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THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Fri 19 Jun 2015, 18:05:12

More Than 230 GW Of New Wind Power Capacity In China By 2024

MAKE Consulting is forecasting more than 230 GW of wind power capacity to be installed by 2024 in China, which is having a huge impact on MAKE’s 10-year outlook.

MAKE has increased China’s expected capacity addition by 3% from last quarter’s outlook, and China’s expected growth is such that it has pushed the global outlook up 1%.

In the near-term, MAKE is expecting policy support and investment in transmission to drive growth, though the country’s offshore wind market is expected to remain sluggish until 2019. Long-term growth for offshore wind will increase substantially after that, with more focus in the long-term on offshore wind and the levelized cost of energy.

China’s Northern provinces are expected to account for nearly two-thirds of the total capacity installations in 2015, with six provinces making it into the top 10 rankings. MAKE expects Xinjiang to dominate China’s wind industry for the next three to five years, compared to Inner Mongolia’s declining growth.

MAKE’s Q2/2015 Global Wind Power Market Outlook Update leaves the Americans relatively unchanged from Q1’s outlook, with Brazil’s shifting market dynamics the only real change in the region. Europe remains similarly unchanged, while MAKE has upgraded the outlook for the Middle East and Africa regions by 6%, due primarily to confidence in South Africa and Egypt, rather than the regions as a whole.


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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Keith_McClary » Thu 25 Jun 2015, 20:04:50

Landowners call on province to review power line near Cowboy Trail
June 23, 2015
... Landowners, however, said they don’t believe the line is necessary as technology for wind power changes.

“Almost all of the wind projects that were in the queue at the time of the needs assessment have not proceeded anywhere,” said Kevin Van Tighem, a conservationist and author who owns land in the area. “The economics of wind energy have changed to the point that there is far more efficient technology coming on than the stuff they were building in the Pincher Creek area 10 years ago.

“They are designed to run on low wind speeds.”

Van Tighem said those projects won’t happen in Pincher Creek, but other locations across the province.

“There is no realistic future need for wind power in our area,” he said. “There will be growth in the wind industry and there needs to be in Alberta, but Pincher Creek’s time has passed.”
It does look to me like all the hills and ridge tops near the Rockies have all been developed and recent wind development has been further East on the prairies.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Sun 12 Jul 2015, 22:40:14

Committee on Climate Change Says UK Offshore & Onshore Wind is Cost Effective Energy

RenewableUK says it welcomes a new report commissioned by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) which shows the cost of offshore wind energy will drop dramatically by the end of the decade, with further significant cost reductions in the 2020s.


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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Wed 15 Jul 2015, 18:25:55

The World’s first Airborne Wind Turbine

A Video featuring the BAT-Buoyant Airborne Turbine which is reputed to be the World’s first Airborne Wind Turbine.


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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 17:33:44

“Abnormal” New Wind Farm System Chops Months Off Timeline

A team of researchers at MIT has come up with an out-of-the-ordinary method for accurately predicting wind speeds for proposed wind farms. The new system uses only 3 months of data, compared to the 8- to 12-month period typically required to select a site for new wind farms. That’s a huge deal in the wind industry. A typical wind farm only takes a few months to build, so cutting several months off the pre-construction timeline is a significant improvement.

Normal Vs. Abnormal

The new MIT model for wind farms represents a 180-degree shift from the way the wind industry typically predicts wind speeds at sites for wind farms.

Here in the US, the timing is perfect because the American Wind Energy Association is just updating its wind farm handbook for developers.

The conventional method is to correlate wind speed data using a relatively simple form of statistical analysis called normal or Gaussian distribution. If you’ve seen a bell curve chart, that’s basically what it is.


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India’s Wind Energy Sector To Attract $15 Billion Investment By 2020
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Tue 21 Jul 2015, 15:25:07

The Wind Energy Victory In The Senate’s New Tax Bill

At the end of last year, a group of senators effectively killed the wind energy industry’s most important tax benefit — a $13 billion tax break to help the industry compete with fossil fuels.

But now, another group of senators is trying to bring those tax breaks back.

On Friday, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft tax package that seeks to renew the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind power. If approved, the 2.3-cent per kilowatt-hour credit would be cemented for the next two years, until December 31, 2016. The bill is scheduled for a markup on Tuesday.

For the wind industry, the inclusion of the PTC renewal is indisputably good news. According to Jim Reilly, the senior vice president of federal legislative affairs for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the PTC’s renewal would bring back a policy that “helped create tens of thousands of wind energy jobs and attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment to the U.S. economy.”

The renewal would, of course, come at a cost. According to the bill summary, the PTC extension would cost $10.5 billion over 10 years.

But while that may seem like a lot, environmentalists point out that it pales in comparison to the tax breaks received by the fossil fuel industry, which some say will cost more than $135 billion over the same period of time. Environmentalists are keen to hone in on that fact, noting that the fossil fuel industry does not need those subsidies to ensure growth the same way that burgeoning renewable industries do.

“The wind industry needs certainty,” said Lukas Ross, a climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth. “Exxon and Koch Industries don’t need to fight tooth and nail for their comparatively larger and historically much more significant share of the energy subsidies pie.”


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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Graeme » Fri 24 Jul 2015, 18:58:50

US Wind Power Industry Celebrates Incentives Extension

The American wind power industry is celebrating after the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending more than 50 tax policies supporting the construction of new wind farms.

The mood towards wind energy in the USA is in stark contrast to that back home, where the Abbott government’s “wonky” directive that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) cease investing in wind power projects has baffled industry experts and economists.
In a 23-3 bipartisan vote, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee passed a tax extenders bill for 2016. The bill retains language ensuring tax subsidies for wind energy developers continue so long as construction begins while the credits are in place.

Both the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Investment Tax Credit (ITC) expired at the beginning of the year, causing consternation for the sector; as these incentives have been widely recognised as the predominant drivers of wind farm development and have cut the price of U.S. wind power in half.


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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 09:25:26

Wow! Breaking news: Reuters - Rhode Island's Deepwater Wind will start installing the foundations for North America's first offshore wind farm on Monday, a milestone the company says could pave the way for an industry long established in Europe but that is still struggling with opposition in the United States.The 30-megawatt wind farm, which will include five turbines located three miles off the coast of the bucolic summer tourist destination of Block Island, will take more than a year to build and is scheduled to produce electricity for the tiny island community and the mainland by the end of next year. Offshore wind projects have been delivering power in Europe since the 1990s, with nearly 2,500 turbines connected to the grid, but they have struggled to gain a foothold in the United States due to worries about cost, the esthetics of towering wind turbines within view from the coasts, and the impact on birds and whales.

Damn...30 MW! That's almost 0.2% of the total installed wind power capacity in Texas. LOL. and it took only 11 years from the initial proposal to the beginning of construction. During which time Texas became one of the largest wind power generators on the planet

Just amazing the fascination with offshore wind power vs onshore. From Bloomberg: "While there’s plenty of potential energy to harness, offshore wind has been mostly stymied by high costs. Onshore turbines are some of the cheapest sources of electricity, with an average cost of about $85 a megawatt-hour, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Coal costs about $90. Installing equipment at sea is much more difficult, driving up costs to about $175 a megawatt-hour."

{I'm certainly no wind turbine construction expert but I have built more than a few offshore platforms: $85/MW-H onshore vs $175 MW-H offshore??? Utter bullsh*t. I also suspect they aren't including the many $millions that will be spent constructing the undersea transmission system. The offshore structure to support just one turbine: "Deepwater Wind LLC is installing a massive steel frame, more than 1,500 tons, that sits on the seabed and juts about 70 feet from the water south of Rhode Island." Consider just what the US tax payer has funded: The U.S. Energy Department has invested more than $300 million in offshore wind research, development, and demonstration projects.}
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby hvacman » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 16:15:44

offshore wind, offshore wave, offshore oil, offshore anything is so danged expensive. Wind, waves, tide, salt, barnacles, you name it. Leak-free, high pressure piping, electrical conductors/conduit and very high voltages that don't short out or break. I consider even shallow-off-shore oil drilling and production an engineering miracle. Deep production platforms and their infrastructure - major miracle. And offshore wind. Does anyone have an idea of the lateral reaction forces and overturning moments of those big wind generators? Stick them in the water and the leverage doesn't stop at sea level. It goes all the way down to the sea floor. where the foundation is.

Really good offshore wind farm locations are very few. It takes exactly the right combination of shallow depth, sea floor geology, proximity to the existing grid, wind patterns, etc.

RM is exactly right. That estimate has to be way low for the RI installation. We shouldn't even consider off-shore until we've fleshed out all our much-simpler, less expensive onshore wind resources. (Which RM says are all in TX!)
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby kublikhan » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 18:19:33

EIA numbers are not very favorable for offshore either. They got $58 vs $169 for capital costs alone onshore vs offshore. Or $74 vs $197 for total levelized cost onshore vs offshore(offshore partially offsets it's higher capital costs with higher utilization rates). That makes onshore wind one of the cheapest sources of electricity and offshore wind one of the most expensive.

Estimated levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for new generation resources, 2020
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby JustinHayler » Wed 29 Jul 2015, 05:47:30

Wind power is the way forward!
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 08:27:20

hvacman - "Which RM says are all in TX!" LOL. That's the truly odd thing about the push to offshore wind. much of Texas wind power is located in N Texas. N Texas is THE midcontinent. The wind doesn't stop blowing when it reaches the OK or Nebraska border. And up north when is the residential electricity demand the highest? In the winter when they're trying not to freeze their butts off. Hello...anyone else ever hear of "blue northers"? There are many areas in the US where onshore wind would work just as well as in Texas. But somehow Texas was blessed with politicians, wind industry investors, utility commissions, tax payers and landowners who decided to work together to "get 'er done". Texans are a special breed in many ways...just ask any Texan. LOL. But we haven't done anything with wind that folks in many other states couldn't do. And without spending many times the cost going offshore for wind power.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Ulenspiegel » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 10:12:15

kublikhan wrote:EIA numbers are not very favorable for offshore either. They got $58 vs $169 for capital costs alone onshore vs offshore. Or $74 vs $197 for total levelized cost onshore vs offshore(offshore partially offsets it's higher capital costs with higher utilization rates). That makes onshore wind one of the cheapest sources of electricity and offshore wind one of the most expensive.

Estimated levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for new generation resources, 2020


But we can expect clear cost reduction in case of off-shore wind turbines in the next years, while costs of on-shore turbines will change only little. But the basic issue still is that overbuilding on-shore and building more tranmission capacity to connect uncorrelated production may still be much cheaper than of-shore wind in 2020-2025.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 13:12:56

U - Perhaps a reduction in the cost of the turbines...but cheaper than onshore turbines at that time? And are you expecting those very expensive support structures to also decrease in costs? I haven't seen any cost estimate for the structures to be built off the east coast of the US. But I'm very familiar with the cost of offshore platform and I'll bet they are greater than the turbines themselves. Likewise maintenance will be significantly more offshore then onshore.

But the bottom line: when will it cost the same to set a wind turbine 10 miles off the coast as setting it 10 miles inland from the coast?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby StarvingLion » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 14:20:34

Cost reduction = More subsidies, more austerity, more deindustrialization...

all for a piece of crap electricity generator that lasts maybe 20 years.

Eventually you run out of suckers and people to rob.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 16:03:38

Lion - "Eventually you run out of suckers and people to rob." So true. Folks should send al those crappy wind turbines to Texas. We're so stupid and gluttons for punishment we would buy them all. LOL.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 16:15:33

JustinHayler wrote:Wind power is the way forward!

Regardless of the costs? And who should pay the higher costs? You?

I'm not saying you're wrong. I just expect more than "sloganeering" empty talking points if you want to back a cause.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 16:21:41

ROCKMAN wrote:U - Perhaps a reduction in the cost of the turbines...but cheaper than onshore turbines at that time? And are you expecting those very expensive support structures to also decrease in costs? I haven't seen any cost estimate for the structures to be built off the east coast of the US. But I'm very familiar with the cost of offshore platform and I'll bet they are greater than the turbines themselves. Likewise maintenance will be significantly more offshore then onshore.

But the bottom line: when will it cost the same to set a wind turbine 10 miles off the coast as setting it 10 miles inland from the coast?

1). Given the physics problems involved, why should it ever be as cheap well offshore as on land?

2). IMO, the real question is how expensive is too expensive? If we're roasting the planet burning, say, coal -- so what if offshore wind turbines are somewhat more expensive, as long as they significantly contribute, over their life cycle, to producing lots of (relative to FF burning) green energy we need?

(As a (rare) consistent advocate of truly MASSIVE taxes on FF burning, I'd say a higher cost is well worth it, when you socialize ALL the costs (like military, pollution, and AGW) of FF burning).
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 16:28:41

OS - The point is that the increase cost of offshore wind is holding up the development. And they are going offshore because the public in that region doesn't want to see wind turbines. Look how long it took to just get approval for the offshore wind farm along with the big and expensive legal battle that required. OTOH other then a few wildlife lovers there was no serious public objection to our wind farms. And given the millions of birds we shoot during hunting season every year the argument over turbine bird kills got virtually no public support.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby StarvingLion » Thu 30 Jul 2015, 18:50:58

Windmills: a copycat of the failing nuclear industry. Great initial enthusiasm, followed by builds on prime sites...and then....

Thats it...just another too primitive technology to end up in the Energy Technology Junk Yard.

Why don't you people wake up and accept that new physics will have to be discovered and exploited to have any chance at all.
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