Belgium Plans Artificial Island To Store Wind Power 242
bmcage writes "Belgium wants to build an artificial energy storage island within 5 years. The island will store excess energy produced at night from the offshore wind farms already present in the North-Sea. From the article: 'Belgium is planning to build a doughnut-shaped island in the North Sea that will store wind energy by pumping water out of a hollow in the middle, as it looks for ways to lessen its reliance on nuclear power.
One of the biggest problems with electricity is that it is difficult to store and the issue is exaggerated in the case of renewable energy from wind or sun because it is intermittent depending on the weather.
"We have a lot of energy from the wind mills and sometimes it just gets lost because there isn't enough demand for the electricity," said a spokeswoman for Belgium's North Sea minister Johan Vande Lanotte.'"
MMMM, Doughnut (Score:2)
It’s a good idea. I do wonder how the harsh north sea tides will affect it though. And as power storage goes, it's the safest way to store it... also the most tasty.
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Can't it be both?
Borrowing limit? (Score:2)
Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Informative)
First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.
But why make an island first? One could also transport the energy on shore and do the same trick with an old abandoned mining network for instance. Sounds like the upfront costs are going to be huge.
Also, the North Sea is the most busy shipping route on the planet. Do we really need an extra island in it?
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Interesting)
While your questions have some merit, I find it strange that with announcements like this, people always seem to assume that no thought or planning has gone into it whatsoever. Without any specific knowledge on the subject, I find it pretty likely that the answers to your questions are
a) No suitable onshore site exists. Abandoned mines have a risk of contamination if there is a leak, and would be too expensive to make safe.
b) Cost-benefit analysis has been done and favoured the island over other options. Storing large amounts of electricity is a very expensive business.
c) Island to be built in coastal waters outside any shipping lanes.
Of course, I could be wrong...
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As a US DoD acquisitions type ... we do "cost analysis" ... The problem is that we're using cost estimates made by analogy, handcuffed by regulations and instructions that add an order of magnitude to cost and complexity of all projects, working with contractors who are so bad at business that they can only get government contracts.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Funny)
As a US DoD acquisitions type ... we do "cost analysis" ... The problem is that we're using cost estimates made by analogy, handcuffed by regulations and instructions that add an order of magnitude to cost and complexity of all projects, working with contractors who are so bad at business that they can only get government contracts.
Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
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Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
Amen brother! They've been doing an environmental impact study for years to consider deepening the Charleston SC harbor channel by something like 2 meters. They've spent MILLIONS on the study and more time than it would have taken to have simply deepened the channel.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Insightful)
An environmental impact study isn't a cost analysis so that's irrelevant. They aren't trying to determine the most cost effective method of doing something (in which case spending more on the determining that then a particular method would cost is really stupid), they are trying to determine if they'll screw anything up by doing the work.
You can think it's a silly to do and that there's no need to care what the environmental impact is, or that any impact will worth the benefits, or whatever. But the time and cost compared to the time and cost to do the work isn't an argument for that.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
This is modded funny but we, in the US, should really be asking this question. Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is so unwieldy and requires so much man power and bureaucracy that I would not be at all surprised to find that it sometimes doubles the cost of things the US government buys.
So cool to trash the government (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Interesting)
d) The guy who owns the company that would be contracted to do it is the golf-buddy of the guy who makes the decision.
Unfortunately, that particular link I have witnessed on scales from the education secretary down to local headteachers in everything from primary schools to academies (privatised schools that break the rules that state schools aren't allowed to break, and get private "sponsorship" which allows them to sign exclusive, long-term contracts with manufacturers owned by the guy from the same army regiment as the "superhead" appointed by a parliamentary Lord to run the academy).
The councillor in charge of waste management in my local London borough "just happens" to own the independent waste management company that they contract out all their services to. It's declared on something called the "Register of Interests" but I can't help feeling that that's a conflict of interest whether you state it or not.
It's really that common in politics and the only question is whether you can prove it or not. I've worked in places where it was literally so bad, we used to Google the directors of the company of any van that pulled into the car park. Glaziers, carpet-fitters, electricians, IT cabling guys, you name it, we managed to find direct links back to those people authorised the contracts (and, in some cases, they directly profited from the companies that were employed to do those contracts - but it was all "okay" because they declared their interests in some obscure paperwork that was almost impossible to find).
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Over the years I've assured people who complain about "Big Oil" that even in a fully renewable powered world we'd still complain about "Big Wind" etc; nice to have this rather obvious point confirmed again, eg Solyndra.
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Big Wind
I am getting my (100% renewable) electricty from a co-op. You needn't complain about it: you can escape it.
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Then don't vote.
Most sensible countries have specific laws about what happens when not enough people vote - i.e. the vote is invalid and special action have to be taken.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for a known evil.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Informative)
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While your questions have some merit, I find it strange that with announcements like this, people always seem to assume that no thought or planning has gone into it whatsoever. Without any specific knowledge on the subject...
Allow me to stop you there and say, you must be new here. It's a proven fact that /. is populated by the best of the best. Everyone who's anyone here are combination lawyers, sociologists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, nuclear scientists, astronauts, psychologists, secret agents, trashmen, and consultants.
Oh, and some of us even have girlfriends.
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Oh, and some of us even have girlfriends.
You had me right until the end. Well played!
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secret agents, trashmen
Yup, that's me. Secret trash agent. Three times winner of the mister dumpster competition.
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so while i don't have experiences in storing wind energy at sea or building islands. something that stands out to me as the same solution but i would think would be much cheaper and quicker. Do it the same way the oil platforms do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_(platform) [wikipedia.org]
the nice large vertical cylinder is used to store the oil until a tanker comes and then it pumps into the tanker, then it moves to a new well and refills the tank.
Using the same basic design, you would not need nearly the same buil
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A structure large enough to store a sufficient amount of water is very expensive.
Dinorwig in the UK uses 60 m^3 of water per second dropping from 500 m altitude to produce 1800 MW. This would empty an oil platform tank in an hour. Less in the North Sea, because it's only 50 m deep on average so you don't get as much potential energy stored in the water.
Dinorwig's reservoir is 6.7 million m^3.
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for shallow waters the oil companies use the same design but rather build a concrete cylinder that is connected to bedrock, (...)this seems a simpler solution then trying to build a sand island.
There is a small flaw in your plan, as far as it applies to that part of the world. The bedrock is hundreds of meters down below the sediment. Building a sand island just means using the materials at hand, rather than having to ship them in from scandinavia. Dredging sand is a relatively easy and cheap method for building structures off the coast, and there is ample experience with this.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Informative)
On land it already been done in Belgium, can't find the link right now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_Power_Station [wikipedia.org]
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for room on the North Sea, there are already plans for wind farms to be built there. Since ships have to steer well clear of these, you could build this reservoir in the middle of it.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Plan Lievense was to convert part of the IJsselmeer (a large lake) to a reservoir, so not on land.
A later version of the plan mitigated the flood risk by keeping the reservoir at a lower water level instead of a higher level than the surroundings, which meant using the IJsselmeer wasn't feasible as it was too shallow. So they looked at putting it in the North Sea instead. The Belgian plan is exactly this.
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Actually Plan Lievense was to convert part of the IJsselmeer (a large lake) to a reservoir, so not on land.
Lakes are on land. HTH, HAND.
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If you check the map, you'll see that the IJsselmeer is actually a sea bay that's been closed of with a dam (the Afsluitdijk). It used to be called the Zuiderzee (South Sea).
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To me, the OP's use of "on land" seemed to imply that Plan Lievense was to involve digging a lake out of dry land. To which I provided a rebuttal. Quibbling over the definition of "lake" is entertaining, but tangential.
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But my guess is that there isn't enough of an elevation change for traditional hydroelectric power generation. Still, that's a lot of potential energy that you'd be capturing, so maybe there are ways to harness it.
Nope. (Score:2)
It's turtles, all the way down.
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there are already plans for wind farms to be built there
plans ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belwind [wikipedia.org]
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sorry, wrong park
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorntonbank_Wind_Farm [wikipedia.org]
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Interesting)
The economics of this are quite complex. So long as the stored energy is insignificant relative to the market, it's quite attractive. Buying energy when there's an excess also means buying when it's cheap. Selling in a shortage means selling when the price is high. In other words, a classic market arbitrage situation.
But as storage becomes larger, of course it starts to feed back into market prices and smooths out the highs and lows of the market. Eventually it should settle to a point where the cost of storage equates to the average difference between buy and sell price, but what that cost might be I don't think anyone knows yet.
Energy demand is variable (Score:5, Insightful)
The scheme is not as much about price arbitrage as about smoothing demand.
There's more demand for energy during the evenings than during the mornings, and price differences will never be able to eliminate that. No one will turn off their lights in the evening to turn them on during the morning, no matter what the prices are.
The effect of energy storage are to allow a steady supply, like wind, to be used when it's most needed. Storage would be even more important if solar energy is used, for obvious reasons.
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The idea isn't new: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Lievense [wikipedia.org] (Dutch only, I'm afraid)
The Belges lack the geology to implement this without an artificial island.
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Funny)
First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.
But why make an island first?
Or they could used the Netherlands, as far as I remember most of it is below sea-level anyway :)
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1. there are no mines near the coast. Who would mine sand since that's all there is?
2. transportation from the sea to the coast would be incredibly expensive because you need to build pipelines, several pumps (as compared to only a few to pump it from the sea into the doughnut). We have (this will sound chauvinistic but I'm allowing my self to do so in this case) the best dredging companies in the world (Jan de Nul and Deme).
3. It's 3km off the coast... that's nothing. The shipping lanes are way out into th
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Lots of peope would mine sand - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mining [wikipedia.org]
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But why make an island first? One could also transport the energy on shor.
space. There is no room on the shore (or anywhere else in belgium).
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Interesting)
"We" made a similar island for storing contaminated sludge in a part of the IJsselmeer. This reservoir island is 1km across (so slightly smaller but same order of magnitude) and 45m deep.
Some links: google maps [goo.gl], Dutch wiki [wikipedia.org], google translated Dutch wiki [google.nl].
According to this page [waddenzee.nl], this island cost around 250 million to build. At 1 km across and 45m deep, it can hold around 35E6 sq meters of water=3.5E10 kgs of water. No idea whether it works that way, but the potential energy might be m*g*h=3.5E10 * 9.81 * 22 (avg.) ~ 7E12 joules, or the output of a 3500MW power plant for 7E12/3.5E9 2000 seconds or about half an hour, assuming 100% efficiency and no fuckups in my orders of magnitude.
I'm assuming it is easier to build this in the ocean than to dig it in a shallow lake (the lake around the reservoir is about 2.5m deep), because otherwise why not just dig it in the shallow lake? Since the north sea is about 50m deep [uni-kassel.de] offshore from the low countries, a reservoir of 3km accross wil hold 9 times as much energy, or around 5 hours of output from one plant. Whether that is enough or not I have no idea. I would suppose that the cost could be around 9*250 million = 2.5 billion euro, which is cheaper than building a new plant but nothing to sneeze at.
Local jobs - good publicity (Score:3, Informative)
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TFA article mentions that you are aiming for 2.3GW from wind, compared to the 3GW you get from nuclear. Seems like it would make a pretty big dent. Those nuclear plants will need replacing eventually anyway.
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First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.
This is a misunderstanding. The Dutch may like to joke about Belgians, but don't really mean it. Belgians are deadly serious when they call the Dutch nasty, greedy, unreliable, uncultured, rude and stupid. There is no joking involved.
Mechanical pumps more Energy Efficient? (Score:2)
I saw something like this 3 years ago. The idea was to pump air into a large cave for storage. The air pressure would power the electric turbines on demand. They figured it was overall more efficient for the wind turbines to run mechanical pumps rather than generate electricity to run the air pumps.
Not sure how closely this applies
Re:Belgians drilling a hole in the ocean?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget as well the costs to build this are basically pi*d + turbines, and the storage capacity would be pi*r^2; so economies of scale rapidly kick in - it makes great financial sense to build this HUGE!
And taking a large amount of farmland or living space out of commission when there is all that unused ocean there just seems plain daft in comparison. What "job" the ocean does it still can do with this, not the same as if you tried to build something analogous on land.
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Why not pump the water out of the mines with the excess electricity, and use the water flowing back in to run the turbines?
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You would also still need a reservior of water nearby to to drain into the mine, it's basically the same problem of all hydro-storage setups, whether you store the water up high and let it drain out in mountainous areas or store the water at ground and let it drain into a mine. You need to find the right geology to
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This comment should not have been modded-down to zero. It isn't like it was wildly off-topic or trolling or anything like that. I thought it was a little bit funny.
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It has recently come to my attention that they are called walloons not whales. (not that it sounds any better lol)
Yeah, indeed. They are called walloons, and this rhimes with balloons, which is just another way to store wind power...
Sounds like a good plan (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't have wind power on any serious scale without storage. Storage built off-shore - near the wind-farm - also lessens the load on the link to the mainland.
Only question is: Will the polulation accept the high price, or will they prefer to import cheaper nuclear energy from France?
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"Only question is: Will the polulation accept the high price, or will they prefer to import cheaper nuclear energy from France?"
Cheaper? They give away this power for free if there's a surplus as Germany did during the holidays. It even paid some companies to take the energy. Because of how the subventions work, the power company has to pay the turbine owners for the power and are forced to accept and pay for it.
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The price will be lower. Up front cost of wind compares reasonably with nuclear, not sure about this storage system because it is so new. The on-going costs are tiny though, and the lifetime of the wind farm is essentially unlimited as it can be maintained indefinitely. Once you take account of subsidies and lifetime cost wind is already comparable or cheaper than nuclear in most places.
conceptual drawing and local print (Score:4, Informative)
Translated short article [google.be] with conceptual drawing
Insensitive Clods (Score:4, Funny)
Weather and sunlight are not, and cannot be, intermittent. They can be variable and cyclical, but not intermittent. There is always weather, and the sun does not shut down at sunset.
The engineer in me wonders what happens when an extended period of calm, cloudy weather fails to yield enough surplus energy to pump up their doughnut.
Perhaps they should consult the experts at Krispy Kreme.
Or redesign it as a Belgian waffle?
Now I'm sorry I missed breakfast.
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There is always weather
You're right. There was some weather today, not much yesterday, and I think not much tomorrow, but i've never seen a weather forecast of "none". There are times when there is very little weather though, and times when there is a lot.
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The sunlight reaching the solar panels is intermittent based on the types of weather. The TYPES of weather we receive are intermittent, also.
Cost? Price? (Score:2)
Once again we have a green/renewable energy plan that comes without a price tag. This stuff isn't free -- in fact it's pretty expensive. If people knew how expensive they'd, be more cautious about building.
Re:Cost? Price? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fossil fuel infrastructure costs just as much to build as does nuclear. This will just take longer to return the investment in terms of power that is paid for. Without value applied to pollution, cost of waste products, etc we can't measure the savings from using a non-polluting system (exclusive of the pollution costs to build it). If we did the return on investment could be seen as much higher than investment in other energy generation systems.
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Clean political story but ? (Score:2, Interesting)
After being named "the emperor of Ostend" Vande Lanotte needs to clean up his public image.
Accusations of various conflicts of interest exist on the guy.
A broader approval of this project is needed.
He better makes sure this is a viable project and not a "prestige project" like some of the Dubai venture of the same companies proposing this.
A similar approached is used with fresh water in Germany, unfortunately salt water is a lot more aggressive.
Furtunately Belpex gives some verifyable data:
http://belpex.be/
Picture, some more info (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an article in Dutch [deredactie.be] which includes a rendering of the island.
The capacity would be 300 MW, equivalent to a standard gas power station. It could provide electricity for 3 hours a day. This would be sufficient to intercept peak usage during morning and evening hours (1.5 hours each).
One of the contractors would be the Belgian dredging company which also worked on the Palm Islands [wikipedia.org] in the United Arab Emirates. Building of the island would take around 2 years. Price: around 800 million euros.
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Re:Picture, some more info (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite a few energy-hungry industries already use cheap night-time baseload electricity -- iron and steel foundries for example often do melts during the night and pour and cast during the day.
As for the projected cost of 800 million Eu, that's about the regular price for pumped storage. Dinorwig and Cruachan in the UK cost about the same, roughly $200 million per GWhr of storage in today's money. Storage generally is expensive; pumped storage is cheap compared to batteries (about $1.5 billion per GWhr), capacitor banks, flywheels etc. It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station (500,000 GWhr of generation @1.5GW over a 60-year lifespan for about $20 billion construction and lifetime operating costs) but that's not too likely due to nuclear being scary.
Re:Picture, some more info (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm 800M euro and a working system in 2 years with no failure mode vs some 10's of Billions and a 5+ year wait with a disaster level failure mode. Both will last at least 25 years. One has very low maintenance costs while the other has extremely regulated, hence expensive maintenance costs.
Let me tally up a few figures on a napkin back here... Okay, you're right Nuclear, wait miscarried the 1. Nope, gravity wins!!!! Yes gravity is the more efficient force to harness in this scenario.
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Amount of electricity created from fuel/wind/wave/solar/hamsters by proposed Belgian pumped storage system, zero. Amount of electricity wasted in operational losses by Belgian pumped storage system, 30%. Cost (estimated), 800 million Eu (about $1 billion US).
Nuclear generation costs about $30,000 per GWhr for fuel, waste disposal, operation, staffing etc. A modern 1.5GW reactor will cost about $5-10 billion for construction (the Chinese EPRs at Taishan are coming in at less than $5 billion, the Finnish an
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That 30% loss you refer could rather be viewed as a 70% gain. We're talking about storing energy that would otherwise be lost completely (thrown away due to lack of storage).
The numbers presented can be taken as incremental energy newly available. Net gain.
Run your figures again.
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It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station
Nuclear simply isn't an option in Belgium at the moment. After Fukushima the usual scaremongering got far far worse, which isn't to say that some of the criticisms are valid, but the scaremongering extends into the realm of the unscientific at times. Of course the nuclear industry has been running save-face ad campaigns, but the power company exploiting the nuclear power plants has come under fire by the press for making record profits while refusing to pay the rather new nuclear tax. To add to that, after
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1 GW extra wind power capacity will only work when the wind blows. When you are in the middle of a low pressure, you don't have any wind, but you just had a lot of it, and you are going to get a lot of it in a few hours. That's why you need storage with wind power. Just adding extra wind power will not solve the problem.
When it's windy in countries with a lot of wind power, the price of power will go below 0. This happened several times in Denmark last year. (Check http://nordpoolspot.com/ [nordpoolspot.com] for real tim
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As someone else have pointed out, this already happens where feasible. But what happens if you have a factory which operates 24/7 with almost everyone being shift workers?
If it was to operate 8 hours per day only, it would need three times the production capacity in order to complete in 8 hours what it normally does in 24. This would mean a massive, costly and inefficient expansion in terms of area and equipment. Equipment which would just sit idle for 16 hours a day.
Also, your shift workers who now may do
Tidal (Score:4, Interesting)
If they're going to this much effort to store/release coastal water, wouldn't it be easier to just rely on the daily tides instead? No wind turbines required.
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The point of this scheme is not the generation of electricity, but to enable better matching between demand and supply (peak shaving). A pumped storage station can store excess generated power and then supply a variable amount of power on short notice, something that's difficult to do with other power generation options.
AKA pumped storage (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a very old idea, although most countries don't need to build artificial islands to do it. For example, the Ben Cruachan [wikipedia.org] pumped storage plant in Scotland uses two lochs at different levels. Energy is stored by pumping water from the low one to the high one.
Pumped storage power stations are typically used for short-term handling of power spikes; if you get sudden load on the electricity network, you can spin up a pumped storage plant in minutes --- sometimes seconds if you know that a spike is due and can prepare --- while traditional oil, coal and nuclear can take hours. So the pumped storage plant handles the load while the big power stations rev up.
Drawbacks involve not being very efficient ---Wikipedia says 70-80% [wikipedia.org] --- and they don't store that much energy. Ben Cruachan, for example, can only generate 440MW for 22 hours before running dry. They're also environmentally rather poor (although not nearly as bad as the alternatives, which are usually fast-start gas turbines, of course).
Using an artificial island is an interesting idea. If you're using off-shore wind farms then the power generation is local and you save on infrastructure and transmission costs; you avoid destroying valuable mountainside (although at the expense of destroying valuable sea bottom); it's close to the coastal cities which would be using the power... does anyone have a link to more technical information? Like how big it is? The linked article is almost entirely content-free.
Re:AKA pumped storage (Score:4, Informative)
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Using an artificial island is an interesting idea. If you're using off-shore wind farms then the power generation is local and you save on infrastructure and transmission costs; you avoid destroying valuable mountainside (although at the expense of destroying valuable sea bottom).
Nothing to destroy there, the North Sea is pretty much an industrial wasteland. Fish populations were decimated long ago, all that's left is oil drilling rigs, shipping lanes, pipelines and wind farms. So an artificial island more or less is not going to be a problem in that respect, and the Low Countries don't have a lot of mountainside, valuable or not. Actually, it's not inconceivable that birds might breed on the island, away from most human influence. The wind turbines may be a problem for them though,
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80% is pretty good! And doing it all offshore could cut down on the environmental impact, provided they've got enough openings for the water such that they're not sucking in the sea life.
Have they considered rain ? (Score:2)
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If you have the storage lake at a higher level than the surrounding sea, you have to build a dike to that higher level. When the storage lake sits at a lower level, you only have to account for sea level + wave height.
Also, precipitation only accounts for a few cm per day.
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While they are busy pumping water out at night, North Sea rains could pour water in their waterhole 24 hours a day. It would be wiser to pump water up into the artificial lake, so that rain will just add energy to the system. But for sure this has been designed by a belgian engineer...
You do realise, do you, that since the rest of the surrounding North Sea isn't roofed over, rainfall will raise the water level both inside and outside by the same amount, so the difference in levels will stay exactly the same?
Having a "hole in the sea" has the added benefit that the melting polar caps (global warming) will raise the sea level, increasing the difference in levels, thus actually adding energy to the system.
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Belgium Donuts (Score:2)
replacing nuclear with wind (Score:2)
if you switch from nuclear to wind you give no benefit to the environment. while there is still fossil fuel power on the grid its irresponsible to reduce nuclear capacity.
Dont forget that electricity currently accounts for only about 20-30% of energy use. to go carbon neutral we need to electrify home heating/cooking and transport. even if we make everything more efficient as we do this, we still need to double electricity generating capacity.
Pumped Hydro Storage Well Proven (Score:5, Insightful)
Pumped storage hydro is a superb way to store and retrieve electric energy. Indeed it is the only proven way to do it on a massive scale.
Power engineers love pumped storage facilities because of a long list of desirable properties they have. From the power grid point of view, they blend well with everything ever done in the past or contemplated in the future.
USA slashdotters may be interested to hear that the Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility has been aiding the reliability and affordability of electric power in New York State and New York City for decades.
The innovation in the Belgian case is to do it using a hole in the water instead of a lake on a mountain top. I'm sure that it will present it's own engineering challenges, but nothing insurmountable comes to mind. We should all wish them good luck.
Compressed air (Score:2)
no shit, sherlock.
Perhaps you shouldn't concentrate so much on electricity directly.
Rebuild your wind farm to produce compressed air instead of electricity.
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Compressed air is much less efficient to store than electricity, mainly due to thermal losses.
Reminds ne of a SciFi story involving teleportatio (Score:2)
where they used these floating islands to dissipate the residual energy of moving someone from point A to point B. The idea being that the moving the person without doing so would be fatal to them.
Why don't they... (Score:2)
Hole in the water (Score:2)
Re:Has anyone done an assessment... (Score:5, Informative)
Not a lot. Certainly no more than building cities and skyscrapers over hundreds of years.
The energy in the wind is ENORMOUS. Stupendous. On a scale we can't even begin to imagine. Huge masses of air going higher than mountains and pushing things over at huge velocities without even trying.
But our harnessing of it is pathetic. It's like putting a child's windmill into a wind test tunnel, but actually much, much worse. Sure, we get useful energy "for free" but we don't take 1% of 1% of 1% out of the power of the wind (if you want to see why, just work out how much volume a wind turbine takes up out of, say, the entire atmosphere above your country. It's literally lost in the measurement error. Multiply by even a million and it's still nothing, and beaten by the change in wind pattern generated by, say, a small avalanche on a high mountain).
The biggest problem is: what sort of impact does having to add all that infrastructure have on the "greenness" of the project? What energy are you using to produce it, and cope with its losses, and what water will you use and how will you filter it (if at all) to get efficient transfer and how will you maintain it (if it's offshore - that's yet-another thing that has to be maintained at great expense and someone has to use a diesel-powered boat to get to it and check on it every so often, etc.). It's all small stuff but it all eats away at the efficiency of the system and we're already at the point where the efficiency of the system has now been admitted to be INADEQUATE after decades of investment and now needs this new "energy store" to make it more efficient.
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While that may be true about the amount of energy in the wind, our earth sciences aren't advanced enough to go further with it anyway. If we take 10% of the energy out of the wind over a large area not knowing how it effects global weather patterns, we're playing russian roulette.
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I've been told that the power required to make enough aluminium for a windmill exceeds what that windmill can generate in its service life..
Does that make even a little bit of sense from an economic point of view? If the power is X kWh to create the windmill, then the cost of creating the windmill would be X kWh * Y $/kWh (plus lots of other costs for transportation, installation, maintenance). What you are saying is that the most money that the windmill could ever produce would be some number less than that cost (since it would produce Z kWh * Y $/kWh, where Z X). Even with a large subsidy to offset the non-creation costs, it would be a
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Not saying that I agree with your parent poster (actually, I'd guess the assertion to be utter BS), but your reasoning does consider all of the necessary factors to determine that windmills could not make money under those conditions (producing less energy than required to construct).
Cost of energy changes radically based on market environment--a large scale Hydro facility can generate electricity for 10% of the cost of a smaller diesel-fueled power plant. Even in the same physical location, if the cheap c
Re:Has anyone done an assessment... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been told that the power required to make enough aluminium for a windmill exceeds what that windmill can generate in its service life.
Windmills are, and have been for quite a while, profitable over their lifetime, even if you discount any subsidies.
Since the energy cost of all the materials in a windmill are built into the overall cost of a windmill, it becomes obvious you've been misinformed.
Also, the meme that windmills kill wildlife is just hype. You've been misinformed there, too.
It sounds to me like you need to listen to more reputable sources. Yours are misleading you, or just plain lying to you, for whatever reason.
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Yes. Slashdot wrote about it i december: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/30/1155243/new-study-suggests-wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change [slashdot.org]
Re:Has anyone done an assessment... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full [pnas.org]
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