Just sharing for anyone interested - the UK National Grid has a nice (if a little antiquated looking) site which breaks down power generation by source http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
Nice! Always good news when there's more investment in renewable energy sources.
I only read the one in the guardian so it might be answered there but isn't higher transmission loss another con for offshore wind farms? How do they deal with that?
It's only a few percent. Of more concern is transmission line capacity, especially between Scotland and England. At the moment the biggest concentration of coal fired power stations is roughly central in Yorkshire (Drax, Ferrybridge etc: there is a point on the railway from which you can see five of them). If we move to more offshore wind we'll need to reroute the power lines.
We're adding more than 50GW/year now, which should easily put us over the amount of nameplate capacity nuclear installed worldwide. Within the next decade, wind will surpass Nuclear in actual twh of generation as well.
If you assume nuclear is about 400GW installed worldwide and a 90% capacity factor, then wind would only need 900GW installed to match output at a 40% capacity factor. NREL just realeased data that shows potential capacity factors of 60% on over 2 million acres in the US:
Comparing wind and nuclear is not an apples-to-apples comparison. To make a valid comparison, you would need to compare wind + some kind of back up such as natural gas (or possibly some nuclear).
There is a premium for reliable sources of electricity generation since you have to have reliable generation to avoid blackouts.
Wind and solar can capture more $fiat per MWh if they purchase Tesla stationary storage and can deliver firm dispatchability (that premium for reliable generation you mention).
Natural gas will make a fine stopgap until we have enough battery storage.
I am not aware of any market where generators are getting a premium for being dispatchable. I would be very interested in knowing what the value is.
Certainly some markets have prices that vary through the day to give generators the incentive to generate when power is needed most if they have that flexibility.
The UK has (8,516 + 5,098) ~= 13.6GW of wind capacity[1].
They seem to have reported the UK offshore amount ("8,179MW") as the global capacity:
The global offshore wind market experienced a record year by installed capacity in 2015. Consultancy FTI Intelligence has projected installed generation capacity to nearly quadruple to 31,200 megawatts in 2019 from 8,179 megawatts in 2014.
The title of the WSJ article is misleading. An offshore wind farm does not power more than 1 million homes, unless you only want electricity when the wind is blowing.
Offshore wind is one of the most expensive sources of electricity generation--more expensive than every except solar thermal. https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm Offshore wind is more than twice as expensive as onshore wind.
The fact that the U.K. is pushing offshore wind is one reason why the U.K's electricity rates are much higher than in the U.S. The U.K.'s electricity rates about about $0.22 per kwh [1] compared to an average of $0.13 in the U.S. [2]
The numbers you cite for Offshore wind are US numbers and completely useless as there are no permanent offshore wind farms in the US and only two under construction/planning. The picture for UK/NL/GE/BL etc is very different. The estimated LCOE for recent DK tenders (eg Horns Rev 3) are estimated at 80-90 USD/mwh.
Actually, it does, if you're using a chunk of your wind time power to pump water up a mountain for hydro storage generators, as happens here. it's almost always windy off the UK coast - most wind power is concentrated off north Wales, which is no coincidence, as snowdonia has several large capacity pumped storage systems.
The reason that the US has cheap electricity is that our natural gas is incredibly inexpensive. That being said, yeah offshore wind power is very expensive, and probably not the best choice.
Offshore wind power is also cheaper than tidal generators. Neither of your sources show that the reason our electricity rates are higher than the US rates, is due to offshore wind.
In the uk politicians are paid peanuts, hence we have monkeys who make stupid descions like this - guaranteeing 3 times market price for such electricity - it's a complete scam confiscating our hard earned cash, then paying most of it too foreign companies somwe don't even benefit from tech advances in this field.
All in the name of the modern religion - nonsense computer modelled weather forecasts.
Most weather cycles - particularly solar cycles related to Gas giant orbits and and our position in the milky way point towards cooling.
Currently we are in a weak solar maximum, when this goes minimum in 5 years after El Ninio swings to La Ninia next year - it will be very obvious how silly most people are.
Co2 is good, life is carbon based, the world becomes much more fertile at higher levels, in anycase warm is better than cold, most prefer Florida to Canada a much greater temp diff than any concievable warming.
> In the uk politicians are paid peanuts, hence we have monkeys who make stupid descions like this
Indeed. If only we paid MPs like they do in Nigeria it would all be much better.
Furthermore, to call computer modelling, i.e. recording all the data we can find and then trying to make sense of it via predictive [though inevitably flawed] analysis a religion is one thing; but if your only counterpoint is some waffle about gas giants and the observation that the weather is nicer in Florida than Canada I find your argument unconvincing. We make predictions as best we can with the data, and maths available to us. ANYTHING else is religion because it isn't subject to counter arguments.
Finally, this obsession with politicians "confiscating our hard earned cash" is pernicious nonsense. We pay tax. The government uses it to build stuff. Most (not all - governments are largely made up of people no smarter than you or me) of it is useful. There are places on the planet where taxes aren't collected in the same way. You're welcome to go there and live with warlords, barrel-bombs, water born diseases that wreck eyesight, drug cartels and all the other fun stuff that goes with any system other than the (rotten, annoying, frustrating, inefficient) thing we already have here in the UK.
I'm not from the UK but I consider myself lucky to have spent time living and working here. I build useful things, get well paid, and willingly pay taxes in exchange for roads, hospitals [modulo PPI], schools, sanitation, rule-of-law and so on.
_YB15.png){kind=link}