear energy is a disaster (at least all known and planned implementations so far) and i'm not sure whether using that excess heat in this manner is efficient. I'm very sure, though, that it's considerably better than rejecting very hot water into natural streams where it destroys ecosystems.
Really? Look at Pickering nuclear power station for example. Highly populated area all around it.
In any case, in that model, heating housing using nuclear sites heat makes perfect sense.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...
I have no major problem with more renewables per se, but unless you're in the Orkneys or a dessert/Mediterranean climate, it appears to me that there are always times when they're not available and so you have build out something as a back-up.
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we have nuclear plants providing >10,0000 MW continuously (click "Supply"):
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
Hydro and gas area scaled up as needed (especially over the last few days with >30C weather), and wind is very "random". (We have only a token amount of solar.)
Right now it's not possible, and there is no solution in sight.
Edit: Why I'm being downvoted, we can't store energy at scale for now, end of the story.
Goes to show that many here do not fully understand the challenges of running an electric grid and also that far too many have bought into the propaganda of wind, solar and battery storage being the sole path forward.
Not large enough. There isn't enough space on earth for all the lakes needed to make pumped hydro work. Sure where there is unused potential we should use it, but there isn't a whole lot of places left where we can do it - even before we get into how hydro tends to destroy ecosystems.
The problem with battery energy storage is not cost but scale. There isn't a battery in the world that can power a gigawatt scale electric grid for more than a few minutes. The original point is a good one - no renewable generation technology is a replacement for coal/gas/nuclear simply due to the unpredictable and variable nature of renewable generation.
Edit - it is very telling that information and views that go against the grain of "renewable energy is the sole future" are instantly downvoted. Shame on you.
The actual issues are the cost efficiency of batteries, the amount of batteries that can be produced in total, and the flexibility of the power grid. Flexibility of the power grid is a known solvable problem, although how much it will cost to improve our infrastructure there is an important question. The point you were responding to was presumably arguing that $100kw/h batteries exist, and that that’s cost efficient enough. The questions are A) Is it true batteries at that cost exist, B) Is that actually cost efficient enough, and C) Can we produce enough of them to deal with the scale of batteries needed. Your post didn’t really argue against any of those points, just stated vacuously that current setups aren’t sufficient. Obviously current setups aren’t sufficient, the question is if we are approaching the cost point where they could be.
Finally, these are just Li-ion prices. Na-ion and Fe-ion are also very close to deployment now. Both of them cannot match the energy density of Li-ion, but that's fine. Grid storage depends on cost, not energy density anyway
A lot of smaller batteries is effectively equivalent to a single larger battery and that does not get around the problem from above - they simply cannot store enough energy for more than short periods. A handful of large hydro reservoirs store more potential energy than all chemical batteries in the world combined.
Meanwhile, extreme weather events are getting more common. Texas - for example - had a nearly 10,000 MW shortfall between their forecast and the actual, served demand. Is a battery every going to supply capacities like that for hours on end? No. During that cold snap, some wind turbines froze, some didn't see enough wind and much of the solar wasn't generating at full tilt. What then? Do we shrug our shoulders and say "no heat, too bad"?
Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
The problem with HN is that people do not think outside their silicon valley and techbro bubble. Another comment here suggested that domestic loads can be served with a battery. Sure, if you live in California and don't need much heat. This is the problem - when someone points out that what is proposed is not viable everywhere and that a mix of solutions is needed, it gets downvoted because it doesn't follow the "renewable energy is the be all and end all" argument.
> Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
You are being downvoted because this is just an opinion, not backed by any facts on the ground. Most solar installs today itself come with 4 hours of battery backup. Also, several posters and I have given cost figures on how much multi-day battery backups would cost even at current prices. So your insistence that batteries only last for a few minutes is getting downvoted, and calling people techbros isn't helping either.
Solar + Storage 100% can replace residential power usage. Ask anyone with a home battery and solar. Density is obviously a factor, but seems straight forward to solve.
Industrial energy usage, I think it’s seperate, but also is very moveable. Ie we can change how industry works to surge production at peak solar and wind, and then reduce when that power is not available. Plus battery storage still works here (Not just lithium either, hydro, thermal, compressed a air, gravity store).
Where exactly do you see “unpredictable” energy problems that storage or shifting doesn’t solve?
I'd posit that it's mostly cost, otherwise it would be a solved problem now.
Certainly we can scale - even if it means putting low-cost batteries behind the meter (that solves, for a very modest sum, 90% of power consumers' problems). That's a horizontal scaling, obviously.
For the consumer types that need a lot of energy, then we need to come up with more imaginative solutions for their requirements. These types of turbines are almost definitely part of that.
Aside - complaining about downvotes is bad form. My feeling is your myriad comments on this article exhibit vehemence, and imply everyone else is ill-informed. It's possible we all have something to learn.
As i said originally, the technical problem is scale. Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen? There is a lot to learn but the solution - and this the part that people don't like hearing - is a mix of technologies. Batteries are a thin slice of the solution. We need more hydro generation, more nuclear, more wind and more solar PV. It is not a binary choice as many here seem to believe.
Certainly.
> Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen?
In an emergency the primary focus isn't, for example, on powering offices, powering every single thing you can. The focus should be on powering homes for a relatively short duration at reduced consumption. The goal is survival, not keeping everything on the grid powered up 24/7. Two Powerwalls can power a home for two to three days at reduced energy consumption (rationing). There's no reason we can't get to that type of outcome as routine in the next 10-20 years, given the cost of homes today (nearing $400,000 median sale price) and the continual decline in battery costs (and that's assuming no great battery breakthroughs). There's no reason all new homes built in the US shouldn't come with the equivalent of at least three Powerwalls of energy storage 20 years out.
This gives the power consumer an energy cache, effectively, with 2-3 days of self-reliance.
That's why I suggested that your insistence that we need one stonking large battery sitting somewhere is misguided - we can distribute, today, relatively cheaply (compared to the cost of a house build / maintenance) short-term independence from the grid supply.
Compressed air storage is another option, that is quite cheap and scales extremely well. The one being built by Hydrostor now in California is 4GWh, for example [0].
Refs:
[0] https://newatlas.com/energy/hydrostor-compressed-air-energy-...
This energy consumption thus translates to an averaged power requirement of 4TW. Notably, while peaks are local, however nationally, extremes are not that higher than average. The average capacity factor is a third for renewables, so 12TW of nameplate renewable capacity is enough for the vast majority of the time - to power the entire nation's complete energy requirements through renewables.
Let's go with a 50-25-25 mix of solar-onshore-offshore wind. Thus solar nameplate needs to be 6TW, and both onshore and offshore wind needs to have 3TW nameplate capacity installed each. Solar PV generates 10W per square foot. That's 22,000 square miles. A lot of that can come from rooftop solar. Onshore wind turbines are 2.5MW each, which translates to 1.2 million turbines, while with the offshore turbine designs that this article shows - this is 200k turbines. The cost of such turbines (onshore+offshore) with installation would come to 9 trillion USD. Solar would cost a similar amount. Battery costs for storing 96TWh (a day's worth of energy consumption - averaged) would be 10 trillion dollars more.
Thus, building the nameplate capacity for the entire US to be powered by renewables is approximately 30 trillion dollars, where the GND price tag originated. However, all of these are at current solar/wind/storage prices. Each of those three is falling, and if the market becomes this big, economies of scale will drive costs down further.
That's actually not that outrageous. In reality you would probably want more battery capacity than that, but at the same time you'd probably have other forms of power generation too. Those other forms of power generation probably aren't going to be off when wind power isn't being produced, which means that they don't need to be covered by the battery capacity.
France's budget in 2021 was $755 billion.
Edit: I forgot about batteries wearing out. If they have to replace the batteries once a year then this would still be prohibitively expensive.
I heard a solar project is over-provisioning the battery and planning to replace it every 5 years as they must be able to deliver some amount of MWh 4 years down the road.
> You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle.
References:
[0] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
Most cars have more than that as battery so when all car are electrified, put together and filled up they can power France for a day without any other generation source.
France peak demand is about 100 GW so that's 3.2 kW per car.
It's a tiny amount relative to the power of the motor.
It can flow through a nearly normal plug (16A 230V).
And this is for the worst day of the year.
A 50% capacity factor does not mean there's no wind 50% of the time. It only means that, averaged over a whole year, the power produced is 50% of the maximum the generator is rated to produce. This includes periods of time when there's wind, but wind that's not strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator.
And the wind not being strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator is probably the most common situation, since it makes sense to design the generator to reach its maximum output at the strongest normal wind on the region; when the wind is stronger than that maximum, the generator has to shut down (feather the blades and brake the rotor), otherwise it will get damaged.
Looking through may 2021 I see instances in which actual wind power delivered is zero.
https://www.aeso.ca/grid/forecasting/wind-and-solar-power-fo...
It may not be windy in some places, but chances are it will be windy in others.
Fossil fuel backups such as gas are not a bad interim solution, considering gas is less polluting than coal.
There are some problems with economics, as backup solutions cost money even when they are not being used.
Extreme prices in Alberta were recently caused by a lack of wind across the province. Turns out sometimes it isn’t windy anywhere! Similar can happen for sun. A big storm can move in and it is dark and cloudy and you get 10% of nameplate for 5 days.
I think ammonia production by solar power near deserts is going to be the missing link that provides the flexibility we need to keep the grid reliable on a cloudy windless day.
On a domestic level, countries like Germany have legislation that targets accelerating internal grid connections.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzausbaubeschleunigungsges...
On a supranational level in Europe, the EU has targets to increase grid interconnections between countries.
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/topics/infrastructure/electricit...
On an intergovernmental level, outside of the EU the UK is building an underwater cable to Denmark, to share hydro and wind energy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/13/work-beg...
On https://www.electricitymap.org/map you can see the transfers between national (ish) grids, and that the transmission lines aren't idle. You can slide the map to North America, but the data is very incomplete.
The blades in the original article are 118m long so they would have a diameter of 236m, and according to your first link the "usual" spacing is 7x the diameter so they'd need to be at least 1.6km apart?
Not a small country.
So based on offshore capacity factors, an area of NYC will generate 500160.5 = 4000MW continuous power. NY state consumes approximately 200 TWh of power annually. Thus, this setup itself will contribute to 1/6th of the whole state's power consumption.
I exaggerated of course [1]. But you probably don't realize how huge half of New York city, or 444 sq. km is.
And the area is likely to larger because you will need additional infrastructure to handle all this and maintain the generators.
[1] There are 43 countries smaller than that: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries+smaller+than...
I specifically chose NYC, as it's one of the most densely populated areas, so its energy requirements are that much higher.
400 square kilometers is a huge area.
But sure. You "only" need one of those to match the output of a nuclear power plant. You "only" need to fully clear that area of all obstacles (including trees, for example), and provide that area with roads, access points, battery storage, power transformers...
Edit: take this report on area comparisons between nuclear, solar, and wind with a grain of salt. https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...
But even if they are 10x off, that's still enormous land requirements.
As if that makes problem go away.
Type Isle of Wight into Google Maps. Its area is 384 square kilometers. Then zoom out. And then zoom out again. You can still see it at a zoom level that encompasses all of Europe. That's the area you need to cover in these megaturbines.
And no, you can't just plop them down anywhere:
- they have to be sufficiently close to the shore (you can't expect power cables to be infinitely long, you need easy access for maintenance etc.)
- the seabed has to allow for construction: even if you don't embed it into the seabed, you at least have to anchor it. And you have to be able to lay down or anchor power cables.
- there has to be place on-shore for power infrastructure: from management to transformers to batteries, as you don't just dump megawatts of power directly into the grid
> when calculating areal requirements you should also calculate land needed for waste disposal.
I doubt any nuclear waste disposal takes up 400 square kilometres.
Singapore is building HVDC lines from Australia as we speak. We have been building underwater cables for a very long time (100+ years now) so it's pretty much a solved problem currently. Deep sea oil rigs have existed for decades at this point. Turbines in comparison are easier than oil rigs.
So tl:dr; we can absolutely plonk them down everywhere, and in fact we should.
No it is not without a balanced power grid.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_wind_tur...
Sorted by "Power rating (MW)", the top three are:
* Vesta V236 (15)
* Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD (14)
* GE Wind Energy Haliade-X (13)
MingYang has a MySE 11-203 at 11: currently listed as "Concept" like the top two, above.
I can see why this would be - it has to be nontrivial to anchor an object of any size to the sea floor (not to mention maintenance and inspection) and doing that ten times at a large scales sounds easier than doing it hundreds of times at smaller scales.
No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity
Three time bigger turbine sweeps 9 times larger area / volume of air, and gives 9 times more power
Faster winds are accessible higher up, and power that can be extracted from the wind goes up as velocity cubed (V3)
The bigger problem is that going offshore is expensive. On the other hand, shipping by sea should be easier than land :)
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30446-X
Their conclusion:
In agreement with observations and prior model-based analyses, US wind power will likely cause non-negligible climate impacts. While these impacts differ from the climate impacts of GHGs in many important respects, they should not be neglected. Wind's climate impacts are large compared with solar PVs. Similar studies are needed for offshore wind power, for other countries, and for other renewable technologies. There is no simple answer regarding the best renewable technology, but choices between renewable energy sources should be informed by systematic analysis of their generation potential and their environmental impacts.
Make of it what you will.
I wonder if these are AI generate somehow.
Having such widely varying conditions would seem to be very hard to optimise for - only one position along the blade can be at optimal conditions.
I would expect that there might exist another design of wind turbine not having this downside - perhaps with a linearly moving blade.