
New island in North Sea to be hub for wind turbine power to 80M Europeans - flexie
http://www.tennet.eu/our-key-tasks/innovations/north-sea-infrastructure/
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Johnny555
I remember when the USA used to be able and willing to create interesting
cutting edge technology like this. Now we're building oil pipelines, cutting
car efficiency standards, and promoting coal. Anything that involves
alternative energy has suddenly become "too expensive", "bad for jobs", or
"liberal elitism".

Soon we'll have reverted back to the 1950's, which apparently is where "we"
want to be -- even back to the cold war era nuclear ramp-up. I suppose we'll
also be back to building back-yard bomb shelters, I guess that will help with
jobs.

~~~
sremani
Did you ever sit down and made a back of the envelope calculation to how much
"fossil" fuel needs to burn to put up Wind Turbines?

Here is a good article to read,
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind-
power...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind-power-you-
need-oil)

I wish this board was less susceptible to green-washing campaigns and look at
this problem through more thorough scientific and engineering lens.

~~~
llukas
Taken from link you posted:

"Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much
energy as it embodies in less than a year."

Sounds like good payout time - wind turbines life span is typically 10+ years.

~~~
sremani
But the bottom line is this...

For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and
photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will
remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

edit: I am not against wind or solar, but they in their current form need lot
more oil and that will continue for a long time, probably our life times.

edit2: The previous poster partially quoted a sentence, others would be well
served if they read the full sentence.

~~~
llukas
Educate yourself and stop spreading FUD. Solar panels already paid their
_cumulative_ greenhouse emission debt and if not it is likely happen very
soon.

Fossil fuels wouldn't disappear overnight but there is less and less real
dependency on them and more of a choice of using them.

There is no reason not to go wind/solar if looking just at greenhouse gases
emissions.

[http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728](http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728)

"As a result, we show a break-even between the cumulative disadvantages and
benefits of photovoltaics, for both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions,
occurs between 1997 and 2018, depending on photovoltaic performance and model
uncertainties."

~~~
sremani
Oh Please! You do not have to educate me, unlike Moral Horsemen, I already
have 10 KW SolarPV, my disagreement was not with Solar that much. We are
discussing Wind Turbines here. If a counter point article in IEEE spectrum is
FUD, good luck!

The major point you have not quoted it, Wind's intermittent generation relies
heavily on an infrastructure that is majorly oil based. Also Wind kills lots
and lots of birds.. but lets ignore that too.

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timthelion
Maybe they would actually be better off without having green areas on the
island. Tiny islands in the middle of the sea tend to be major bird magnets,
and that doesn't seem to be a good mix with wind. It looks nice on the render,
but it would be probably be better to make the island surface as inhospitable
to birds as possible to make sure they don't get in the habit of flying there
and gettign killed by the turbines.

~~~
foota
I wonder if you might be able to use a magnetic field to screw with the birds
and make them not want to go there. (since birds rely on the Earth's magnetic
field for navigation)

Alternatively, I wonder how long it would be before the birds learned not to
go there if they kept dying.

~~~
stuaxo
Are birds more likely to die from a windmill than say electricity cables, or
other structures?

~~~
Maultasche
No. I've seen the statistics for how many birds are estimated to be killed by
human-made objects.

Buildings were the biggest killer of birds by far. Many millions of birds each
year are killed by colliding with windows on buildings. They often don't
realize the window is there. I'm guessing the bird sees through the window and
doesn't realize there's a barrier or they see a reflection of the sky instead.

Automobiles were also big killers of birds.

Windmills were estimated to result in 0.1% of bird deaths by man-made objects
or something really tiny like that.

I don't understand why people freak out about birds being killed by wind
turbines when vastly larger numbers are being killed by buildings and cars.
Nobody is yelling about saving the birds by getting rid of buildings and cars.

~~~
rodgerd
> I don't understand why people freak out about birds being killed by wind
> turbines when vastly larger numbers are being killed by buildings and cars.
> Nobody is yelling about saving the birds by getting rid of buildings and
> cars.

Because they don't care about the birds. But they do hate anything that smacks
of clean energy.

~~~
edw
Invoking Mr Burns isn't necessary; the people screaming "bird murderers!" are
often members of the NIMBY set.

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Gravityloss
One problem of building so many in one area (within a couple hundred
kilometers?) is that there is less geographic averaging of wind. When the wind
dies there, likely there is very little production.

That probably limits it to some percentage. Would be interesting to see some
summary what kind of other measures are required in the grid, the bigger it
gets. Things like flexible demand, pumped storage (all the countries are flat
except Norway).

~~~
ezzaf
This is partially mitigated by double use of the island's connectors as
interconnects. If energy production on the island dropped to zero, the entire
cable capacity would be able to move power between connected nations. The
'flat' United Kingdom has 2.8GW of existing pumped storage capacity.
([http://www.british-hydro.org/hydro_in_the_uk](http://www.british-
hydro.org/hydro_in_the_uk))

If this was the only power generation in the area it would be an issue, but
even such a large power plant as what they propose would be a highly effective
addition to the grid of the north sea area.

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nraynaud
Can someone develop on the AC/DC aspect of the distribution? It makes no
intuitive sense to me. Wind turbines generally have an asynchronous generator
whose electric side is synchronized with the distribution network.

~~~
caf
Submarine power cables use HVDC rather than AC because the capacitance of the
water makes the reactive losses of AC transmission a lot higher in that
environment. This doesn't affect HVDC.

They're also talking about connecting to multiple separate national grids,
which is of course easier to do with HVDC.

~~~
nraynaud
thanks a lots. With the keyword HVDC I could find some interesting wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
voltage_direct_current](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
voltage_direct_current)

(I always sought that the entire European grid was synchronous it looks like
it's not the case.)

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mynewtb
Not "to be" but "envisioned by tennet"! Sounds great though!

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Ono-Sendai
Wouldn't there be enough turbines packed in such a small area that they would
'wind shadow' each other?

~~~
nraynaud
Separate them from 10 times their diameter. You also avoid aligning the array
in the dominant wind. Before working in the industry I had never realized it
but wind turbines mostly produce in one direction, in the other directions the
wind tend to be at the wrong speed.

