
U.K. offshore wind park may generate power cheaper than by burning coal - Anon84
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-20/plunging-offshore-wind-costs-could-soon-end-u-k-subsidies
======
Brakenshire
Offshore turbines also access more consistent winds, so not only will the
turbines be cheap, they will be reliable, which will reduce grid integration
costs.

Edit: The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity
grid, this is an extra 6GW of capacity, and goes on top of previous auctions
which are currently under development, it looks like we’re headed for 60-70%
in the mid to late 2020s.

~~~
sempron64
Silly question, but is wind at sea guaranteed? What if weather patterns
change? It's really expensive to put up these offshore turbines, but with
systemic climate change is it possible they'd be becalmed?

~~~
marcosdumay
The sea is a huge area without hills or mountains to reduce the wind speed,
and near shore there is a daily guaranteed temperature differential nearby to
generate some wind.

So, yes, it's so likely that it's practically guaranteed. Too much wind is an
orders of magnitude more likely problem.

~~~
wongarsu
>Too much wind is an orders of magnitude more likely problem.

It's worth elaborating that too much wind is as bad as too little wind. The
blades can only spin so fast before disintegrating, so wind turbines have
transmissions and choose a gear appropriate to the current wind speed. Once
wind speeds exceed what the highest gear can handle the turbine locks the
blades to prevent damage. In that state it doesn't produce any electricity.

~~~
Robotbeat
That's not the whole story and is somewhat misleading. Wind turbines feather
the blades at high velocity to keep from spinning too fast; they rarely
actually have to lock the blades and stop electricity production, and even
then that'd be a very localized drop in electricity, more than compensated by
increased production from surrounding areas with strong winds.

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Bjartr
There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now.
Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.

~~~
danw1979
yeah they're attaching Bloomberg specifically in a couple of the posts too.

I wonder if someone somewhere has a large vested interest in fossil fuels and
is annoyed about the BNEF and Bloomberg's mostly positive reporting on
renewables.

~~~
WhompingWindows
I've noticed a few very pro-fossil comments in threads. I don't know if there
are shills or if there are simply propagandist fossil fuel lovers? Is there
any way to empirically study HN commenters? Data scrape + analyze?

~~~
danw1979
I've been using "pro fossil / anti EV / global warming denial" as a pretty
useful heuristic to filter the Great Comments Section of Real Life for a while
now. Usually goes hand-in-hand with being a Leaver and general contrarian.

To your point, I've found that petrolheads are pretty common even in tech.

~~~
creaghpatr
Pretty sure digging past comments goes against the guidelines. It's also a
primitive an absolutist way of judging a comment (rather than on, say, its
substance).

~~~
WhompingWindows
What if the substance of the comment is just erroneous or poorly intention-ed?
How am I supposed to tell if it's a paid corporate shill or a genuine fossil
fuel lover?

~~~
pstch
The idea is to assume good faith. If it can't be done, I think not answering
is the best course of action.

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Reason077
Here's a list of off-shore wind projects in Crown Estate waters. Currently,
there's about 8GW of capacity in operation, and a further 19GW in various
stages of construction or planning.

(This does not include _on-shore_ wind farms, or projects in Scottish waters)

[https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindproj...](https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindprojectlisting_201908.pdf)

~~~
tpurves
The british once built an empire with large thanks to off-shore wind power.

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danmaz74
The money quote: "The price of 39.65 pounds per megawatt-hour ($49.70) was 31%
below the level in a similar auction two years ago."

~~~
Brakenshire
The graph below has £120/MWh in 2015, £57.5 in 2017, and £40 in 2019. Gas
costs about £50/MWh.

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daveoflynn
The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the
Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their
story to reflect the results.

In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to
match the updated story :)

(1)
[https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=...](https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=21)

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KirinDave
So just some basics out of the way:

1\. Yes, this is good. They should do this and 2. coal is an awful and
inefficient power source with lots of carbon emission which is bad. 3. the way
we harvest coal is deleterious to humans and bad for the environment even if
we ignore carbon. It's an ancient technology we should leave in the dustbin of
history next to lead piping.

The challenge of wind turbines is that they're actually fantastically plastic
hungry things. While inexpensive in their current state, we need to heavily
invest in more sustainable turbine blade options that don't contribute to our
other problems (carbon emission in plastics manufacturing and huge
unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades). [0]

Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making
huge strides in energy storage (with sodium ion batteries removing our
reliance on lithium[1]) and Gallium Arsenide greatly reducing the cost and
size of electrical components while increasing their heat tolerance [2]).
Essentially what's left here is tooling and contracts and for dinosaur energy
providers to be displaced by newer options.

[0]: [https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-
turbines...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-
turbines.html)

[1]: [https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-
io...](https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-ion-
battery.html)

[2]: [https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-
ap...](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-applications-
limitations-gallium-nitride/)

~~~
ourlordcaffeine
To add, I see down at the bottom people fighting over "consistency".

Wind power is almost always producing something. This production can be
statistically modeled. Thus, you can overprovision wind and say that on
average, your target of <x> MW is met or exceeded <y> percent of the time. So
wind, if planned well, doesn't really need big storage.

Baseload generation is also a fallacy. It only matters that demand is met.
Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK in that wind operators always
undercut everyone else on the market, thus displacing other generation.

Baseload demand is the point which demand never falls below. Back in the age
of coal, it made sense to meet this baseload demand with large baseload
plants, that were big and did not change output and gained economies of scale.

One challenge that I think people overlook in the shift to renewables is grid
frequency stability. Big thermal plants have heavy rotors that have a lot of
inertia, stopping the grid frequency from changing too quickly in an
imbalance. Replace these with inertia-less wind and solar, and you will need
another solution for grid stability.

~~~
telchar
Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to
imagine one of those stopping on a dime.

Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The
Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid
stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that
stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a
diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from
having too large an immediate impact on the grid.

You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that
balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big
constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them.

With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for
variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by
geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have
a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having
greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to
overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have
sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload
with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the
renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.

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tshanmu
May be stupid question: I have always wondered if we build enough windmills
will it affect the global windpatterns? What will happen to the place where
all this wind energy goes if we extract it before there? Could it affect
rainfall in directly unconnected places? The butterfly effect?

~~~
hutzlibu
Butterfly effect means, small effects CAN induce big ones. But not necessary
in a significant lasting climatechanging way.

Windmills do not change much different, than I would say, a city with
scyscrapers does. So it is changing, but to affect the global jetstreams, we
probably would have to build really big windmills, directly exploiting those
winds on a big scale ...

So sci-fiction we are talking about, not at all, what we have now...

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ncmncm
I look forward to the day when all the windmills have worn out, and the towers
are standing around unused, mined out for rare-earth elements, but too
expensive to take down. Then, we can stretch cheap mesh between them and
generate power with no moving parts, by releasing ions to be carried away by
the wind. Alvin Marks (holder of the patent on polarizing sunglasses) got a
patent for that back in the '80s.

But the most important recent development in wind power has nothing much to do
with windmills, as such. Roger Ruan at UMn, and Roger Gordon in Canada have
both invented small-scale, efficient reactors that can turn power, water, and
air into ammonia. This is important because the overwhelming majority of
places with useful wind are nowhere near an electrical grid, but many of them
have immediate uses for ammonia.

Now, you can put up a windmill anywhere, and it can produce useful liquid fuel
and fertilizer any time the wind blows, with no inconvenience to anyone when
wind doesn't blow. Farms need large amounts of both fuel and fertilizer, and
have lots of space for windmills. Any extra ammonia can be sold to neighbors,
so wouldn't need to be transported far. Ammonia is directly useful for
fertilizer--you pipe it right into the ground behind plow blades, and soil
microbes fix it instantly.

Any manufacturer of windmills should be very excited by this development,
because it stands to radically increase the market for windmills. A single
windmill is now a useful purchase, and any farm can use one. Industrial
ammonia production consumes huge quantities of natural gas, and belches 10
megatons of CO2 every year, not counting exhaust from transporting it and
processing it to solid form.

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JulianMorrison
Onshore wind would be even cheaper if the Conservatives hadn't all but banned
it to appease NIMBYs.

~~~
Brakenshire
You can build bigger, more efficient turbines offshore, and the winds are
stronger and more reliable, so offshore being inherently more expensive isn’t
actually a solid assumption. All the more so if you include the costs of
integrating the generation into the grid.

~~~
Robotbeat
It is still a pretty good assumption that on-shore is significantly cheaper,
even including grid integration costs. After all, a significant portion of
off-shore wind's cost is the expensive seaborne transmission.

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stuaxo
I read it as " U.K. offshore wind prank may generate power cheaper than by
burning coal" which is a much more fun story.

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kmjg88nvf8
"may"

wake me when it does.

Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the
power grid. A lot of nonsense is going on in that area.

~~~
Ma8ee
That sounds bad. Where can I learn more about it?

~~~
saalweachter
Skimming
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany)
it sounds like there is just a perpetual lag, where offshore wind is built and
then it takes awhile to get it hooked in. It's been going on since at least
2014, and since that time like 5GW of offshore wind looks to have been hooked
up, so I'm not sure there's a problem beyond "things take a while to build".

