Presumably these would be on-shore only? Or could you have e.g. a steel base and then a wooden tower for an off-white turbine?
At least in the UK, off-shore wind is utterly dominant.
At least in the UK, off-shore wind is utterly dominant.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/boris-johns... and https://www.ukri.org/news-and-events/responding-to-climate-c... have some more context.
Over here it started onshore but is now happening inland. Offshore is very expensive because of moving ice.
Huh? Ice? There isn’t any sea ice to contend with in the UK.
Land locked countries or countries with not a lot of sea also can benefit from this newer wind technology that can be built inland profitably. They then don't need to build onshore but can build inland. Some US states for example have great inland wind resources.
And there timber towers could be very relevant - it doesn't need to be saltwater proof.
This is for political reasons rather than economic or technical ones. Further reducing the cost of on-shore wind relative to off-shore could swing the political argument in favour of on-shore wind.
One widely cited source is the 'Lazard' report:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
it puts onshore wind at between $26 and $50 per MW and the cost of offshore wind at an average of $83 per MW. I.e. the opposite of what you think.
Lazard could be wrong, and it would be interesting to hear why, backed by some numbers.
Well, no, I didn’t make the claim that it was the cheapest. It is competitively priced, however, which is important, and both technically and politically achievable. Anyway the other person claimed that if onshore became even cheaper that onshore would gain favor over offshore. Yet, it’s already apparently significantly cheaper. So why isn’t it more favorable already?
There are motivations beyond purely cost…it’s a lot easier to have larger-scale offshore wind than onshore (are there 15MW+ turbines in the onshore pipeline?) with less nuisance and better wind resource. It’s not really feasible to transport the components for such massive wind turbines onshore. Multi-gigawatt scale onshore wind farms don’t exist (the largest I noticed after a quick search is only 350MW). Offshore can be so much bigger…Dogger Bank, when it’s fully realized, will be almost 14 times larger than the current largest onshore wind farm in the UK.