Is wind power’s future in deep water? | Hacker News Reader

Is wind power’s future in deep water?

bbc.com

92 pointspseudolus151 comments

There's huge energy potential for tethered floating wind turbines off the California coast.

The costs seem to plummet far faster than even the rosiest expectations, too. A more recent auction than the Hywind project discussed by the BBC here, at Dogger Bank, has anchored turbines but is super cheap, about $50/MWh, which for the UK means cheaper than natural gas:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/23/uk-offshore-wind-prices...

They recently ordered 13 MW turbines, which are absolutely massive compared to the tethered 5 MW turbines at Hywind.

Europe has been very quick at changing their offshore oil expertise into renewable energy know-how. The US is far behind, and though there are a few plans on the US Atlantic coast, it seems that our energy giants are determined to go down in the flames of fossil fuels rather than transition to the future of cheaper, cleaner energy that everybody else is building. They deserve their low market caps these days.

We also have a fractured policy landscape in the US. We have weakened federal regulations due to the denier in chief and his former-coal-lobbyist EPA director. We also have a lot of states with great renewable potential, either solar or wind, that because of their fossil industry and corruption in politics, leads to denialism and slowing of renewable progress.

Contrast that to the EU, where most member states are energy importers and don't have their own fossil fuels to use. If they do, then like Germany or Poland, they still use a LOT of coal. It's easier for UK to be done with coal: they mined up all of theirs and used it already. Add these factors onto a much more literate and well-educated populace who reads about and cares about climate, and we have an EU that is leading but still not perfect.

So, in general, the US has great potential, but there is definitely the most progress happening in Europe.

> fractured policy landscape in the US

are you saying that the EU is more uniform politically than the US?

When it comes to realizing an offshore wind farm, Europe doesn’t have the Byzantine multilevel and multiagency permitting process that the US does. Permitting delays and complexity are largely what’s holding back offshore wind in the US.

IMHO, US politics are extremely polarized. Politics elsewhere tend to be a much more nuanced spectrum, with large moderate bases.

There's a lot of money to be had by making sure Americans are divided and not united against corporate interests. In addition to limiting corporate lobbying (including fixing the lobbyist/regulator revolving door), campaign donations, etc, I would really like to see more research into how media and social media influence polarization, and perhaps some regulation around social media curation.

It's less about the polarization and more about the dominance of the hydrocarbon lobby. In Europe it just isn't as powerful.

It's the same story with a few lobbies - especially gun manufacturing and HMO.

The most successful lobbies may favor one side but they are pretty bipartisan.

I think perhaps this holds for specifically climate science and the politics around it.

Even the Conservatives in the UK are backing wind, with a goal of 40 GW recently announced.

Meanwhile in the US, even though conservative voters show majority support for clean energy in polls, conservative politicians sabotage clean energy policy, and work to convince voters against their clean energy views, because their campaign funds come from fossil fuel interests.

This leads to much less certainty for investors that policy will stay consistent long enough for projects to come to fruition. When a bought and paid for election destroys policy, like was recently exposed in Ohio, it keeps investors' money away.

https://www.energyandpolicy.org/utility-corruption/

The US has the more well-educated populace. A larger percentage of Americans have college degrees than in every EU country except Luxembourg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

Completion of tertiary education =/= "well educated" necessarily. Consider the math and reading scores of our children, which lag behind many other countries. Consider the poor state of public schooling in urban and rural areas. There's also a cultural difference, many European areas may have a more pro-knowledge or pro-truth mindset, whereas "American values" are often incongruous with the actual facts established by science.

There's still coal in the UK and it is high quality compared to say Germany - but it was initially a political decision by Thatchers government to switch to Gas, to hobble the NUM.

You right that the federal nature of the USA is holding it back - might have been ok for 18th century rich farmers a twenty-first century supper power not so much.

> denier in chief

First time I'm hearing this reference. It's cute.

> [EU/UK has] a much more literate and well-educated populace

I'd like to agree that it's all well and good on this front in the EU, but recent developments like Brexit and the rise of identity politics stand as strong counter-arguments.

Isn't hackernews meant to be politics free? Would be great if there was at least one place we didn't need to read these tiresome comments from people who can't comprehend that others have different value systems.

If HN were politics free, we couldn't discuss our differences or maybe even know about them. To defend what I said, I think it's easy to argue that Brexit was rash and short-sighted (the campaigns were more or less based on lies) and identity politics are short-sighted more or less by definition (since cooperation is proportional to inclusiveness of identity). If you'd like to have a discussion, those are my arguments.

> Isn't hackernews meant to be politics free?

No, though there was a brief experiment in that direction in, IIRC, late 2016 that was aborted before it had run its planned one-week course.

Your name is dissident science, I'm guessing you're skeptical about the mainstream of science? So, tell us, what are your "different value systems" that support Trump's denial of climate science?

I don't think it's a stretch to call the current Commander in Chief a "Denier in Chief". When asked about climate during the two debates, he obfuscates and talks about forest floor litter or OPEC-negotiation for low gas prices. When asked about global warming, he claimed "It'll get colder". He can't come out and say fossil fuel combustion leads to atmospheric change that warms the planet. To say that would be to go against his party, which is pro-fossil fuel and takes big money from big energy companies (but the GOP is also pro-renewable, might I add, look at Iowa, TX, and many red states doing well on renewables).

Hackernews is supposed to be about technology, which is governed at its core by the objective reality of 0/1 binary transistors and the complex scientific/logical systems we've built to interact with that science. It's not a stretch to support science on this forum. If you're going against the grain of science, I'd say SUPPORT your position, don't just state your position and ask for moderator take-down of an opposing view.

One of the problems with offshore wind in the US is the depth of the ocean off the coasts of areas that actually have high wind. It's like God gave the middle finger to the US in this regard but it's something technology could potentially solve for. Much of the eastern US coastline has huge drop offs not far off the coast of windy areas. You need a max depth of ~50 meters for a good sized turbine to be installed. Florida is one of the most viable places but alas, not very windy.

Compare this to Northwestern Europe in this map: https://www.britannica.com/place/Atlantic-Ocean It makes England/Nordics/Benelux the Saudi Arabia of wind power!

I don't know much about the potential for California though. Has it not been invested in due to seismic risks? Or is it mainly a factor of coastal homeowners lobbying against it?

The US has a huge "wind belt" from the Texas panhandle north to Canada.[1] Big, flat open spaces where there are roads. Higher winds are available in the mountains, but installation and maintenance gets expensive. HVDC lines to Texas, the West Coast, and the Midwest will be needed to exploit that power.

California has four good on-land wind areas, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Time to look elsewhere.

[1] https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/08/us_wi...

There's an HVDC line that intends to colocate along railroad right of way to route from Iowa to Illinois [1] to get clean wind power to load centers. Lots of railroad right of way [2] to get renewable generation to load centers. Throw some fiber down while you’re at it, we can always use more fiber everywhere.

[1] https://www.soogreenrr.com/

[2] http://www.mapattacks.com/2015/01/who-owns-americas-rail-inf...

California has a much steeper drop off than the continental shelf in the Atlantic.

The floating Hywind turbines are tethered to a sea floor depth of 130m, but this technology is fairly recent for wind turbines.

Here’s a recent study on the potential off the California coast:

https://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/news_releases/2020/september...

There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California, so one would think that it would be straightforward to add wind. However the laws are such that existing practice is privileged and allowed, and changes are easily challenged by only a tiny number of people. So we will see if CA is able to deploy anything new off the coast.

> There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California

There was a lot of offshore drilling before 1969, before blow-out protectors were required, until one big spill at the cusp of the environmental movement turned most of the California coast against oil drilling, and anything like it offshore, even, ironically, off-shore wind farms - for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill#M...

Ironic considering they still pull oil out of the ground in the middle of residential neighborhoods in LA

>The US is far behind, and though there are a few plans on the US Atlantic coast

the UK is smaller than the state of Michigan, so it naturally follows they would seek to expand their wind turbines to the sea. Its doubtful that a nation the size of the US would ever commit turbines to sea when theyre already generating 105 gigawatts across the nations expansive stretch. conversely, the UK's most ambitious goal is a paltry 40 gigawatts.

neither country is "ahead" or "behind" the other. The opportunities, requirements, costs, and other variables are simply different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_State...

We are behind on the industrial development for offshore wind farms. We will likely buy the tech from Europe, as well the rest of the world.

I don’t understand how the size of the nations means that UK would expand to sea but we wouldn’t. Can you step through your reasoning for me? For example, the wind corridor in the center of the US doesn’t provide anything for North Carolina. How does the size of the US and UK relate to this?

On shore wind is cheaper and more durable. So use it first. North Carolina is part of PJM and would benefit from wind throughout the region. Now the transmission costs might be high enough that off shore could make sense in NC if on shore is not an option. So then you need to look at increasing transmission or building something local.

We've had problems installing offshore wind in the US as the wealthy people who live on the coasts generally don't like to look at the turbines in their ocean views. Hopefully something like this has a better chance of succeeding if they are further off the coast.

If a wind turbine is 50m high, and a coastal house is no more than 50m above sea level, then as long as it's 30 miles off short there's no problem.

Of course there's a question about ownership of "ocean views". Who owns the sea? If you have a view over a field you don't own, can the field owner put up a water tower? Or barn? Or wind turbine? If your view in enhanced by the horses, can he choose to grow maize instead?

The US might have started behind, but wind power is now the fastest growing generation source.

https://www.powermag.com/wind-energy-leads-u-s-power-generat...

It’s quite misleading to emphasize the cheapness of renewable generators themselves and not take into account the price of the storage they require and where it would go if there was demand for enough to keep the whole world running when the wind has lulls (and when electricity use peaks as the sun goes down).

I’m glad Europe has scouted ahead, I hope we can learn from France’s 75% nuclear grid and nuclear “waste” recycling and comparing them to Germany’s much more expensive renewable path.

I think “misleading” is the wrong word to use here, but if it’s misleading to look at the drop in costs for offshore wind without talking about some of the challenges of deploying it, shouldn’t it also be “misleading” to talk about France’s nuclear fleet from the past as if they would be able to do it again? The future of France’s electrical grid is unlikely to be nuclear because their attempts to build replacements have been failures. I just came across this audit today:

https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/more-pressure-for-french...

Of the five attempted new reactors, only two have completed and have not been impressive financially. The auditing team found gross project mismanagement, but also found that there has been difficulty completing welding properly, and the large nuclear reactors inherently require massive amounts of high precision, high quality welding as a basis for the entire endeavor.

Finally, it is quite misleading to generalize Germany’s renewables path to other countries, because they consciously financed the creation of an industry that now has exponentially falling costs. The entire world owes Germany a debt for kickstarting this virtuous cycle of product innovation and falling costs, as we will all benefit from their early work.

Sorry to be unclear, and thanks for alerting me to it. I was talking about ongoing energy prices, not just initial infrastructure investment. According to the US Department of Energy, our reactors are expected to last for 80+ years.¹ But solar panels and wind turbines can wear out in 20. So I expect France’s energy to stay cheaper in the future, even if it takes a while to convert the last 25% to nuclear, and for Germany’s costs to continue rising, like California’s. Not to mention France’s 7 times lower CO₂ emissions per capita, or nuclear’s 400 times lower land use.

¹https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...

> What’s groundbreaking about the Hywind project, located in more than 300ft (90m) of water, is that the giant masts and turbines sit in buoyant concrete-and-steel keels that enable them to stand upright on the water, much like a fishing buoy. The turbines’ nearly 10,000-ton cylindrical bases are held in place with three taut mooring cables attached to anchors, which lie on the sea floor.

> Currently the electricity they generate is often almost twice as expensive as near-shore wind turbines and three times that of land-based wind turbines.

How long would one of those have to generate electricity to make up for its own construction? 10,000 tons of concrete and steel probably cause quite a lot of CO2 pollution to make.

Last time I researched it, it came to about 1->2 years to pay back manufacturing energy. That was for land based turbines. Bigger turbines payed back faster. So 1MW was closer to 2 years while 3MW was closer to 1.

The steel used was by and large the biggest energy cost.

Steelmaking's CO2 footprint is driven by energy costs, but concrete's CO2 footprint is driven by the chemistry of the commonly-used concrete production stages. It isn't visible in energy costs.

Portland cement production, not concrete which consists of aggregate as well. There must be many trade offs in this design and one can imagine pure sand as ballast so the concrete plays some structural role. The sea floor anchor design and high voltage underwater cables also seem like hard engineering problems.

Strangely each time I see a doubt about renewable energy quick search resolves it [1]. I've thought hydro produces least, no

> At a dam in Brazil, where the flooded basin is wide and the biomass volume is high the methane produced results in a pollution potential 3.5 times more than an oil-fired power plant would be. A theoretical study has indicated that globally hydroelectric reservoirs may emit 104 million metric tonnes of methane gas annually [2].

There is no green gas free energy only different cost, even nuclear. But maybe we can reduce emissions and some day catch them back.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...

Methane’s impact is really overblown. It’s got an atmospheric half life of ~7 years and rapidly turns into CO2. Hydroelectric’s steady state is therefore already baked into the current climate and future releases are equivalent to about ~285 million metric tons of CO2. (The difference is due to CH4 being heavier than CO2.)

Except the carbon in that methane comes the atmosphere so the the long term global warming impact of existing dams is approximately zero.

Now increasing methane production can have an impact, but it just doesn’t stack linearly like CO2 does.

How is it overblown sorry? It's half life is actually 9.1 years, which means after nearly a decade, half of it is still left, and this is methane produced annually, so it's continually being added to.

Add that to the fact that methane is 84 times better at trapping heat within the atmosphere than C02. Most methane production from Hydro isn't even counted because it's considered green.

That 84 is based on 20 years, on a 100 year timeframe it’s 21, and a 1 year timeframe it’s approaching 200.

All the methane for the last N years is decaying as you move forward. Say at day 1 you released X methane that’s being directly added to the global total. Now move forward to day X0,000, in some ways your adding X methane but because a little methane is decaying from every prior day the net result is not an increase of X, but an increase of X * 1/2^(some number that keeps increasing).

So, sure the hover dam is adding net methane. But after 84 years it’s less than 1/2 ^(84 /9.1) or 0.17% as much as directly measured. Further, the GWP of methane is calculated under the assumption it released from the ground where most sources like cows are releasing Carbon and Hydrogen that used to be in the atmosphere in the first place before photosynthesis etc eventually turned it into methane.

Also, unlike CO2 it’s really easy to reduce considerations simply by lowering emissions.

PS: I have seen several estimates around 7 years, I used 9.1 because the exact number isn’t that important.

Have you read article?

> Warm climate reservoirs generate methane, a greenhouse gas when the reservoirs are stratified, in which the bottom layers are anoxic (i.e. they lack oxygen), leading to degradation of biomass through anaerobic processes.

In warm climate it is methane generator, biomass constantly added with river flow.

Yes, but I don’t think you understand what’s being described. Dam methane production is based on the amount of organic matter being added by the river which is effectively a constant over time. It’s effectively the same process as cow’s methane where decaying plants release methane in a low oxygen environment.

The issue is you don’t get an accurate number for the amount of methane in the atmosphere from a dam by multiplying average annual methane release by the number of years it’s in operation. Thus the the rate of doesn’t correlate to future global warming making such statements absolutely meaningless.

PS: Also, all of this is assuming the study adjusted for what happens when the dam is not there and nearly the same process occurs when the river dumps into an ocean somewhere.

Plant either eaten or decays, closed system.

Methane does not return upstream only, river flows into ocean, open system.

My argument supported by published article and nice picture, look at sediments [1].

Your argument "calculated yearly is not yearly", maybe you should bring some citations, maybe it is you who do not understand what is described.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_storage_of_carbon_dioxid...

“First, very shallow coastal waters contribute around 50 percent of the total methane emissions from the ocean, despite making up only 5 percent of the ocean area. That's because methane can seep out of natural gas reservoirs along continental margins and can be produced biologically in anoxic (oxygen-depleted) sediments at the seafloor.”

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-global-ocean-methane-emissions...

Dams are collecting the exact same sediments that would end up in estuaries and as that article points out some of that is then turned into Methane.

Natural methane is just part of the carbon cycle. It’s generally ignored in oversimplified explanations like you just linked.

Thank you. Next sentence

> In deep waters, methane is likely to be oxidized as it travels its long route from the seafloor to the atmosphere.

Coastal waters emissions does not imply all biomass. Open system — what escapes to deep waters stays there. Quote above implies dam water is warmer.

The very next sentence is “But in shallow waters, there's a rapid route to the atmosphere and methane escapes before it is oxidized.”

Most sediment collected by dams ends up there because it weighs more than water and so filters out as soon as the water stops flowing. As rivers reach the ocean that process generally produces vast and very shallow silt deposits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary You can even read about what happens in dam removal when that same sediment flows down stream and ends up very near the surface. There are some very striking images of this processes when muddy flood water reaches the ocean.

PS: Also by deep water their talking miles deep. Dead fish end up falling miles in most of the ocean.

I do not think researches do not understand sediments would deposit somewhere. That's obvious. There should be something else.

Turbine gets water not from the surface. There was a project to extract enough methane to increase energy production.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6638705.stm

Except it doesn't happen in the ocean. There isn't flooded forests in the ocean. Trees take a long time to decay, can be a hundred years in an aerobic environment, but 2-3 times longer in an anaerobic environment.

Most organic matter decaying behind dams is carried in by the river after the initial flooding. Rivers carry a lot of organic matter like tree branches and in floods even entire trees down stream and sometimes all the way to the ocean. Some of that ends up as driftwood on beaches, and some of that gets turned into methane “biologically in anoxic (oxygen-depleted) sediments at the seafloor.” https://phys.org/news/2019-10-global-ocean-methane-emissions...

>Most organic matter decaying behind dams is carried in by the river after the initial flooding.

What is this based on? The dams producing the most methane have actually flooded forests without removing the trees.

That’s something I heard from someone restocking fish. So, it might be an artifact of US dams being over 50 years old on average, but I assume that generally holds true globally.

As to peak methane production, yea that seems reasonable. Though a great many dams didn’t cover forests, so the extremes aren’t representative of the average.

Most trees underwater will not have decomposed in 50 years and would still be producing methane.

I am not disagreeing with that, just saying the weight of twigs deposited by rivers behind dams is significantly more than the weight of trees that where drowned by the dam formation. Visually trees are very striking, but chemically even tiny fragments of leaves are important.

Flooding land for hydro power generation can also release significant amounts of natural mercury:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project#Mercury_poll...

True! There are alternatives that are net-absorptive, too.

But until we can set a market price for CO2 emissions, current emitters will continue to treat it as a zero-cost externality.

Do you have a link explaining that? Cement is made by baking limestone in a kiln, so the energy inputs are really high.

I thought it was up there with smelting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement#Environmental_...

The steel is still steel a hundred years later. Anyway life time co2 is bounded by project cost.

E.g. If you bought coal/gas for the cost of the project how much co2 and energy would you produce.

Most estimates are about 3 to 6 months to recover energy used to produce a wind turbine.

Steel corrodes and rusts in a salt water. You need to replace steel or replace the entire construction after some time.

Once you get about half an inch to three quarters of an inch, the steel creates an oxide layer that protects the material underneath. You can look at ship wrecks all over the world from a hundred years ago, the steel for the steam boiler is usually the last to go.

The steel cables holding up the suspension bridge Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (87 years old), clouded in fog and arguably one of the harsher saltwater environments (near-constant 20mph winds 8 months out of the year) is still using it's original steel cables, and there are no plans to replace them.

We've known of paint for a while.

And also of galvanic protection with copper electrodes.

I can remember watching one of the jackets for the Forties field being towed down the Moray Firth in '74.

Still there and working today!

https://www.energyvoice.com/opinion/92008/forties-at-40-the-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forties_Oil_Field

Hywind is a demonstration site, I understand it was not optimised not for foundation design, it’s main purpose was to get an understanding of the dynamics of the turbine blades as the structure pitches and rolls, so I wouldn’t focus on the 10,000te figure. Future generations will reduce this significantly.

From the brochure, it's 2300 tons of steel in the substructure vs. 670 ton weight of the towers. It's not stated what fraction of the ballast is fixed, and what fraction is water. Normally the fixed ballast would be rock. I don't know how these numbers compare to a shallow water fixed installation, or even an onshore turbine (they must have some foundations!).

I feel somewhat put off by this headline. I mean, by all means, yes, please try that! We'll gonna need lots of clean energy. But I fear the NIMBYs will read that headline and interpret it as: "see, we're not gonna need these turbines near my house any more, the future is in deep water!"

The future of wind is onshore. And offshore. And maybe also in deep water.

Has something changed? I'd always thought the cubic dependence of power generated on wind speed meant that the places people willingly live are often distinct from the places engineers site wind turbines.

I guess this is often true, but not always.

For example, the Netherlands is essentially one big river-delta at the end of two of the major rivers of Europe. This makes it flat and windy. Ideal for windpower (in fact, we had an early lead on the UK in terms of industrialization with our windmills, but then they figured out how to use coalpower and took over). Also, being a river delta, the Netherlands contained extremely fertile soil that lends itself very well to agriculture (the flat landscape doesn't hurt either). Hence we're also one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

And even in the Netherlands, where windmills are part of the national culture, you got tons of NIMBYs

I thought the most important fuel of the Dutch golden age was peat, not wind. The first really fossil-fuelled economy. (You can see evidence of it flying over, marshy areas where this was strip-mined, I mean strips the size you could load onto a barge & deliver to town.)

Edit -- I can't find a great source, but [1] has some figures, putting peat somewhere over 100x as much energy as wind, 17thC.

But of course heat energy and mechanical energy were two separate categories then, before steam engines, so it's not easy to compare. He tries to estimate equivalent land areas required to either grow wood (for heat) or feed horses (mechanical) and seem to reach comparable figures. (Which together are a bit less than the figure for horse-area saved by sailing, instead of carts. For which NL was also ideal, of course.)

I guess the more interesting, and harder, question is the degree to which each of these enabled economic progress. Sawing wood for ships, vs. baking pottery & bricks. Certainly the easy peat more or less ran out, about the same time that the UK got serious about coal.

[1] https://www.peatandculture.org/documenten/Zeeuw.pdf

I know peat was used for heating in the house, but I don't know how useful it was to run steam engines. Anyway, my claim is based on two articles from Low Tech Magazine, each with their own sources:

> So-called 'industrial water mills' had been used in Antiquity and were widely adopted in Europe by the fifteenth century, but 'industrial windmills' appeared only in the 1600s in the Netherlands, a country that took wind power to the extreme. The Dutch even applied wind power to reclaim land from the sea, and the whole country was kept dry by intermittently operating wind mills until 1850.

> For example, the Dutch shipbuilding industry, which was centred around some 450 wind-powered saw mills, imported virtually all its naval stores from the Baltic: wood, tar, iron, hemp and flax

> One of the most spectacular developments of industrial wind power technology occurred in the Zaan district, a region situated just above Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Although the area is surrounded by water, the potential of water power was limited because the land is as flat as it can be and so the flow of the rivers is low. The wind, on the other hand, is strong. Many of the applications of windmills described above appeared first (and sometimes only) in the Zaan district.

> It is said that the region was the world’s first industrialized area. From 1600 to 1750, when the Netherlands became an important economical power, around 1,000 windmills were built and operated here (see the map on the left). Mills were given names, just like ships.

Of course, that doesn't mean that coal (and peat) powered engines weren't used at the same time! Just that the Netherlands really doubled down on wind power very early on.

[0] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/history-of-industria...

[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-the-econo...

Thanks, didn't see this comment while I was digging for references for mine... I'm sure I read something more recent & more quantitative.

But the site you link has this which is not bad:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/peat-and-coal-foss...

Yeah, Low Tech Magazine is run by Kris de Decker, a trained historian. He's pretty good with sourcing his articles :)

What happened was that wind mills were fitted with a steam engine in the 19th century. And later, end of 19th century, factories were built to be powered by steam from day one.

Steam came to the Netherlands relatively late. The Netherlands were quite dominant when everything was built from wood. The Netherlands lost its edge when steel became the dominant (structural) element.

Waterwheels were more than competitive before coal powered steam engines took over. Still, it is a fascinating question: why wasn’t the Netherlands a fast-follower in the Industrial Revolution?

> Waterwheels were more than competitive before coal powered steam engines took over.

True for most of Europe, but this essentially requires height differences, something in fairly short supply in the Netherlands ;)

(see also the two articles I linked in the other comment)

I had thought coal would be in fairly short supply as well, but apparently there are corners of the country more than a few meters above sea level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Limburg

> "The demand for coal had grown explosively as a result of increased industrialization and urban expansion, but the national governments regarded any form of interference in the extraction and sale of this fuel as unnecessary. Thus it came about that the first concessions for the extraction of coal in South Limburg were granted without hesitation to foreign firms, although most of the coal consumed in the Netherlands was imported from Germany, and Dutch investors preferred to invest their capital in foreign countries, such as in Russian government loans, American railways, and Hungarian waterworks."

If mining in a big way didn't happen until the 1870s, maybe that implied it was difficult, for the tools of earlier times? Too deep?

I was specifically responding to the following claim that the Netherlands:

> ...had an early lead on the UK in terms of industrialization with our windmills, but then they figured out how to use coalpower and took over

The point, that I was unsuccessful in making clearly, was that the difference between Dutch windmills and English waterwheels was a wash (no pun intended) at the critical early part of the First Industrial Revolution. The first link you mention supports this view.

In my opinion, the ecosystem built around global industrialized cotton was the key factor driving England's Industrial Revolution, but I understand that many attribute the success to the coal powered steam engine.

> the difference between Dutch windmills and English waterwheels was a wash (no pun intended) at the critical early part of the First Industrial Revolution

Would be interesting to see numbers on this. I would have guessed there was substantially more total power from water in England (just before steam) than the wind in NL, but could be wrong. It may depend a lot on what year you pick for the comparison. And whether you include all the isolated windmills pumping water to keep farmland dry, or only the ones doing work that was also done by water-mills.

Coal and steam weren't the first chapter, but are hard to overestimate once they did arrive, IMO.

Ah, thank you for clarifying! Yes, I see your point now. At the same time, the second link references the claim that it has been argued that the Zaanstreek was the first industrialized region in the world, starting a few decades before the period that we usually consider the First Industrial Revolution (which is also what I quoted in the other comment). I'm no expert though, and I doubt it's a universally accepted view.

Yes, well, that is partly due to precisely the heritage you mention: when you think of the Netherlands you think of canal-interspersed fields with cows and a few traditional windmills here and there. That view would be ruined if a few 90m high wind turbines were to dominate the landscape. Also, being as flat as a pancake those turbines are visible until they disappear under the horizon, leading to a very large backyard full of NIMBYs.

Ha, I actually thought the headline was really clever because "in deep water" is also an idiom for "in trouble", "doomed", etc. So I thought it was quite clever that the article means actual water, with a lot of depth, but leads you to maybe think the opposite when you start reading.

Considering how many more people will scan the headline than read the article, it made me uneasy. What's the effect of all those people getting a vaguely pessimistic message about wind power? Did they consider that when they wrote the headline? I guess it's possible they were only thinking about being clever.

Wind turbines are beautiful, reminds me of future depicted by H. G. Wells in The Sleeper Awakes. And it is today, not in 2100.

Is problem as bad as on DW documentary [1]? Installed Capacity confirms [2] but that's unbelievable. Birds would have much more problem if temperature raises 4°C.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr5PEAK1t3U

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany#Statisti...

Windmills do kill birds. Not as much as housecats though, so maybe we should get rid of those first. Also, you can paint one out of three windmill blades black to drastically reduce the number of birds who die from it

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-wind-turbine...

For a minute I thought they meant it literally, that it would be an article about underwater turbines.

Well they're a growth field too -- tidal and current based turbines.

Wind energy is far from being "clean", unfortunately.

Please explain.

Check my working...

The UK's national grid is currently running at about 35GW. A wind turbine, produces on average 1MW (from a potential 3.5MW with a 120m blade diameter). The turbines need to be spaced at 8x the blade diameter to be optimal, call it 1km. (edit)

So at the moment, the UK needs 35,000 wind turbines to match the national grid.

We'll need at least double that again to charge all electric vehicles in daily use if we get to 100% electric vehicles, e.g. only 5 million vehicles with 7kW chargers, but we have almost 30m registered vehicles in the uk.

That's almost 200km by 200km of wind turbines, or 120 miles x 120 miles right now.

No wonder we're putting them in the sea. I can't see all of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Essex, London and Hampshire being covered with wind turbines somehow.

I worked this out previously and came to the conclusion that electricity production needed to rise more like 50%. it was a while ago, but the vague calculation was something like this:

UK electricity consumption/year: 301.7 TWh

Miles driven per year in UK: 327e9 [1]

Convert into TWh if vehicle is petrol: 470TWh [2]

Electric cars need about a third the energy of petrol vehicles: 160TWh

See here: https://observablehq.com/d/e02d09be8794978c

[1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://github.com/robinl/energy_usage

(Apologies some figures are not sourced)

Yep. That's why I think energy to fuel is potentially a better solution. It will also be a good fit for solar power, as you can just make then stockpile the fuel when the sun is out. For the UK though, I think most fuel would then be imported from sunny places.

I'm not sure that the UK will increase it's grid capacity enough to get all cars electric in the next 10 or 15 years. I have a feeling the UK will end up relying on interconnectors.

> I have a feeling the UK will end up relying on interconnectors.

Gridwatch used to allow you to download an entire year (or more) with a 5 minute resolution. Based on my last download from Sep 2018 to Sep 2019, a net of 7.6% of UK's electricity usage was from interconnectors

Not sure how much those brexit effects these, the UK government has ripped out the conditions that allow these to work, put all the blame on the interconnector companies, and still have no idea what the relationship will look like in 11 weeks time

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electrici...

> Not sure how much those brexit effects these

Implicit auctions across the interconnector to end.

Also gridwatch isn't 100% accurate. Accurate enough to get a good picture though.

And if you want to download data, just download from elexon/bmreports. No point gong via a 3rd party.

Current electric cars are about 160 Wh/km.

327.0e9 miles = 526.0e9 km => 85 TWh.

You overestimated the efficiency of petrol vehicules by a factor of two :)

Note: heavy vehicules are 5% of miles travelled according to your [1]

Your info on capacity is a bit sketchy, the capacity of turbines being installed now is 8-10MW, with 15MW turbines on the roadmap. 3.6MW turbines were being installed 7-10yrs ago (exception being Rampion on south coast of UK being installed 2016/17)

Further offshore you go, and the bigger the turbine, generally speaking the better capacity factor you get.

The relationship between individual turbine capacity and the total power generation of a given area of land/sea is quite complicated. Bigger turbines don't get you as much additional power output as you might initially think because they have to be spaced out more. This is described in detail here: http://www.withouthotair.com/cB/page_263.shtml

(Of course, there's lots of space out to sea and larger turbines may be more economically viable)

Thanks. Cunningham's Law in action.

It's nonetheless interesting to see the scale of these. You can see them off the coast of Kent quite easily, but there's no perspective for the size.

The size is unbelievable to be honest. The 12MW system when constructed will be taller than the Eiffel Tower I believe, and that is the section above water, there will be 20-50m in water then considerable length piled into the ground.

Another way to see it : cars are parked about 95% of the time.

If you allow V2G for 5 million cars to deliver 7 kW each to the grid, they can power the country for about 7 hours with zero other mean of electricty production - assuming a 50 kWh battery in the car.

A 50 kWh car will power a typical home for a few days to a few weeks for energy efficient homes.

When full electrification of cars is done the grid will look very very different.

Even if you completely ignore V2G and look solely at load shedding via deferred charging if most of the energy requirements of the transportation sector were met with battery electric vehicles that's a massive chunk of power that can be deferred.

Demand at night is quite a bit lower than during the day and I suspect that's when most EVs will be charging - so that might help.

Agreed. I used a bit of lazy maths to make the numbers match to give a simple illustration. I suspect we'll have more than 5 million vehicles charging daily, and overnight, given that there's almost 30 million registered vehicles right now. And there's also 22kW chargers as well.

And year-on-year, everyone uses more electricity. Definitely interesting times ahead.

I did some calculations on how much more renewable the UK would need based on demand over a given year, and how much storage.

With 20 times the current renewable, 1GWh of charged storage, and a perfect grid, starting on Sep 18th 2018, we'd be fine until September 30th at 18:15.

With 10 million EVs acting as a battery store, all topping at 50KWh and going as low down as say 25KWh, that would be 250GWh of storage, we'd last until September 30th at 19:30.

That doesn't count the extra demand of the EVs in actually driving.

If we had 50 times current renewable and that 250GW of storage we'd be OK.

On top of that, energy expenses for air cooling and conditioning will increase dramatically in many places due to climate change.

So we probably need to triple the grid capacity. It's very hard to do that with renewables only without opening serious risks. Not impossible though. And will definitely take some long time to deploy the necessary facilities.

air conditioning is one of the smallest issues (somewhat ironically), as the demand from it is the highest when sun is shining, meaning there is lots of PV Electricity available (and with roof PV no burden on the grid either). Heat Pumps in Winter are the bigger issue generally.

I'm not so sure. If you're still speaking about the UK then we'd have to have a spectacular rise in temperatures to make AC a problem. The UK is much cooler than the USA and continental Europe in summer, so it's very rare to have AC at home.

I don't think I've ever seen a home with AC in the UK - certainly not here in Scotland.

Come to the south-east. New build homes down here are heat traps. We have two portable units for the summer and are going to get a full unit next year. We need it. Our house gets to 30C inside and stays at that through the night.

At least one of my neighbours has air-con that I can see, and a couple of re-builds in my town that I can see from the road have them too. My utterly unscientific estimate would be 1 in 500 houses in the SE now have aircon.

You're probably looking into heat pumps. We added one when we moved in and we got another 10 years out of the furnace. What killed the furnace was 27 years of moving air. And parts were no longer available to replace the "squirrel cage".

Heating the house with natural gas (from the replacement furnace) is now cheaper than using electricity, which is not what I predicted when we put in the heat pump. But I didn't foresee fracking.

Anyway, heat pump gets us hot air in the winter, cold air in the summer, and lowers our bills.

A neighbor put in a well-based (as opposed to air, like ours) heat pump which I was very interested in. But it took them 3 days of drilling (rocky soil) and tens of thousands of dollars. So probably just as well.

> Demand at night is quite a bit lower than during the day

Germany currently has around 60 GW, during the day we had 77 GW:

> https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

To give a reference in France an average vehicule is driven 13000 km/year which is around 2 MWh with typical 150 Wh/km.

A parking spot is around 2.5 x 5 meters, solar panel efficiency is about 20%, in France we get about 1000 hours equivalent full sun per year so a parking spot covered with solar panels will produce 2.5 MWh each year.

Of course not enough in december and too much in june, but that gives an easy figure to remember.

Solar panels don't produce that much energy but electric cars are very efficient devices.

Another statistics about France : there are about 2 to 3 parking spot per car in the country.

I guess the car charging will make up a lot less than 35 GW constant demand though heating will probably make up a lot more than that over time. This will probably more than offset the general energy savings in electromobiles. Progressively you want to transition most of heating to heat pumps (COP of 3.0 should be quite possible) rather than direct heating, such as oil ovens and such (COP of basically < 1). Practical heat pump motors usually run on electricity and maybe natural gas but probably not heavy oil, coal or even wood. Also insulation of private homes will probably improve a lot in the coming years. It is a very complicated matter that is frequently occluded by politics in some form. It is nice to have interesting facts being mentioned, e.g. I didn't know the 8x blade diameter distance figure.

> So at the moment, the UK needs 35,000 wind turbines to match the national grid.

Assuming a 100% capacity factor which is far off the realistic value of around 30%.

Nuclear power plants have >90% capacity factor and therefore the most reliable power plants we have.

That's why China is building a lot of new NPPs (https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstruction...).

One of the most interesting potential wind sources is Lake Erie: it's relatively shallow, fresh water (less corrosion), and dotted with population centers: Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, London. It's also quite windy. But I do wonder about the potential impact on fish, there or anywhere else.

Archived copy that works with JS disabled:

https://archive.today/8LUqj

What is stopping us from combining tidal and wind energy sources? Especially considering we are already venturing out in the sea for wind?

Tidal energy never panned out, it was far too expensive and no one came close to commercial viability over the dozen years of experimentation.

Tidal streams are only strong in very specific locations. Consider a regular, straight-ish coast: the water volume difference between low tide and high tide may seem massive, but divided by the cross-section of an imaginary divider between coastal waters and off-shore waters the stream (meters cubed for tidal delta volume divided by meters squared for the cross section that the delta has to pass through) will be rather negligible.

It would be very cool to have fully developed tidal generator products ready to deploy in the few places where geographic features force the delta through a tight bottleneck (anything from small bays and fjords in high tidal delta areas to the massive bottleneck of Gibraltar straight) but that's a pretty hard limited market that makes development investments rather unattractive when there are more universally applicable renewable energy sources untapped, like e.g. offshore wind.

Extracting lots of energy from the tide usually requires natural or manmade lakes or eastuarys attached to the sea. Building those in deep water isn't really practical.

I'm curious, when wind farms do go into the ocean bed, how does it affect the ecosystem? I'm guessing it might not be a problem since I've never read about it, but it seems like it could cause reverberating problems in the ocean which is one of our biggest natural tools in fighting climate change

Sunken ships and pier pilings are generally a haven for underwater animals; this is a key principle behind the creation of artificial reefs.

One thing I do know is that putting tons of huge wind farms off of the coast of California would likely be a disaster for migratory birds that travel the pacific flyway down the coast, many of which are not found anywhere else in the world.

Can’t really comment on anything above the waterline but below typically they become more attractive to marine life, basically things grow on them... if this is good or bad depends on who you talk to (eg should barren places remain barren, is increasing the amount of marine life the right thing?).

I worked on a project decommissioning an oil rig d as no it nearly got canned because rare cold water coral started growing was found on the structure. Marine life is weird...

There's a couple of large-scale wind farms in the Irish Sea, haven't read anything about ecological impact of monopiles -- they've been used for other sea structures for a long time so longitudinal data should exist.

Nice to see discussion on this topic! I worked on software to design floating wind turbines in my last job. Fun coupled dynamics/hydrodynamics here.

Working also in that space, designing floaters using such tools... which software was it?

Being able to move the bulk of building an offshore turbine into a factory could lead to amazing economies of scale. It'll be an incredible assembly line to pull together 10,000 ton of materials but if we need to build hundreds of thousands it might well be worth doing. There should be a gentle stream of these things bobbing out into the sea, ready to be taken by tug to their resting place.

Where do you think wind turbines are currently manufactured? Sure, off-shore makes many of the transportation issues much easier, but final on-site assembly is pretty streamlined already no matter what site category.

I hope being able to assemble the turbine & the "foundations" together in a factory brings better economies of scale than factory turbine with foundations built in situ.

As someone who used to live and sail on a sailboat by myself, this would scare the bejesus out of me in the middle of the night if it wasn’t accurately marked.

As a side effect can a network of these be used to tame floods / tsunamis ?

I mean you could make them into a matrix, and use them as phasors .. much huygens corp. (let's use another kind of high grade historical figures)

Betteridge's law of headlines claims that no, the future is not in deep water.

They arent really defensible, so not suitable as a major source of power

Most green energy isn't feasible for today's power needs in the first world. We can't store it and they cost a lot to build in comparison to it's counter parts of coal and natural gas plants. And no more capital funding it won't fix it. Power companies hate them cause they just suck.

All your points are wrong. We can store the energy in batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/methane, as heat and probably half a dozen other technologies. Renewables are cheaper to build than conventional power. Power companies hate them because they challenge the profitability of their existing coal plants.

> All your points are wrong.

No, yours are.

> We can store the energy in batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/methane, as heat and probably half a dozen other technologies.

Germany consumes 1600 GWh of electricity per day. We currently have a pump storage capacity of 40 GWh, so that's about 30~40 minutes of electricity storage.

If you want to go the power2gas route, just have a look at the combustion heat of methane to calculate how much you would roughly have to synthesize to store 1600 GWh worth of energy.

> Renewables are cheaper to build than conventional power.

They are. But they need backup power plants as their energy densities and capacity factors a very low compared to nuclear power plants.

That's why electricity prices in Germany are the highest world-wide:

> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

> Power companies hate them because they challenge the profitability of their existing coal plants.

That's simply untrue. Power companies LOVE renewables because they are highly subsidized and the government always guarantees that any kWh renewable electricity produced is also purchased.

Germany is not at the point where large scale storage is more economical than better demand side integration and very far from the point where it is necessary for grid stability.

It's no surprise then that there is not much storage capacity available.

For gas though we already have the strategic gas reserve infrastructure that can store nearly 25 billion cubic meters. What's missing is the synthesizing part.

Is gp flagged because their points were all wrong or because they violated HN rules? I’d like to see their points which you refuted rather then downvote brigaded à la reddit. Not to say I think you’re wrong or anything positive towards fossil fuels, just in principle I’d rather let someone wrong have their say and get debunked.

Set the showdead option in your HN settings to see flagged comments.

I did, and it looks like they wrote something that's just wrong, not against HN guidelines. It feels pedantic to make a stand here, but I don't think this is what flagging is for.

If you believe that a dead post should not be dead, you can click on its timestamp and then click the "vouch" link. That will bring it back from the dead.

FWIW you can enable "showdead" on your config page.

Oh I'm sorry, do you work out the logistics of managing an energy company? Do you know the base costs and how hard it is to tell your board, investors, and petition local, state, and the federal government to employ these mechanisms? What about the NIMBY's you forgot to account for? How about the expertise to manage these things?

Leftists always act like green power is "super easy" and "it just works." Green energy is a time and money pit. Also while we do have batteries, how do you expect an energy company to store terawatts of power? That is far from cheap as well as hardly feasible.

Green energy is the goal. But this isn't goddamn star trek yet. We're far from even being capable of having it replace half of our supplies of power.

Wind power is a bad joke. In my home state, i see the things everywhere, and I know its a giant waste for one reason: steel. There are independent studies that quantify this and prove it, its been in the papers.

The environmental/carbon impact of having a windmill megawatt over existing natural gas production is slim. The carbon cost of refining several dozen tons of steel and metal for the thing, ruins the benefit. The things dont work very well for the cost, and they dont last. They require service all the time. They have a crane to take the generator/transmission out of the whole thing to work on it.

Whenever you consider the total "carbon cost" most of the zero emission green tech falls flat. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear are still the only commercially feasible zero carbon. Everything else is being subsidized. In place upgrades to existing fossil fuel plants is the best short-term solution. Profitable natural gas, with carbon offset trade (forestry/tree-planting) is the best long-term solution imo.

Check your facts [1]

> The life cycle analysis focuses on the wind power plant as the basic functional object instead of a single wind turbine. Our results show that present-day wind power plants have a lifetime emission intensity of 5.0–8.2 g CO2/kWh electricity, a range significantly lower than estimates in previous studies.

> Our estimate suggests that wind is currently the most desirable renewable energy in terms of minimizing CO2 emissions per kWh of produced electricity [2].

2014 IPCC, Global warming potential of selected electricity sources [3]:

    +--------------------------+------+--------+-------+
    |        Technology        | Min. | Median | Max.  |
    +--------------------------+------+--------+-------+
    | Biomass – Dedicated      |  130 |    230 |   420 |
    | Coal – PC                |  740 |    820 |   910 |
    | Concentrated solar power |  8.8 |     27 |    63 |
    | Gas – combined cycle     |  410 |    490 |   650 |
    | Geothermal               |  6.0 |     38 |    79 |
    | Hydropower               |  1.0 |     24 | 22001 |
    | Nuclear                  |  3.7 |     12 |   110 |
    | Ocean (Tidal and wave)   |  5.6 |     17 |    28 |
    | Solar PV – rooftop       |   26 |     41 |    60 |
    | Solar PV – Utility scale |   18 |     48 |   180 |
    | Wind Offshore            |  8.0 |     12 |    35 |
    | Wind Onshore             |  7.0 |     11 |    56 |
    +--------------------------+------+--------+-------+

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+power+co2+footprint

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Citation please? According to here a typical offshore wind turbine will pay back its life cycle energy cost in 0.57 years: https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/energy-balance-analysi... (0.55 for on-shore)

Here is another article stating a payback time of 12.3 months: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257564430_Life_Cycl...

>There are independent studies that quantify this and prove it, its been in the papers.

Source? Also, there was a study[1] published recently that found natural gas polluted worse than expected.

[1] https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/gas-bridge-fuel_n_5f7f74f0...

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