New island in North Sea to be hub for wind turbine power to 80M Europeans
tennet.eu
tennet.eu
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.
I'm not really sure I'm a big fan of such massive government projects myself though. Private companies certainly managed to build a fiberopitic data network that spans every major city, and excelent wireless phone coverage, and some really fast CPUs, and a new type of smaller light commuter jet which, along with Europes airbus, revolutionised cheep intercity travel. Unlike in the 50s, none of that was done by the feds.
Here is a good article to read, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind-power...
I wish this board was less susceptible to green-washing campaigns and look at this problem through more thorough scientific and engineering lens.
"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.
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.
What? llukas quoted a full sentence.
And I don't think you understand the term ‘green-washing’. It's when a company that has a bad environmental reputation does some sort of (tokenistic) project to appear ‘green’.
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
"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."
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.
Given we're starting from nearly all fossil of course fossil fuel needs to burn to do just about anything. So long as there is a sensible pay-back period, and reasonable life beyond, what's it matter? Come replacement time hopefully the steel will be smelted with entirely renewable electricity.
If we reach that point having to keep using some coal and oil for coke and other products we cannot get elsewhere is going to be environmentally trivial comparatively.
Would you prefer to stay away from renewables and stay on fossil?
Alternatively, I wonder how long it would be before the birds learned not to go there if they kept dying.
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
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.
Because they don't care about the birds. But they do hate anything that smacks of clean energy.
Have a look at Table 1 on pg 4: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-112414-054133
It does get a bit misleading to generalize, because there may indeed be localized instances where turbines unduly affect a specific sensitive bird population.
First year breaders. These tend to be small birds who lay eggs, feed the young, teach them to fly and forget about them. First year breaders die at an enormous rate. I think that more than half don't survive the first year. But they lay a lot of eggs and if a few billion of them are eaten by cats and hit by cars it doesn't matter.
Seccond year birds. These are almost as expendable as first year breaders, however, they teach their young how to find food and some cultural things as well. Far fewer of these die, but they are smarter and they don't hit windows as much.
Large birds which bread at older ages. These birds spend even more time with their parents, and there are only one or two eggs per year! They rarely die before they reach maturity but every life counts. They basically NEVER die from running into windows, but they aren't smart enough to not get killed by wind turbines.
So the numerical statistics are meaningless. It is like saying that the death of a single human doesn't mean anything at all, because we tend to swat a lot of mosquitoes.
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).
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.
They're also talking about connecting to multiple separate national grids, which is of course easier to do with HVDC.
(I always sought that the entire European grid was synchronous it looks like it's not the case.)
Turbine spacing would in any case be no different from other offshore wind farms. There's a lot of interesting CFD modeling that goes into optimizing wind farm layout given the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Rule-of-thumb though is 7-10 rotor diameters between turbines to limit the shadow effect.