UK Wants Huge Expansion In Offshore Wind Power

OriginalArlen writes "The UK government has announced an ambitious plan to expand the existing offshore wind turbine farms, which are already extensive, to an estimated 7,000 units — two per mile of coastline — enough to generate 20% of the UK's power needs by 2020. The newly green-friendly Conservative opposition party is also backing the scheme. Wonder what they'll make of it in Oregon..."

Why not make some more nuclear plants?

[the_humeister (922869)]

France does it quite well. In fact they're a net energy exporter.

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[DigiShaman (671371)]

I assume they sell to Spain via the grid? Also, does France create and export Hydrogen with the left-over nuclear energy?

Electricity export from France

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

When you're next door to Italy, of course you're going to be a net exporter! Who are they going to rely on to generate their power? Themselves

In case you're not familiar with power sources, for baseload power, you're generally going to be using hydro, nuclear, or coal. They're sources whose fuel is cheap and whose plants lend themselves to larger outputs. To cover infrequent peaks of demand, one frequently maintains reserve capacity in the form of gas turbines or, less common and more expensively, oil or gas-fired power plants. Reserve capacity has a low purchase price (or is leftover from decades with more favorable fuel prices, in the case of oil and gas-fired plants) and a high operating cost

Italy--in goddamn 2007--maintains oil-fired baseload capacity. That's right, the stuff an American power company won't touch unless a market's gas lines happened to be cut on the same day their whirly gigs won't start up. Just like the rest of the West did up until the first Oil Crisis in the 1970's.

So, while France's impressive system for licensing and standardizing plants, along with their active R&D in the industry, might be laudable, that surplus is there to profit from flaws in their neighbors' own energy policies.

European hell...

[by Anonymous Coward]

When you're next door to Italy, of course you're going to be a net exporter! Who are they going to rely on to generate their power? Themselves

In European hell all the cooks are British, the cops are German, the engineers are French the lovers are Swiss and the whole thing is administrated by the Italians.

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[Tim Browse (9263)]

In European hell all the cooks are British

Sounds pukka!

Re:Electricity export from France

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

Actually the power-plants-blow-up-in-50-years feature in SimCity 2000 stems from a feasibility study into the possibility of letting Italians run their own power plants.

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[somersault (912633)]

No, Italy is Italy and France is France. This isn't some intricate mythical story created to help you better understand America. These are real places out in the real world. Really! Apologies for my crankiness but wtf dude.

Wind/Solar and "Base Load"

[mcrbids (148650)]

This concept of "Base Load" gets bantied about, in (often) confusing and erroneous ways.

An electrical energy system has two values that are critical in preserving the integrity of the system.

1) "Base load" - the minimum amount of load the system can expect at any time. In short, there's *always* going to be this much or more energy produced at any given time. If you overproduce Base load you have rising voltages in the system and potentially cause problems. Though, this is rarely a problem - if there was too much capacity at any time, they could offset the phase of a generator or two, causing one system to effectively cancel out the other, reducing system voltage.

2) "Max load" - the maximum amount of load the system could generate at any time. If your usage exceeds max load, you have rolling brownouts or even blackouts.

Usually, the "Base load" is handled by slower-moving-but cheap power plants. A coal-fired plant can take an hour or more to change its output significantly, but it can produce electricity 24x7 at the cheapest possible cost. Thus it's a good candidate for "Base Load". But whatever solution is applied to base load, it must be very, very dependable.

However, the difference between Base load and Max load can be quite variable, changing significantly in mere minutes. This "Variable load" must be met in order to prevent voltage spikes and/or brownouts, and to handle this, you need power plants that can vary their output quickly, and on demand.

Notice that neither Wind or Solar energy can actually act as either Base or Variable loads. Yes, they add energy to the sytem, but they can't be considered "Base load" since their output varies. And they can't really be considered "Variable load" because their output varies with their wind-energy input, NOT because their output varies upon demand.

Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.

YES, you can get energy from the wind, or from solar panels. But it isn't reliable, so can't be used for "Base load", but it also isn't available "on demand" so it isn't useful for "Variable load".

Which brings me to my point: what if they used the wind energy to compress air that's otherwise stored on the ocean floor? All that nice, heavy water would avoid the need for high-pressure tanks, simply pushing the water out of the way would provide significant amounts of energy. And it would be useful for either base or variable loads, since the compressed air could be used to power generators on demand. Oh, and piping compressed air is a fairly lossless ordeal.

Why not?

Why not?

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[EsbenMoseHansen (731150)]

Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.

Nobody discusses? It is discussed pretty much every time wind and solar is brought up :) Still, an excellent post, but there is a couple of factors you have overlooked:

One is weather forecasts. It is perfectly reasonable to predict the wind and solar power output for the next few hours. Thus, if you get a period where significant parts of UK enjoys no wind and fog, UK would have hours notice to start up those coal power plants, or bring on line an extra nuclear reactor or two. This is quite unlike the p

Solar CAN BE base load [wind too with help!]

[stomv (80392)]

Notice that neither Wind or Solar energy can actually act as either Base or Variable loads.

This isn't quite accurate. In many industrialized parts of the world, the annual peak load is during sunny periods. Think: Arizona. Why is the peak load during sunny periods? Air conditioning. When do solar cells produce the most electricity? During sunny periods. Correlation can be used to allow intermittent power to be considered "base". Is it possible that there'd be a peak on a cloudy day in Arizona, or at night? I guess. It's also possible that all the coal power plants will have to come down for emergency service at the same time.

Correlation can also be used to allow wind to be base load, under at least two scenarios: In the first, if you had two wind turbines spread geographically in such a way that they were highly negatively correlated -- that is, if one was spinning, the other wasn't -- then you could count one of the two as base load, since one of the two will always spin. You won't be able to get two turbines with a coefficient of -1.0, but you might be able to find a series of turbines in which they were always generating some power, and you could count that as base. The other way to count wind turbines as base is to use a second source of power [say, natural gas, wood chips, landfill gas with a storage tank, etc] and force them to have a correlation of -1.0 by varying the output of the second source of power perfectly negatively with the wind, thereby guaranteeing a minimum output between the two systems.

Are any of these methods applicable just anywhere? Nope. But, there's plenty of room for solar installations in the Southwest US to count as base [and as an added bonus they're distributed, so massive failure is far less likely], and some wind can be used as base load anywhere if there's enough negative correlation in wind or using a second type of power plant.

All of this ignores the very real opportunity to use technology to shift peak. Give people instant feedback on the supply-demand curves [ie change price] and watch as they shift their usage off peak -- thinks like running the dishwasher or clothes washer/dryer will start happening later in the evening, helping to smooth the peak thereby making intermittent power sources like wind and solar less difficult to incorporate into the supply grid.

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[saigon_from_europe (741782)]

First of all, I have 5 yrs university degree in electrical engineering. I have spent couple of years working on frequency regulation of power systems.

Your intuitive understanding is wrong.

No it's not. I don't speak about AC circuits, I speak about power/energy balance. I just want to know how you can explain energy balance if we have two power plants that produce more power than user consumes. I don't understand how phase shifting will in long run prevent frequency and voltage to increase (which will lead t

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[aaarrrgggh (9205)]

I've seen the aftermath of someone manually paralleling a generator. They waited until the sync lights were their brightest to close the breaker... which is 180 degrees out of phase (you want to do it when the lights are off-- no voltage difference). The generator pulled off its vibration isolators and flipped on its end. Stayed inside the building, but you could see the damage to the louvers.

We weren't allowed to take any pictures, and googling generally yields results on utility-grade units which are a

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[supersnail (106701)]

I think this is actually a ploy to gain support for some new nukes.
The number of turbines proposed averages out at one turbine for every two miles of coastline (according to the BBC news).

Once middle England realises thier favorate beach/bird sanctuary/sea view is going to host a dozen turbines the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome will kick in fast, then the UK government will say "Oh then we will have to build some nukes, heres a plan I made earlier".

Most UK politicians are PR persons, lawyers or phone clean

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[CmdrGravy (645153)]

Basically it's because the Labour government has been traditionally opposed to Nuclear power and whilst they do seem be coming around the realisation that it's actually the only option they also seem to be terrified of actually doing anything about it. Hence these stupid suggestions to build more windfarms.

This is a pity because most of the current nuclear power plants will be decomissioned in the next 10 years along with quite a few of the coal fired ones leaving us with a large gap between the amount of e

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[arivanov (12034)]

Close but no cigar. The goal (and it is stated in the report) is to decrease the dependency on foreign energy sources.

What is interesting here is that it is actually not Britain being afraid of the Gulf going tits up, it is afraid of Russia. Even with the new Norwegian pipeline that came online last year the net North sea gas production is forecast to continue decreasing. As a result the UK which has moved most of its electricity production to gas as has 90% of households using gas will have to start buying

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[segedunum (883035)]

Yer. Close down the coal mines and flood them so that all your natural resources are tied up (thanks Thatcher), and start burning gas at an insatiable and unsustainable rate in power stations which uses up your own supplies and makes you totally dependant on other countries! Brilliant idea.

Makes you proud to be British!

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[aproposofwhat (1019098)]

What unreasonable demands?

That British Coal stopped its plans to eviscerate the mining industry?

That people doing a difficult and dangerous job should be paid accordingly?

The miner's strike was the culmination of a planned attack by Thatcher on the British people, fed by her determination to squander the North Sea oil and gas dividend as quickly as possible in order to enrich Denis's friends in the oil industry.

Coupled with the disastrous notion of privatisation and the destruction of most of our manufactur

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[Goth Biker Babe (311502)]

You're obviously far to young to remember the time before her. Wilson and Callahan almost let the country go bankrupt. Every nationalised industry was being subsidised to great extent. The national debt was horrendous. No one worked. There was garbage on the streets, power strikes, three days weeks and rotten cars. Something had to be done. Alas Maggie got too big for her boots and went slightly nuts (just like Blair did) and I feel that all PMs should have a maximum of two terms. I'm not Tory, I'm

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[polar red (215081)]

Not to mention the latest study of the German gov. which says that Living close to a nuclear power plant gives you a much higher chance(or at least your children) of cancer. see: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2994904,00.html [dw-world.de]

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[vidarh (309115)]

Wind power, assuming you can generate enough of it, can be combined easily enough with power storage of various kinds, whether termal (heat up water), kinetic (pump water into a reservoir, or speed up a flywheel) or chemical (batteries, hydrogen fuelcells) so there doesn't need to be anything else apart from extracting energy from the storage you use. Of course wind power won't be cost effective nearly everywhere compared to other technologies, but the reliability of wind doesn't make it impossible to use i

Tidal is different from wind

[explosivejared (1186049)]

Wonder what they'll make of it in Oregon..."

The situation in Oregon called for the implementation of buoy-like devices to harness wave motion into power. Great Britain is talking about placing windmills offshore. The power generation and science in general is different. The politics of it may be the same though. I'm not qualified to speak about Brit NIMBY's (or I guess NOMSL-not on my shore line), Brit fisherman, or Brit energy lobbyists, as I am an American. I imagine there would be some resistance here, but I not familiar with the situation. On the other hand, wind is a proven tech so who knows. It really just comes down to how powerful the lobbying against this is, as it looks technically feasible and sufficiently beneficial.

They are, but perhaps they can combine

[WindBourne (631190)]

They will most likely do stationary trubines in shallow water. Why not combine the pole with a bouy around it that generates wave power as well? I would think that the cost to do it is minimal.

NIMBYs are hugely powerful in the UK

[Kupfernigk (1190345)]

One of our local farmers, a very progressive guy, tried to put up a serious wind turbine to power his farm. He was prevented by a hugely expensive public enquiry in which "experts" from nowhere local were paid to turn up by local celebrities who didn't want their views spoiled. They even wheeled on a celebrity botanist (!) named David Bellamy, who told the enquiry that over the world as a whole glaciers were increasing, not decreasing (and the other side were so startled they didn't call a real climatologist to disagree.)

The opposition in the UK will come, not from locals, but weekending Londoners and expat American actors who will object to everything that spoils their view of the rest of the UK as their weekend playground. They will oppose the substations where power comes on shore (they've already done that in the Thames estuary), and, because they are lousy sailors, they will oppose anything that they might bump into while cruising drunk.

And they will demand first access to food and power when the crunch comes. Welcome to a country of 60 million people entirely controlled by the inhabitants of one Southern city.

Kennedy Comment

[PHAEDRU5 (213667)]

Good thing for the UK Teddy Kennedy doesn't own coastal property there. They'd be screwed.

Mmm breezy

[OzRoy (602691)]

At least the windmills will keep the beaches cool in summer...

Re:Mmm breezy

[Faluzeer (583626)]

"At least the windmills will keep the beaches cool in summer..." In the UK we do not need help to keep our beaches cool in summer...

Re:Mmm breezy

[DirePickle (796986)]

Windmills do not work that way!

Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work

[AcidPenguin9873 (911493)]

(*) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests

(FWIW it is my firm belief that this phrase should become the next Slashdot meme.)

Re:Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't w

[OriginalArlen (726444)]

No, it won't. The North Sea is pretty much fished out, and a combination of "no fish" and draconian quota restrictions brought in to try to help the remainder to recover has lead to there being very few commercial fishing fleet left in the UK. The remaining couple of dozen of inshore trawlers don't exactly have the government in their back pockets.

Good news!

[ls671 (1122017)]

The only way I can view us solve the energy crisis and its effects is:

1) Phase out coal and fossil thermal plant. Fossil fuel will be reserved for things like airplanes or other moving equipment because of its high energy density (13 KWh/kg for gasoline compared to 0.14 KWh/kg for flywheels and 0.04 KWh/kg for batteries). It will slowly become obvious that it is silly to use fossil fuel for stationary equipment like power plants.
2) Use existing hydro infrastructure
3) Use wind
4) Use solar
5) Use nuclear
6) Etc..
In short, let's not put all our eggs in the same basket. This way if one way to get energy fails, we still have alternatives. Let's not pretend we are infallible and that we will get it right the first time with a single approach.

I have problems with a recent article on /. saying we should only use nuclear because other ways can't meet the "base load". Funny how scientists can sometime ignore simple principle like "do not put all your eggs in the same basket".

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[Anne Thwacks (531696)]

let's not put all our eggs in the same basket

You must be new here

Story update

[OriginalArlen (726444)]

Since I submitted the story on Sunday, they've actually made the announcement [bbc.co.uk] (on Sunday, it was just being heavily trailed in the press.)

Maintenance requirements?

[compumike (454538)]

Denmark's Horns Rev [wikipedia.org] wind farm, which I believe is the world's largest offshore wind farm, was built in 2002. They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation. That's a lot for 80 wind turbines. And that was very expensive. Hope they get this right in the UK.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

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[nogginthenog (582552)]

Well the UK already has at least 1 offshore windfarm at Kentish Flats [kentishflats.co.uk]
Granted it's only 30 turbines.

Re:Maintenance requirements?

[cozziewozzie (344246)]

They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation.

That's 150 trips per day.

For 80 turbines.

So each turbine had to be serviced twice every day for 1.5 years, and each one of these involved a helicopter trip.

Are you sure about this?

Numbers

[Propaganda13 (312548)]

UK Demand 2007 = 358 TWh
Estimated UK Demand 2020 = 381 TWh
Increase in demand = 23 TWh
Vesta V80 2MW wind turbine will make about 0.006666666 TWh in a year. V80's are used at North Hoyle Offshore Wind Farm.
3451 Vesta V80 will be required to meet the increase in demand.
This does not cover the loss of some coal-fired power stations after 2015.

Currently, there are 155 wind farm projects in the UK, with 1,900 turbines making around 6.4 TWh. The average makes around .003376295 TWh in a year, about half a V80. So increasing the efficiency of all wind turbines to average a V80 would be an accomplishment.

57151 Vesta V80 would be required to make the 381 TWh in 2020. Over 7 wind turbines each mile of coastline.

All errors above were possibly intentional.

NOT enough to generate 20% of the UK's power need

[giafly (926567)]

Ministers want 20% of Britain's energy needs to come from renewable energy sources by 2020, and see wind power as a major element of it - BBC.

That 20% figure is for all renewable sources, not just wind. For example a tidal barrage across the Severn River [wikipedia.org] might produce several percent of this.

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[JK_the_Slacker (1175625)]

The British are cigarettes? Seriously, old boy, I'm from MISSOURI [wikipedia.org] , and I know that slang means different things across the pond. If you don't catch up with the times, people are going to think you're one of those extremely unintelligent trolls. Oh, the shaminess of it all.

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[ZombieRoboNinja (905329)]

What's the difference between the wind hitting a windmill and the wind hitting a building?

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[bogjobber (880402)]

The building absorbs more energy I would think.

Re:This has to have some long term effect...

[Dirtside (91468)]

Well, as I understand it, the windmill turns the wind into bread, and the building simply sways back and forth in an impressive display of capitalism. ...but, um, that's not what you were asking, is it? Nevermind.

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[Kadin2048 (468275)]

For it to affect global weather or atmospheric patterns it wouldn't matter whether the electricty produced was a large fraction of the energy consumed by humans, what would matter is whether it's a significant amount of the total energy in the atmospheric system. That's a far larger quantity than what humans actually use. I strongly suspect that you could run our entire civilization on atmospheric energy and not even be in the same order of magnitude as the total wind energy in the atmosphere at any particu

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[polar red (215081)]

We removed enough trees to make up for our puny amount of windmills.(I would even guess that the forest-clearing done in 1 day would make up for it)

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[ZombieRoboNinja (905329)]

And those who understand Logic understand that we've been putting up really big buildings that absorb a lot more wind energy than a windmill for millenia now and we have yet to make all the Earth's atmosphere shoot out into space.

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[Markus Landgren (50350)]

You're the one who is lame, and those who understand physics are exactly those who modded the parent to your post as troll.

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[kaos07 (1113443)]

You DO realise English comes from England right?

So technically, you're the one saying it wrong.

Re:Oh great

[Malc (1751)]

English is a mongrel language. Something like 1200 of the most common words are derived from German. These tend to be the shorter, simpler words too. Presumably by the Angles and Saxons. Longer words tend to be derived from French, and less common as they were only used by the ruling classes after the Norman invasion. There are words of direct Latin origin too, etc. English has continued to absorb words from all over the world due imperialism and multiculturalism. It's a functional language. It seems to me though that all languages have roots elsewhere, but English as we know was spread around the world by the British. American English is now spreading around the world in much the same way the British did it before: trade, backed by military force.

Actually, no.

[Chas (5144)]

The whole "kills lots of birds" things came about because of some very early, very dense wind farms that weren't planned out very well and had smaller, very high-speed blade systems.

Newer wind turbine systems are larger, slower, better-designed, and more care is usually given to layout of a wind farm so that, while SOME birds are occasionally killed, the numbers are greatly reduced.

Do some Google searches for "altamont pass" and "wind turbines kill birds".

Isn't this good for bird evolution?

[MOBE2001 (263700)]

I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...

If it does

[Chuck Chunder (21021)]

then the upside is that there will be plenty of bird-slurry food to help fish populations increase.