Offshore wind has a cable problem | Hacker News Reader

Offshore wind has a cable problem

semafor.com

28 pointsbelter49 comments

This would just be a minor improvement, but we should all stop and think how much better all society would be if every country just flat out banned fishing trawlers every where in its territorial waters. For one we would have more and tastier fish. We would also have less cables being damaged.

More fish = greater oceanic ecosystem top to bottom. Everyone forgets the ocean when discussing carbon capture. Micro organisms can help a lot.

they could combine it with this desalination setup and not have to send the power out, just fresh water comes out.

https://abc7.com/amp/water-desalination-technology-seawell-c...

Or possibly ammonia? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053586>

Ammonia is really nasty.

While it's technically lighter than air, as a result of spilling it tends to form an aerosol, which travels low to the ground - a cloud of death if you will.

Hydrogen is impractical, but ammonia just dangerous.

Meanwhile methane apparently can be synthesized pretty efficiently:

https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/copper-based-catalysts-effic...

While it doesn't condense into a liquid at reasonable temperatures, there's ample infrastructure to handle it, since natural gas is largely methane.

I was hoping they would have a clever way of determining what to do with the brine solution, but looks like they just disperse it on the spot. I wonder what the environmental impacts of that looks like.

Interesting that much of the issue isn't necessarily the cables, rather the insuring of the cables

The cost of insuring the cables just reflects the underlying dynamics.

Yes, and why? That is the mad bit.

Presumably because the coverage triggers happen at a frequency that makes the premiums more expensive than the developers want to pay?

Insurance companies are usually quite happy to take your money as long as the premiums will cover their expenses.

It means the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for them (aka payouts have been > premium payments often, or so close they can’t make money.).

The Danish government owns 50.1% of Ørsted. (See: https://orsted.com/en/investors/shares - "Danish State (majority stakeholder)) It's effectively a state company. So, when you think Ørsted, instead think Denmark.

Again, for the very slow crowd: here is the ownership graph again: https://orsted.com/en/investors/shares

This is a dumb take.

Ørsted is not a state company. I used to work there. It is a utility. That means lots of ties to the state but the state does not influence decisions.

Ørsted screwed up risk management.

Norway is probably the wealthiest country on earth. Nothing to do with Soviets.

It is majority state-owned. Everything else the person you're talking to is saying is inflammatory and loaded, though.

You even went back and edited your comments to say something different than you originally did and removed your insults.

Incredibly bad faith.

Trolling random people on the internet doesn't usually actually make oneself feel better: find a new hobby.

> Ørsted is not a state company.

Except it is and you are wrong.

It’s possible for there to be a distinction between state-owned and state-run (see the BBC). Perhaps you could discuss why you think it is state-run rather than just state-owned instead of resorting to insults.

I responded to an insult. And I was being factual. Please reflect on your own behavior.

And no, no there is no BBC-like distinction here. Ørsted is company run by the Danish government, period. The link above should be proof enough to any thinking person.

> Except it is and you are wrong.

It has been excepted.

Is that a bad thing?

They used to be DONG right? Or am I misremembering

the very slow crowd is forever grateful for enlightening us...

For what exactly?

Lasers. Everything is better with lasers. Use high power lasers to transmit the power.

In case it has to be said...joke.

What you say is not a joke. There has been research into space based solar power which would beam this power down to earth to a collector point. Perhaps it is possible? Could power be safely beamed from sea to port?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

The maximum power density before the air ionises is surprisingly low. Well before this point, it’s a terrifying industrial accident waiting to happen, given 1 mW is supposed to be the safety limit for eye-safe lasers while 500 mW lasers set things on fire and blind people who are only looking at diffuse reflections of the beam.

Ok, so we establish vacuum tubes to blast the lasers through, maybe with some sort of glass fiber to direct the light, and...wait a minute, that's just a different, more fragile kind of cable. Darn.

Mm. People are trying it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-over-fiber

https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6732/8/8/335

I have no idea if this is a good idea that just hasn't been developed very far, or if it's like powering cars with compressed air (technically possible but not valuable).

My completely uninformed guess is that light can be incredibly information dense, but not all that energy dense compared to electricity.

Also fiber is a little more brittle and persnickety than electrical wire, so in this specific use case it would seem to be strictly worse, at least when it comes to the immediate challenge of cables experiencing physical harm.

In space it could well be plausible, but I feel like the losses from air resistance would be more than could be done using an electrical cable.

> Could power be safely beamed from sea to port?

Beaming straight up and down incurs much less atmosphere than beaming horizontally at sea level.

Not too serious proposal, beam up, beam sideways, and then beam back down starlink style? I wonder if the losses and costs here could ever be competitive with HVDC lines.

Much fewer shore birds as well.

Space mirror?

Phase conjugate tracking system?

They should just charge batteries at the wind turbines, then fling them to shore using trebuchets.

They should use the power to disassociate sea water into hydrogen, store it, then have a barge come by and collect it. See the "Sea change" ferry project by the SF port for inspiration.

Weird that this got down voted, what for?

Weird that this got down voted, what for?

I suspect it's because people get a bit tired of every article on infrastructure challenges getting responses along the lines of "They should just do this thing that I just read about that sounds really cool!"

Chances are that the possibility occurred to at least one of the numerous technical experts and professional engineers involved in the project, and there's a reason that's not the favored approach.

Sometimes it's because the linked idea has other complications that aren't actually that much easier to solve than the present complications (hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store, because it's so dang small, and it's pretty volatile too), and sometimes it's because a super cool emerging technology that might become the standard for the future isn't actually ready for large-scale deployment, because people literally just figured out how to make it work (why don't people simply have large batteries in every home to balance out grid loads? It seems like a really good idea!).

Sometimes problems are hard, and as smart as I'm sure you are, I don't know that you're smarter than everyone involved in this project combined.

Wow.

I did not imply any of that in my comment. I also did not violate any HN guidelines that I'm aware of. You are assuming I'm a bunch of things I'm not, and then acting accordingly. I don't think that's fair.

My comment was applying a classic problem solving technique of combining two problems into one symbiotic solution. Things like using waste heat from industrial processes to heat offices, etc. Check out TRIZ

I am not just some random idiot on reddit, I have deep experience here. I don't really feel the need to explain why or how.

Random people proposing unrealistic solutions is something I personally am very tired of. It just really derails any intellectual discussion with baseless fantasising. For example it often happens for discussions on EV. So if you don't state your experience in any convincing way your comment is just noise to me. I won't research your credentials and google you just to judge wether it's random sci-fi or a realistic comment, there are just to many of these comments. I think the down-votes you got reflect this general sentiment. You don't have to explain your experience but then your proposition might not be taken serious. Your comment is also so short that it is really indistinguishable from the sci-fi spam comments.

I checked out a lot of your other comments and you have a lot of negative and angry comments abound. One even says a general "F U" to anyone who does XYZ.

You're also a student. If you're a student and already "very tired " of people (experts, I'm actually an expert in this situation) proposing solutions on a tech chat website. I don't really follow why? Are you an expert in this field? Who are you to judge that this idea came from someone who isnt?

this really is a nice straw-man argument. I stated that I don't trust your comment (even if you just plainly state you're an expert...an expert in what?). If you don't like it, don't try to deflect by attacking my personality.

The amount of downvotes shows that it's a common sentiment and this reply is pretty childish I think.

> The amount of downvotes

2, 2 downvotes?

Random people trying to make the world a better place is how we move the world forward. There are a million examples of this.

Getting outside ideas, outside blood into these kinds of projects is exactly what moves us forward.

I'm a engineer, I've been designing large complex systems for 2 decades and I always welcome and even encourage outside perspectives and folks from other industries lending their advice.

I was just chatting with the head of a robotics automation startup who found some great synergies in the cabinet making industry.

It sounds like you are just tired. It doesn't matter much what your tired of, it sounds like you are tired of all new ideas unless they come from the same old places. That's just exclusionary.

So a lot of the bigger hydrogen projects in Europe are doing that except at the onshore connection point. Electrolyzers are hideously expensive so you probably don’t want to cosite them on the actual wind turbine itself. But IIRC there is a pilot project to build a “hub” in the North Sea like this.

Edit: yes here it is: https://northseawindpowerhub.eu/hydrogen-production-could-ta...

> Electrolyzers are hideously expensive

I can easily believe the piping is hideously expensive, likewise the storage, but I find it difficult to believe that the actual electrolysers themselves are expensive, given I built a small one at such a young age I’m not even sure how old I was (single digit, but apart from that, IDK).

efficient hydrolyzers are expensive, both to build and to maintain, especially if they use seawater.

Sticking wires in saltwater is cheap.

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