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Hi Rosie - I work for a company that is trying to enter the floating offshore wind market with a novel TLP substructure. There are some steep hills to climb which are also road blocks for us including finding an offshore wind developer who is willing to support a demonstration of a new platform. Even though we are the global experts on TLP Buoys with over 40 years experience, we are still struggling to find a way forward. For a developer to use a new technology, this means if they are installing 50 WTGs but one is installed very differently, then that causes a lot of disruption from their process and equipment used for the other 49. In other words, more expensive so not an attractive option. The only way to convince a developer is an argument about new technology lowering the costs which is our long term vailue proposal but the first one will be even more expensive than the baseline for floating wind. Yes there is a valley of death in this market too! ☹
Too bad that it is so expensive to try all these new things BUT I hope you get it to work-seems that floating has reasonable potential to be biggest wind market eventually as it just seems fewer site specific concerns to worry about wow time will tell💨♾️
Hi EngineerLewis Are you in Canada by any chance? If not the two provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada has tendered bids for Offshore Wind Farms on the Scotian Shelf and other offshore areas. You may want to contact the appropriate provincial government offices as they would provide you with companies involved in these ventures to see if they are interested in your design.
As always, Rosie putting it out of the park with concise and thorough explanations of all things complicated. If you aren't a member of her Patreon, consider joining, she is one of the few producers of this quality content with the education and practical experience to back up what she says. That makes her a rare find well worth your support.
As a niche market, I immediately thought of desalination. Moor the turbine off, say Israel, and run a simple pipe to shore. Produce fresh water directly all in one unit.
It has already happened, at small scale. No, the ships will not be directly wind powered, the big ships spend most of their time in the low wind parts of the world, far more cost effective to put the turbines in the best wind locations and store the energy as synthetic ship fuel, or for ships that make short journeys, use battery power.
Thanks Rosie. Very informative and should help raise awareness of the benefits of floating offshore wind that is coming soon to the Hunter and Illawarra. 😊
When you want your car serviced, you don't bring the service station to your car, you take your car to the service station, exactly as Hywind Scotland is currently doing with its floating turbines. In the long run, floating wind will end up much cheaper than fixed bottom offshore. Very little specialised marine equipment needed, just land based servicing on the dockside, with all the service engineers working from home. It will take time to build the servicing infrastructure and port facilities, but by the time we get to 30MW offshore turbines, they will all be floating, just as currently all 10MW+ turbines are offshore because installing them on land is impractical.
@@ClimateRealism Because in some places (e.g Japan) it's the only renewable generation system that they have plenty of space for, and it'll get a lot cheaper as it grows so should be competitive. As nigel explains, the ability to float it into port for major servicing may actually reduce maintenance costs. (maybe - it depends how long it takes, as it'llbe offline for that time).
Excellent video Rosie, thanks a lot! Your last minute comment about decarbonising long shipping routes with floating wind turbines is a very interesting notion, food for thoughts!
I love your content! How about combining tidal energy with the wind energy? You already have the transmission cables and already need a big base anyway. Throw some PV panels on too, just for fun
In my view materials advances are going to be transformative for offshore wind, including floating. Basalt fiber is now being used in China as a component of wind turbines, and has great advantages. It is inert and reacts neither to UV or seawater, is tougher than glass fiber and as rebar can replace steel, with projected lifespans of over 100 years instead of the 35 years of steel, and then is completely recyclable as well as emitting a fraction of the GHG in manufacture compared to steel. And we can now make biomass derived resins to glue them together, PECAN, so we can have very long duration, low carbon materials far more suitable for a marine environment than anything which we have previously been doing.
Basalt fiber/resin has long been used as low-conductivity wall ties (My house has a load from in 2014). And it is impressively light, strong and much less brittle than you might expect. Where are they proposing put it on turbines - in the blades instead of glass fibre?
@@xxwookey You name it, and basalt fiber has good characteristics for use off shore. For instance rebar made from basalt has the same expansion characteristics as concrete, unlike steel, so lasts way longer. But also for blades. Unfortunately I can't put links here, but here are the characteristics of basalt for bionic plates in turbine blades: 'Under the high wind speed, the fatigue damage covered the whole skin, only slight damage occurred at the trailing edge of the tip. The dangerous point is mainly located near the tip of 50 m-60 m along the span direction. The traditional Miner theory can accurately predict the fatigue life of wind turbine blade, and the fatigue life of the wind turbine blade with basalt fiber bionic plate is 29 years, while the fatigue life of the glass fiber wind turbine blade at the same scale is less than 1 year.'
Hello Rosie! It would be interesting to see your commentary on more wind turbine concepts. May I suggest looking into student's designs from the JamesDysonAwards energy category? Its really fascinating✨️
Hywind Scotland, the floating wind farm that's just been taken down for maintenance, managed a 54% capacity factor over its 5 years of operation. (Over every time of day, every season, it averaged 54% of its maximum capacity) Onshore wind averages in the '30s, and a very good solar array is 20 to 22%
Hywind Scotland was placed in a convenient test location, not the location with the best winds, and they used medium size turbines, not the biggest and most efficient ones. The big new floating farms should do significantly better... it will be cheap power.
@@nigels.6051 Thanks for that additional information, I believe they had 8 or 10 MW turbines. They still had the highest operating capacity factor of any renewable project in the UK...
@@thewheelieguy They are six MW turbines so a decent size at the time they were installed, but the new commercial floating wind turbines are going to be around 20MW so will be able to reach up into more powerful and consistent winds. I do wonder if the high capacity factor might have more to do with the turbines used than the fact that they are floating, or their location. Capacity factor is normally calculated as average output / maximum output, and if you fit large blades plus a small generator that reaches maximum output at low wind speeds, you can easily get a high capacity factor figure. The blades on these turbines are quite long for 6MW output, and they are also direct drive, so no gearbox, which probably improves output but may have imposed a generator limited maximum rather than a blade size limited maximum. So expensive turbines, probably for reliability reasons, but which happen to give a good capacity factor. Probably a lot closer to what will be used on the big farms though than what is used on a typical offshore wind farm, so not necessarily cheating from a testing point of view. I don't think the high capacity factor figures actually tell us much about floating wind, they just make for good press releases!
MingYang OceanX is a breakthrough in offshore wind design ( because of guy ropes which allows better overall structure and weight distribution). They are updating their product portfolio nearly every year so I expect to see 2х11mw design in 1-2 years and 2х14mw design in 2-4 years. I'm sure that this design will go mainstream in 5-10 years and a lot of companies will mimick/develop that.
At some point, it is certain we will have to industrialise floating sea wind with mass production techniques based on standard components to bang out and float more than 1,000 units every year. For this, we must chose a design that can be made rapidly and assembled entirely onshore, then just be floated out and hooked up. If it is damaged or defective it must be easily unhooked and towd back for repair. Those design restrictions will dictate the model design features - so they are unlikely to be the biggest or most complex designs with the great output, nor are they likely to be done on spar buoys. I suggest we set up a panel in the UK to review all the available technologies to determine the design that most lends itself to mass adoption. I am particularly impressed with one VAWT model in development in Holland that has a single blade, erected on a giant barrel such that higher winds elevate it, automatically reducing its wind load based on the blade design. It seems to offer the best combination of simplicity, economy of materials and power - they reckon they can make them at 12.5MW. It’s early days, but we need to be floating more than 1000 pa within the next five years just in the UK - time’s a wasting….
The developers don't seem to agree, for example BlueFloat's Celtic Sea wind farm is planned to produce 1GW from 50 turbines, so 20MW turbines, with construction starting in 3 years, so they will be using small numbers of the largest available turbines. The UK now has 30GW of installed wind capacity, but not a single vertical axis turbines as far as I know. Using untested technology on GW scale farms is not sensible, especially floating farms located in the windiest of places!
@@nigels.6051 Aha - a fellow enthusiast! No, there are no VAWTs I know of in the UK. This particular VAWT is being developed in Holland. So far he has only tested a small model, but a larger test model is underway. It is fantastically clever in its simplicity, though. I do maintain that we need to industrialise the entire process of turbine production in the UK to scale it up. Delivering a turbine should be no more than towing it out and plugging it in. Removing a broken turbine should be no more than towing it back and fixing it. The spar buoy turbines are amazing - and I note the Hywind turbines are all being taken back to Skandy for refitting - already.
@@ThinkermanQuindo I have seen a vertical axis turbine in the UK, many years ago in South Wales. Looked a fantastic design and was obviously better than the horizontal axis machines next to it, but the test results didn't agree! We have already had this competition back in the 90's, vertical lost, and if it is to have another go, it needs to prove itself on land first, or in very small and easily accessible offshore test farms as we are maybe seeing with SeaTwirl, expect it to fail again! The Celtic Sea floating area does seem to be getting quite a few designs, it will be a competition between the farms to find the right design, but the turbines will be conventional technology because the farms are too big to risk anything else. I agree that it needs industrialising, but that is now underway along the South Wales ports, the Celtic Sea turbines will be simply towed out of port and anchored, then brought back for servicing. Massive investment needed for the ports, the turbine manufacturers and the wind farm operators, so the first farms will be a bit expensive, but after that... 20GW of cheap green power coming up, the bigger the scale, the cheaper it will be, the bigger the turbines, the cheaper it will be! Floating wind is capable of having larger turbines that anything else, expect them to continue increasing in size...
I know some trainees in Danish Folkecenter for Rewable Energy perhaps started this concept about floating wind energy because. they made an own design years ago.
Cabling must be a challenge for floating wind/deep water windfarms. The additional loads on cables due to a moving turbine, plus the much longer cables will be a quantative difference in difficulty from fixed turbines.
As an engineer, I’m disappointed smarter minds haven’t harnessed the potential power of endless waves and tides. Are we generating electricity anywhere using these natural power sources?
Many years ago the question for floating wind was 'how will the main bearings do being slopped abut like that' (so adding significantly to the dynamic loads). I guess if Hywind has been dragged back to port for major bearing work, that suggests that those fears were real. I'm sure I read that bearings could be replaced out st sea, because they are built as 3 segments precisely to allow in-situ replacement. But perhaps the point is that they have realised that beefier ones are needed, not just replacements of the standard ones, which is to hard to do out at sea. Looks like the bearing life is half or 1/3rd of a fixed turbine. Does anyone have details of what has been discovered? Anyway, yet another 'yay' for a quality video.
You need to remember that Hywind was built as an experiment, they wanted to find out how long the bearings would last, without having to wait for 30 years. So they would not have used extra durable components. I'm not sure that they are actually worn out anyway, it may just be that they want to see the results and upgrade them to test the next generation of technology, and the easiest way to do a thorough examination is to tow them into port. Also, we are now about to start serious bidding for GW size floating wind farms, those results are needed this autumn. We did already have some large size floating wind auctions, but nobody bid, too much risk for the price our government was asking, but this time there is more sensible money available for the risks that need to be taken... floating wind is about to get serious.
As an electrical engineer I was wondering if floating has a major problem with reliability of the electrical cables connecting to them. Love your videos as they are full of technical details and generally always include the effects of $. Thanks
Hey Bertie, subsea umbilical cables are used in practically all FPSOs and floating platforms - I can say from personal experience that they operate very reliably. Practically all technical impediments to floating offshore wind have already been solved in the oil and gas industry - which is good and bad. Makes floating wind viable, but also means the video is overly optimistic on future reduction in cost.
@@kindling1191 thanks but just saying they are reliable from experience does help me imagine how they solve the fundamental problem. To my simple mind a floating platform will always move. This movement must translate to the connecting cables. How do they solve the fatiguing effects on these cables. Is the solution that they simply replace them once fatiguing is found? Or is there another method. Or is fatiguing not really an issue and if so why? Thanks for replying anyway.
@@bertiewalker5140 Hi Bertie, I was only responding to your original question “if floating has a major problem with reliability of electrical cables”. A detailed explanation of how that is achieved is a bit beyond the scope of a TH-cam comment, and not one that Rosie could realistically answer as a mechanical engineer. Fatigue is only one small part of the reliability issue but I’ll give a brief response on that point. Copper is very resistant to fatigue and the range of movement is restricted by the outer armouring applied in a helical formation. Cable movement is further constrained by supporting it via submerged buoyant arches that are tethered to the sea floor, combined with strategically located deadweights. This ensures the cable makes a controlled “S” shape as it rises from the sea floor to the floating topsides. Hope that goes some way to answering your question.
Hi Rosie, question: could off-shore wind turbines be used to re-charge battery-based container ships (maybe which are supported by attached sail / wind turbine / tide turbine generated electricity)?
We would need new battery technology to power a container ship at reasonable cost, they travel huge distances, and can't afford the time for many recharges, but smaller battery ships that make short journeys, such as the wind farm support vessels are already being recharged at the wind farms. For container ships, in the near future, they will be powered by synthetic fuels created by the wind farms, and will be able to refuel at the wind farm or nearby. Maersk said recently: "660,000 standard shipping containers transported on green fuels in 2023", "Maersk is investing in new methanol enabled vessels of which the first eight very large ships (16,000 TEU each) are entering Maersk’s fleet in 2024, with the first vessel, “Ane Maersk” already deployed. "
I'm personally skeptical about the synthetic fuel idea, in part because making it in a way that doesn't directly spew CO2 into the atmosphere likely requires several times the electricity input compared to charging a battery (similar problem as with hydrogen). This makes production of the fuel very expensive, to the point where it's uneconomical without huge, never-ending climate subsidies (or government mandates that would dramatically increase the cost of shipping). Realistically, I see container ships continuing to just run off fossil fuels for a long, long time, until, eventually, battery technology catches up to make the battery solution feasible. I don't see them every switching to a synthetic fuel, at least not beyond token demonstration gimmicks, solely for greenwashing purposes.
@@ab-tf5fl On a container ship, if you fit an extra battery, then you have to carry one less container, that is a big impact on profits, So unless batteries become much smaller, I suspect they will stay with liquid fuel for the big ships that routinely travel half way around the world. Also, recharging a container ship for a long journey is going to take time, and time is the biggest cost for a container ship, they can't make profits if they are not moving. This means that they need to be refilled with fuel while unloading/loading. While you can charge batteries quickly, supplying enough electricity to do so is going to be a big problem, they will want the entire output of a GW windfarm to charge in the required time, and that is going to be a problem if the windfarm that particular port is connected to has a calm day! It is hard to see batteries winning over liquid fuel for ocean journeys, and that applies to both ships and planes. Short journeys are a different matter, really short journeys already make economic sense for both ships and planes. There will have to be liquid fuel available, and as long as the whole shipping and aviation industries change at the same time, and we don't end up with some companies using fossil while others use green, then there will not be a problem. Once wind-synthetic fuel infrastructure is operational, the costs will not make a big difference to shipping and aviation costs, that is why we already see both shipping and airline businesses starting the transition, new ships and new planes are being built to be synthetic fuel compatible. Also note that ships currently run off what is left over after refining petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, rocket fuel, etc. Once people stop using those other products from fossil sources, fossil shipping fuel will become very expensive, and unavailable, this is already happening with the move to electric vehicles reducing petrol/diesel use, the change will soon become quite rapid.
@@ab-tf5fl Sufficient batteries for a trip around the world currently take too much space = less containers = lost profit. Charging in the ocean instead of in port means lost time = lost profit. Charging in port, while unloading/loading is fine as long as the port has a 1GW wind farm nearby and you can take all its power and there is a good wind at the time, but a calm day would be a disaster for profits. Realistically, ocean going container ships need liquid fuel available in port. Synthetic fuel should not be expensive, it can be created from overnight electricity in windy weather and then stored, that electricity is cheap, currently sometimes negatively priced, so you are paid to take it. Currently people complain about wind turbine operators being paid to turn their turbines off, that power can instead be used to make synthetic fuels, we already have "free" power available and the amount is going to increase hugely as we build enough wind turbines to power the country on a calm day. Synthetic fuel will be cheap, once the infrastructure to create them is built, seems likely that they will become cheaper than fossil fuels in a couple of decades time, even without carbon penalties for fossil fuels.
Emergence: A complex behaviour arising from simple roots. Studies show (easy to find Texas scientists plus others) kiwifruit are way, way, way... more beneficial to eat than their individual mineral components. As Rosie points out maybe... just maybe offshore wind has an emergence value too.
7:38 As mentioned in this video floating wind turbine generator can have a huge long term advantage over fixed offshore wind turbine generators in that they can be towed to near shore for major repairs and overhauls. This makes them far safer for human's to service with that service able to be done in a low wind environment near full scale machine shops onshore. Floating wind turbine generators would be some of the largest floating structures with no crew posing a navigation hazard if they were to loose their mooring.
Hi Rosie - you didn't talk about Enerkite, which could potentially be ideal for floating offshore: low mass = small buoyancy - body, low center of gravity = high stability, no tower to climb for maintenance since all relevant stuff is down on the platform, and more.. I'd love to hear your asessement of this technologie!
I wonder if a spar buoy paired with a two blade turbine could be the technology that conquers the market. With the blades aligned with the tower, the whole assembly can be put together on shore and launched along a track into a dredged pit. A spar buoy may not be the best from a moments perspective, but keeping the whole assembly linear has a lot to be said for it when assembling thousands of turbines
yep, countries and areas with big coastal cities and not a lot of shallw water are interested. California and teh west coast showing a big pottential, but also the atlantic shores in europe and probably the indian shores and huge coastal cities in addition to Japan China and Korea. For me that is more than just a niche. I remember a figure in the direction of 50% of world population being less than 50km of the sea shore. that´s no more a niche. the advantage of floating wind, is that you can assemble it on teh shores at a factory and float it to it final position. that would indeed avoid the complicated intsallation of the blades on the fixed offshore turbines. only time will tell if it becomes cheaper or not.
Hi Rosie, can you help us understand why wind turbines have the heavy generator on top of the tower instead of at the bottom, connected with a drive shaft to the rotors? Is it because the mass of the generator stabilizes the tower against gusts?
Wouldn't a driveshaft to the bottom of the tower weigh more than the generator? A 20MW driveshaft must weigh a fair amount, and need quite a few bearings on the way down the quarter Km high tower. The generators seem to work perfectly well at the top! I imagine that having the generator at the bottom is going to cause issues for the yaw motors, they would have to fight against the torque on the generator?
10:50 I would have thought Japan would be more interested in wave power than wind but are there still questions over RoI and power output linked to what designs should be used & with a common design come with reduced costs of manufacturing and installation etc?
Generation systems typically have redundancy factor like 10-30%, I'm sure it's practical 20% are down for maintenance at any point in time. Maintenance is done "run of the mill" rather than emergency or disaster basis
Thank you Rosie. I would not dare to suggest this if it was not far from your usual area of expertise, but if you want to know a bit more about vessel stability at sea I would recommend C.A. Marchaj "Seaworthiness. The Forgotten Factor". It is an oldish book now. While this is a book about yacht design, it gets into how floating bodies respond to wave systems, including large ships. As you were showing the various platform types, I was thinking about how Machaj depicts their roll behaviour. I am sure there are more academic works out there.
On one hand, offshore wind seems a no brainer because of availability of consistent wind. The, for me, not a no brainer is the transmission of the generated electricity to land. Of course the large capital expenditure and operating expenditure are obstacles, but they're just part of the operating plan. When they're in place and operational, they seem economically sustainable.
It's not a no-brainer but also not rocket science. Sea floor cables are a very established technology, and HVDC is fairly established and can make it work for the required distances. What still requires work is rigging up many turbines to the cable. That said, I find the most interesting option to _not_ transmit the electricity to land but instead use it for energy-intensive processes near the turbines, or for charging electric ships.
@@leftaroundabout Good thought. What about a battery depot, full of batteries that can be charged and swapped for discharged batteries? Nah, probably never work. Anyway, I am not an engineer or scientist all my questions are valid?
What happens when the turbines start to suffer erosion to the blades due to the salt in the air how do you replace them after 15 years when they are suffering motor damage
I've been reading some challenges with gearbox life in some of the larger offshore turbines - would be interested in what you thought about this. i.e. whether it's a big challenge or just one of the more minor issues.I was intrigued by one company that has a magnetic gearbox for wind turbines and I always wondered why that idea got stuck in the "valley of death." It's not dead but one might imagine it getting a much bigger boost if the problem was really that bad.
There are about 3,000 miles (4800 km)of offshore pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, I wonder if they are conductive enough to double as transmission lines for offshore wind?
Probably, but high current in a gas pipeline seems problematic both due to losses from lack of insulation and, you know, combining combustible fuel with high current. Can fix second by stopping gas extraction, first by insulating but is probably even more difficult than just recycling the pipelines for cables.
I'd be interested in learning how offshore wind turbines are designed & tested. For example, ocean labs centers that mimic marine conditions or is everything done on computer using AI models? In terms of materials: there have been several underwater tidal turbines in service for a few decades - how have they contributed to the suitability & use of materials for floating wind turbines. My country requires around 60 GWh electricity. We have 3 major coastal development areas (and 3 major inland development areas) so offshore wind could significantly contribute to our country's energy needs (when it's a lot cheaper). We also have great solar potential similar to Oz, awa on shore wind potential. We also have 3 or 4 hotspot areas for geothermal. We have only recently completed several new coal fired power stations with one near completion - it would be great if these could be converted to run on renewables instead of coal, so we don't (a) lose our investment and (b) take advantage of existing transmission & distribution infrastructure. Rooftop solar is taking off slowly, but it's still unaffordable for most. I'm also interested in how off shore wind could eventually contribute to a global energy grid, perhaps managed by an international organisation similar to Interpol - perhaps via the UN (using UHVDC cables at the backbone of the network?). These wind farms could be located in the middle of vast ocean expanses eg between Africa & S America, usa & europe etc. I hadn't thought of mid-ocean refueling stations for ships - interesting concept! Would ships also only charge to 80% 🤔
It's just going to be too expensive. Very hard to get below 250€/MWh in today's prices. Could end up being even more than that, even with possible technology improvements.
This technology is needed along the west coast of Canada. Lots of wind out there, but its too deep for conventional turbine assets. And as the technology is perfected and advanced, like all technologies, they will become cheaper. From a materials perspective there is no reason for floating to be more expensive than fixed installations.
I think you might be underestimating the cost of a floating platform capable of holding a 20MW quarter km high turbine reasonably vertical, plus the cost of the anchor cables and moorings required to hold onto 20MW+ of power! Fixed bottom in shallow water must take less materials. The advantage of being able to install the turbine while still in port may pay for the extra cost, but I think more materials will be used for floating?
If I wanted a 3-phase supply to my home, then the street loads would have to be considered, and I may be denied. If the 30 homes on my street wanted a 3-phase supply and the street has gas supply, then our street transformer might have to be upgraded first. I am just talking about 3phase, 3 times more electricity. So if gas cooking and gas hotwater and gas home heating is replaced with electric and BV oversized battery charging for 2 or 3 cars in every home. Then we may wait months or a year or 2. Now, if 20 million buildings on the grid went 3phase, I think anyone could see a problem. Now add industrial heating demand. I think we would see glowing wires in the streets. Does anyone see a grid capacity problem 🤔 ??
Typically you would use cathodic protection and paint. Also you estimate the amount of material you will most likely loose over the structures lifetime and add it to your design thickness. That works pretty well. What often kills offshore structures is fatigue, then at welds. This is why offshore wind likes monopiles much better than jacket structures: Much less welds to inspect and to possibly fail.
Have a look at my comment above. The use of basalt fiber, including to substitute steel rebar, ups the life from around 35 years to around 100 years, as it does not corrode. It is also very low carbon to produce, and totally recyclable using biomass PECAN resins.
Im somewhat surprised not to hear anything about tuned mass dampers. I realize that weight, high up in a floating platform, seems counterintuitive one would think stability of the nacelle and hub would be important.
Isn't it a little difficult to tune a mass damper to the frequency of the waves? That is why Rosie mentioned "active" stabilisation, it can cope with anything thrown at it.. Active may include mass, but also aerodynamic.
The cable connected to the floating turbines is moving .It is a dinamic cable. Some say it is a major problem. What about some comment from Rosie about it.
@@HendrikStander-v1l The drill pipe from a floating oil rig is probably a hell of a lot more prone to damage, and yet there seem to be hundreds if not _thousands_ of them, in operation for decades... 🤔
If these designs are borrowed from the oil & gas industry, how do they maintain their platforms?? Cost is never an issue for oil & gas platforms....what needs to be done, to redress that imbalance?
In the case of an oil well, the platform *has* to be maintained until the well is completely sealed, otherwise, you end up with a huge spill costing the company billions of dollars in fines. Google "Deepwater Horizon" for a recent example. In the case of a windmill, neglecting the platform simply means that the company no longer gets revenue for sending power to the electricity grid, but it's not the environmental disaster that you'd get from a poorly maintained oil rig.
I dunno. It seems to me that a deep sea floating platform will always be more expensive than shallow water turbines - the higher cost of connection alone will make sure of that. Which would not be a huge problem if there was a real shortage of places to put shallow water turbines but there most certainly isn't. I don't think the higher capacity factor of a deep water turbine is going to overcome this.
There is a shortage of shallow water. Offshore wind farms take a huge amount of space to maximise performance, and even the UK, which has more shallow water sites than most countries, is running out. Plus our best wind is over the deeper waters, that is why the new wind farms off our south west coast are going in the deep waters of the Celtic Sea, not in the shallow waters nearby, we have 12GW allocated for floating wind in the Celtic Sea alone, and none in the shallow water nearby!
It's not just capacity factor, but also the ability to have wind farms widely spaced around the country so they produce at different times and reduce intermittency. When the wind is calm in the North Sea, it's often blowing on the other side of the UK. There's currently very little on the west coast because the sea there is so deep.
There may also be cases where the shallow-water site you would ideally like to locate a windfarm is a protected marine sanctuary, so you have to move it further away.
Tip them upside down and place them about fifty or a hundred metres below the surface, preferably where seafloor topography gives you a strong, steady current. The kinetic energy of water will always beat that of air, and the reduction or elimination of problems caused by the intermittent nature of wind would reduce the need to incur the cost of battery storage. Call it offshore hydropower
@@dennisenright9347 dunno, but these are prototypes, so unit cost is much higher than mass production. Rosie says this for the floating wind turbines too
Rosie love your work. But if every Australian 20million vehicles were BVs with oversized battery and parked 23hrs every day, and every Australian building rooftop PV covered only 33m² then when the sunshines the grid cashflow is DEAD. The grid is a massive $1TRILLION infrastructure investment and needs $100BILLIONs in cashflow every year. Dead cashflow is a financial disaster far bigger than a grid generator's dead cashflow. Do you see the problem. A little more rooftop PV and then the customers can be the grid supplier. So step 1, unload the customers load. Step 2, keep the customers connected and supplying the grid back to its maximum capacity, 600gWh daily. Step 3, add industrial heavy user customers and RECOVER CASH FLOWS. Step 4, avoid more grid capacity construction, it is incredibly expensive. $1, 2, 5, 6, 10 millions per km is the published facts and professional construction opinions. (TRILLIONS) Step 5, protect grid cashflow. Step 6, understand that the grid was built out over 10 decades. Step 7, understand that not only transmission lines and infrastructure, but distribution lines and infrastructure to millions and millions of customers who need no breaks in supply 24/7 is 1million km. Step 8, customers pay for rooftop PV and maintain it. Step 9, customers pay for BVs oversized battery parked 23hrs every day. Step 10, Expensive ANY GRID GENERATION will fail financially and want government money, tax payer's money. Nuclear promoters are the pits of economic disgusting. Snowy 2.0 in future droughts and even today is the pits of economic disgusting. Nuclear want to stop worldwide CO2 emissions and for Australia to buy more nuclear submarines and USA weapon systems. Nuclear want to export uranium yellowcake to 9billion people including the dictatorships nuclear electricity industries. Nuclear wants the world and the USA to police nuclear weapons non proliferation. Nuclear want to add military exploding budgets to grid electricity costs. Nuclear Australia wants the world to buy Australian iron ore and coal and copper and zinc and aluminium and uranium yellowcake and electrical grid raw materials. And Electric Vehicles or BV batteries materials. Australia nuclear electricity stations are also military targets. And todays grid handles only part of Australia's energy, only 15% of Australia's energy. So 100% energy as grid electricity, FMD. The old Australian saying. $7TRILLION to $70TRILLION plus generation plant costs $1TRILLIONs to ..... Then look at the cashflow the new grid must achieve. FMD. I said it again.
Here in British Columbia the latest mega dam is now filling for the fist time. We have a long Pacific coast line but, a short continental shelf that was used as the excuse for the Site C dam, $20 Bn all debt and, 60 miles of arable land flooded the reason for the dam was put power the new LNG industry which ironically sits on the coast, there are hundreds of miles of new power pylons between the two projects, you can't make this shit up.
This video got me wondering that if offshore wind is such a great energy resource, would it make sense to have these facilities serviced by industrial scale electric 'tankers'. In this model a series of large battery ships could rotate from the offshore wind farm to a seaside city or even a site of a fossil fuel power plant or nuclear power plant which has been deactivated. Once the ship had discharged its power into the grid, it could travel back to the offshore farm replace a now fully charged ship which would return to the land based grid connection.
Ever noticed that batteries get hot when you change or discharge them? That heat is wasted energy, and probably makes ‘battery ships impractical. But impracticality doesn’t seem to deter governments nowadays so I look forward to seeing huge fleets of battery ships.
@@SocialDownclimber Yeah, moving electricity via cables is much more efficient than storing the electricity in a battery and physically moving the battery. The latter approach may sometimes necessary in temporary, one-off situations, but not for permanent infrastructure.
Floating offshore carries higher capital expenditure by order of magnitude. Does it provide availability of output at rates orders of magnitude greater than the close to shore or onshore turbines?
Hi Rosie. Thank you for all of your informative videos. I was wondering of your opinion about the feasibility of using multiple power generating technologies on offshore wind turbines. Ie. cladding The Tower of the turbine with solar panels & connecting to its base or immediate vicinity some Wave or Tidal Generators such as CorPowerOcean. 2 or 3 source's of power generation is better than just one on its own. You would even save money on the transmission lines as you'd only use one rather than three. Unless the answer to my question is what (@EngineerLewis) & company are facing with there TLP Substitute.
The amount of solar would be minute and Wave and Tidal on any structure just costs to much. So YES they share a common connection but NO that still does not make the economics stack up.
It kind of will be suboptimal in everything. Fabrication and installation of the steel structure will be hard when the parts are too fragile. For solar, without any axis tracker the amount produced will be also small.
Rosie, the real energy is in underwater current generation. If you took all the nuclear weapons ever made, the energy released would be equivalent to 30 seconds of energy available in the Eastern Unitted States gulf stream current!!! The currents that go around every continent and also where there are two islands with constricting terrain on the ocean floor create a 100% duty cycle current for generators. This current varies very little from season to season. Since water at the ocean-atmosphere interface is 760 times as dense as the atmosphere, the potential is astronomical in creating energy for underwater electrical generation. The challenges are to create seals around the shaft that interfaces with sea water. The challenge to slow down the blades so fish are not hit by the can be mostly solved by using a reduction gearbox, BTW....is already used on commercial land based wind generators. A sonic system to keep whales etc away. can be devised. A cable system to lower and raise the wind generator for maintenance is being used by the offshore systems already. Lastly you don't need very many of these systems because they generate a couple of orders more energy, than even the best onshore or offshore wind generations can provide. So lets take a very lo ball figure of 1 water current equals 100 offshore generators; the cost differential per M wh/hr is so much in favor of underwater generators.
I can imagine floating recharging stations in the middle of the ocean charging ships that come by. They would have to be charging with a C rating that would make today's batteries look like capacitors. Arcing hundreds of thousands of volts per second with amp ratings that would blow your mind. No humans allowed in the area when charging. Make lightning look tame by comparison. Is that the imagination you wanted?
Normal Lithium batteries can be recharged perfectly safely in 40 minutes, doesn't matter what size they are. For an ocean going container ship, that is going to require a charging cable capable of carrying gigawatts of power, which at first thought seems a little impractical. The real issue is that no shipping company is going to want to stop in the middle of the ocean, they will want to charge while unloading and reloading, thus taking zero time, time is big money for container ships, so unless there is going to be a port in the middle of the ocean, with most container ships visiting it to load/unload, then I can't see this happening.
Multiple turbines tied together to make a floating community of turbines? Is that a recipe for massive failure of the turbines at once or is it a possible solution for stable buoyancy?
`"Hywind Scotland was the world’s best-performing offshore wind farm as it achieved a capacity factor of 54 per cent over its five years of operations." Do we know why the world's best-performing wind farm is floating? Is it because it is floating? It doesn't have the biggest turbines, only 6MW each.
Probably because floating turbines can be use where the wind is best, rather than needing a shallow area. West of Sheltand is a really windy patch of sea, while places like the Thames estuary are more sheltered.
@@robinbennett5994 Hywind Scotland is located a short distance from the port of Peterhead, it appears to be a convenient test site, rather than the location of the best wind. Of course floating wind does have the choice of the best wind sites, but I'm not convinced this is the reason in this case. My guess is that they used turbines rated for use in lower wind areas, hence they did better than they were designed for, and also wore out rather fast! I'm not sure how capacity factors are calculated though.
Probably better for birds than on or near shore, but not sure about marine life. Deep drilling platforms are actually known to improve some ecosystems as they provide habitat, these platforms could possibly do similar.
@@szurketaltos2693 I'm sure you're right about that, but I wonder about the effect on marine mammals, especially whales and dolphins. Any sound transmission from these units is likely to be wide-ranging.
@@mattlodge7305 hm, boat props don't seem to be a huge concern for sound and those are in the water; sonar is the real whale killer it seems. But maybe props are a bigger problem than I'm aware of?
It appears to be spelt wrong then! Gaelic spelling also agrees with Rosie rather than with you: Cinn Chàrdainn Maybe it is time to change the spelling to match the current pronunciation?
Because we are building the offshore wind farms at much larger scale with much larger turbines than is possible onshore, thus it will be much cheaper than building onshore. The Dogger Bank fixed bottom Offshore Wind area is 8,660 square Km in size, that is one wind farm, although built in stages of around 500 square Km each, the Celtic Sea floating wind farm area is 6,700 square Km, together that is almost the size of the country of Wales in two wind farms. When people say that onshore wind is cheaper, they are not comparing the same things, often it is the sort of turbine erected by a farmer with two or three on his farm, built to a design that has been in use for.a couple of decades, because that is all we have been installing onshore for the last decade, compared to the latest prototype offshore turbines on a farm that will produce 10,000 times more power. We are still developing the offshore technology, and are still in the early stages of floating offshore, the development and risks have to be paid for until the technology matures, but it will mature, and then it will be much cheaper than onshore, and more importantly, actually possible to build.
Lessons are taught, learnings can be gained with or without a teacher. In my view, this was a nice use of the word "learnings", perfectly valid, and better than using "lessons" or "insights", which have slightly different meanings. Not everyone uses the same English, it is a rule of English that it is open to evolution, with no single authority defining correct English, this makes Rosie's English perfectly valid.
I don't know about the Australian market but Britain already has too much wind power on some days. Then they are being paid to dump power. Conversely there can be periods with no wind at all. What do you do then? France puts out less CO2 than Britain or Germany and has far cheaper electricity thanks to nuclear. There Iis NO way to store enough electricity to tide a country over for a few days. Batteries are only suitable for grid smoothing.
No, we don't have too much wind. Yes, we sometimes turn some turbines off, but so infrequently that nobody has bothered to make use of the excess power yet, even though that excess power is available at very cheap/free/negative prices. If there was enough excess then somebody would invest in some batteries or hydrogen electrolisers, or an aluminium smelter to make use of it. You shouldn't worry about paying to turn turbines off, that is just the way the system works, quite often they are turned off because France is paying us to take their excess nuclear power, because nuclear can't be turned off overnight, so they are happy to pay us more to take their excess than we pay to turn the turbines we would otherwise be using off. Turning a turbine off is cheap and easy and extends the turbine lifetime, but you have to compensate the turbine operator for choosing to turn off that particular turbine and not somebody else's. If you have enough turbines to provide enough power on calm days, then it is inevitable that you will have excess on windy days, but we should be able to find ways to use most of that very cheap excess power, maybe for generating synthetic aviation fuel, maybe for generating synthetic "natural gas" (methane) that can be stored for use in our gas power stations in calm weather.. France doesn't really have cheap electricity, their nuclear power is partly paid for through taxes instead of electricity bills.
@nigels.6051 So how do we get through a 2 week winter wind lull? This is usually caused by an area of high pressure sitting over the whole of Northern Europe. The Germans have a term for it. Dunkelflaute. It happens more often than people think.
@@codprawn This year, May had 3 weeks with low wind, July had 4 weeks, and we used a lot of gas for 2 weeks in December and 3 weeks in January. We have been filling in with coal, but I think that is ending this year with decommissioning of the last coal plant? The summers seem to be more of an issue than the winters because there is a lot less wind power in summer. Low wind does not mean zero wind throughout the UK, if we had triple the current amount of wind power, most of those periods would have had enough wind to have needed no coal or gas, only the odd day would have been short of power. We already have a system where many industrial processes that are heavy users of electricity can be shut down for a day if necessary, so I suspect three times the current wind would have been just about enough. As more industries convert to using electricity, there will be more scope for shutting things down for a day or two, so I suspect we do not need battery storage to cover days, only for hourly peaks. We need much more wind power to replace our current use of oil, petrol, diesel, heating gas, etc., if some of that is done via synthetic fuels, as aviation fuel almost certainly will, then the electrolysis for that can easily be shut down for a few days, I'm not convinced that we need much storage. Germany has enough natural gas storage to last them 6 months without any new supply, that can store synthetic fuels without modification. UK has closed down its natural gas storage, considered unnecessary! Having some spare wind turbines is not a problem, if they are not generating power then they are not wearing out, so they become a long term investment, and given that nuclear is many times more expensive than wind, it makes much more sense to build twice as much wind as needed than to build nuclear, but we don't need that much spare. "This is usually caused by an area of high pressure sitting over the whole of Northern Europe" - this is why we have a lot of interconnectors, when we are sitting in the calm centre of that high pressure, Denmark and Norway are sitting in the strong winds at the edge, if it moves east a bit then Ireland is in the strong winds at the opposite edge, and Portugal is down on the southern edge. With floating wind, we are expanding our wind generating area to the West into the Celtic Sea, and north to Shetland, so will be less affected by large high pressure areas anyway. Our friends in Denmark and Ireland have much more of a problem with high pressure areas than us, and they also have problems with low pressure areas as the centre passes over them, so they are always going to want to work together. Currently we don't have enough wind turbines, once we have enough, the problems will disappear, except for the problem of what to do with our very expensive nuclear power that nobody wants to pay for!
@@nigels.6051 "...and given that nuclear is many times more expensive than wind..." Uranium-fired power is the cheapest power, on a sustained basis. This is because uranium is the densest fuel. Wind and solar are infinitely-expensive, on a sustained basis. This is because wind and solar are the *_least_* dense fuels.
Could these giant barges offer a safer option for offshore wind? When I hear bearing issues - that sounds like too much wind. th-cam.com/video/2qPiE4pJimw/w-d-xo.html
Great Vid Rosie, OOPs forgot to mention what these do to nature, birds killed, whales thrown off course or collide with the structures etc. I still think solar in deserts is the big win and don't forget to get everyone an EV bicycle, the other big win.
Offshore birds need offshore food, and currently our offshore birds are loosing their food due to rising sea temperatures. Burning of fossil fuels needs to end if our offshore birds are to survive, and for not so sunny locations, away from the equator, floating wind has the biggest potential to replace fossil fuels. As for the whales, the only significant problem with the fixed offshore turbines seems to be the noise of construction, which isn't going to be much of a problem if the turbines are constructed in port.
No reference at all to the environmental damage from wind turbines; from the devastation of environments thru extraction processes for their materials, to the destruction of biodiverse habitants to the harm these turbines cause to the other species (especially marine life) that we are suppose to share this planet with. Until we focus on solutions that protect all life on earth, not just human life, there will be no mitigating, much less solving, the climate crisis. The frogs in a slowly boiling pan of water is completely false. Frogs know enough to jump out. Humans apparently aren't as smart as frogs.
I'll run it down for you: Extraction: Minimal harms compared to other technologies. Wind Turbines are more materially efficient than all other types of generation except hydro if you discount the structure of the dam. 'Devastation' of environment: Minimal compared to all other generation types except geothermal and rooftop solar. Marine environments experience very little disruption from offshore wind, even in the case of turbine failure. Your comment about 'solutions that protect all life on earth' is stupid, as we need to take urgent action now to protect all life on earth, and if we wait for a perfect solution we will all boil. You have this very wrong if you actually care about our biosphere.
@@SocialDownclimber good evening. I just had a discussion with a friend about this. Wind turbines seem to me to generate about 10% of their installed capacity over a long period. So often, when I look, the 33 gigs we have installed is only generating 300 megs. Lots of machinery doing very little. lots of redundant machinery be dumped when it ages. On humans boiling; I think we are better than that. We; our children, will find ways not to boil. There is a lot of thinking that the increased temperatures will result in lower death rate due to cold and increased food production. Regards; Peter
@@peterwundersitz3715 Ok well you seem to me to be completely unable to fact check anything, since wind farm capacity factors are more like 30-40% onshore and higher offshore. Why bother to even write a post if you aren't going to base it on reality? Was it your 'friend' who told you about the capacity factor of wind farms? Maybe rethink that friendship.
Go to ground.news/rosie to stay fully informed on the latest developments in energy and technology. Save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan with my link.
Hi Rosie - I work for a company that is trying to enter the floating offshore wind market with a novel TLP substructure. There are some steep hills to climb which are also road blocks for us including finding an offshore wind developer who is willing to support a demonstration of a new platform. Even though we are the global experts on TLP Buoys with over 40 years experience, we are still struggling to find a way forward. For a developer to use a new technology, this means if they are installing 50 WTGs but one is installed very differently, then that causes a lot of disruption from their process and equipment used for the other 49. In other words, more expensive so not an attractive option. The only way to convince a developer is an argument about new technology lowering the costs which is our long term vailue proposal but the first one will be even more expensive than the baseline for floating wind. Yes there is a valley of death in this market too! ☹
Too bad that it is so expensive to try all these new things BUT I hope you get it to work-seems that floating has reasonable potential to be biggest wind market eventually as it just seems fewer site specific concerns to worry about wow time will tell💨♾️
Hi EngineerLewis
Are you in Canada by any chance?
If not the two provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada has tendered bids for Offshore Wind Farms on the Scotian Shelf and other offshore areas. You may want to contact the appropriate provincial government offices as they would provide you with companies involved in these ventures to see if they are interested in your design.
Forgive me, what's the TLP acronym stand for?
@@thewheelieguy tension leg platform=TLP
Keep your wind scam out of our oceans
As always, Rosie putting it out of the park with concise and thorough explanations of all things complicated. If you aren't a member of her Patreon, consider joining, she is one of the few producers of this quality content with the education and practical experience to back up what she says. That makes her a rare find well worth your support.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
As a niche market, I immediately thought of desalination. Moor the turbine off, say Israel, and run a simple pipe to shore. Produce fresh water directly all in one unit.
Offshore Wind turbines to harvest energy for electric ships? Fascinating!
What next? Ships powered by the wind itself?
It'll never happen!
It has already happened, at small scale.
No, the ships will not be directly wind powered, the big ships spend most of their time in the low wind parts of the world, far more cost effective to put the turbines in the best wind locations and store the energy as synthetic ship fuel, or for ships that make short journeys, use battery power.
Rotor sail (Magnus effect ) operate on a few ships. It reduces fuel consumption by 5-10%
@@nigels.6051 No kidding? Noddy.
Try googling sarcasm
@@thomasgade226 OP was referring to sailing ships I believe. 😀 Zero carbon transportation.
for electric fish, they have to recharge too aren't they?
Thanks Rosie. Very informative and should help raise awareness of the benefits of floating offshore wind that is coming soon to the Hunter and Illawarra. 😊
Thanks Rosie, interesting and informative as usual!
When you want your car serviced, you don't bring the service station to your car, you take your car to the service station, exactly as Hywind Scotland is currently doing with its floating turbines. In the long run, floating wind will end up much cheaper than fixed bottom offshore. Very little specialised marine equipment needed, just land based servicing on the dockside, with all the service engineers working from home. It will take time to build the servicing infrastructure and port facilities, but by the time we get to 30MW offshore turbines, they will all be floating, just as currently all 10MW+ turbines are offshore because installing them on land is impractical.
th-cam.com/video/jB49o5HoOdk/w-d-xo.html
Ever heard of mobile mechanics?
@@nigels.6051 why even pursue such an expensive form of power?
@@ClimateRealism Because in some places (e.g Japan) it's the only renewable generation system that they have plenty of space for, and it'll get a lot cheaper as it grows so should be competitive. As nigel explains, the ability to float it into port for major servicing may actually reduce maintenance costs. (maybe - it depends how long it takes, as it'llbe offline for that time).
@@xxwookey on my videos I detail facts and the facts are wind energy is getting more snd more expensive.
Excellent video Rosie, thanks a lot! Your last minute comment about decarbonising long shipping routes with floating wind turbines is a very interesting notion, food for thoughts!
Thanks for this interesting story and giving me something to think about!
Thank you!
I love your content!
How about combining tidal energy with the wind energy? You already have the transmission cables and already need a big base anyway. Throw some PV panels on too, just for fun
In my view materials advances are going to be transformative for offshore wind, including floating.
Basalt fiber is now being used in China as a component of wind turbines, and has great advantages. It is inert and reacts neither to UV or seawater, is tougher than glass fiber and as rebar can replace steel, with projected lifespans of over 100 years instead of the 35 years of steel, and then is completely recyclable as well as emitting a fraction of the GHG in manufacture compared to steel.
And we can now make biomass derived resins to glue them together, PECAN, so we can have very long duration, low carbon materials far more suitable for a marine environment than anything which we have previously been doing.
Basalt fiber/resin has long been used as low-conductivity wall ties (My house has a load from in 2014). And it is impressively light, strong and much less brittle than you might expect. Where are they proposing put it on turbines - in the blades instead of glass fibre?
@@xxwookey You name it, and basalt fiber has good characteristics for use off shore.
For instance rebar made from basalt has the same expansion characteristics as concrete, unlike steel, so lasts way longer.
But also for blades. Unfortunately I can't put links here, but here are the characteristics of basalt for bionic plates in turbine blades:
'Under the high wind speed, the fatigue damage covered the whole skin, only slight damage occurred at the trailing edge of the tip. The dangerous point is mainly located near the tip of 50 m-60 m along the span direction. The traditional Miner theory can accurately predict the fatigue life of wind turbine blade, and the fatigue life of the wind turbine blade with basalt fiber bionic plate is 29 years, while the fatigue life of the glass fiber wind turbine blade at the same scale is less than 1 year.'
Video should have been entitled "The sinking of off shore wind energy".
Hello Rosie! It would be interesting to see your commentary on more wind turbine concepts.
May I suggest looking into student's designs from the JamesDysonAwards energy category? Its really fascinating✨️
Hywind Scotland, the floating wind farm that's just been taken down for maintenance, managed a 54% capacity factor over its 5 years of operation. (Over every time of day, every season, it averaged 54% of its maximum capacity)
Onshore wind averages in the '30s, and a very good solar array is 20 to 22%
Hywind Scotland was placed in a convenient test location, not the location with the best winds, and they used medium size turbines, not the biggest and most efficient ones. The big new floating farms should do significantly better... it will be cheap power.
@@nigels.6051 Thanks for that additional information, I believe they had 8 or 10 MW turbines. They still had the highest operating capacity factor of any renewable project in the UK...
@@thewheelieguy They are six MW turbines so a decent size at the time they were installed, but the new commercial floating wind turbines are going to be around 20MW so will be able to reach up into more powerful and consistent winds.
I do wonder if the high capacity factor might have more to do with the turbines used than the fact that they are floating, or their location. Capacity factor is normally calculated as average output / maximum output, and if you fit large blades plus a small generator that reaches maximum output at low wind speeds, you can easily get a high capacity factor figure. The blades on these turbines are quite long for 6MW output, and they are also direct drive, so no gearbox, which probably improves output but may have imposed a generator limited maximum rather than a blade size limited maximum. So expensive turbines, probably for reliability reasons, but which happen to give a good capacity factor. Probably a lot closer to what will be used on the big farms though than what is used on a typical offshore wind farm, so not necessarily cheating from a testing point of view. I don't think the high capacity factor figures actually tell us much about floating wind, they just make for good press releases!
MingYang OceanX is a breakthrough in offshore wind design ( because of guy ropes which allows better overall structure and weight distribution). They are updating their product portfolio nearly every year so I expect to see 2х11mw design in 1-2 years and 2х14mw design in 2-4 years.
I'm sure that this design will go mainstream in 5-10 years and a lot of companies will mimick/develop that.
Thanks, Rosie!
At some point, it is certain we will have to industrialise floating sea wind with mass production techniques based on standard components to bang out and float more than 1,000 units every year. For this, we must chose a design that can be made rapidly and assembled entirely onshore, then just be floated out and hooked up. If it is damaged or defective it must be easily unhooked and towd back for repair. Those design restrictions will dictate the model design features - so they are unlikely to be the biggest or most complex designs with the great output, nor are they likely to be done on spar buoys. I suggest we set up a panel in the UK to review all the available technologies to determine the design that most lends itself to mass adoption. I am particularly impressed with one VAWT model in development in Holland that has a single blade, erected on a giant barrel such that higher winds elevate it, automatically reducing its wind load based on the blade design. It seems to offer the best combination of simplicity, economy of materials and power - they reckon they can make them at 12.5MW. It’s early days, but we need to be floating more than 1000 pa within the next five years just in the UK - time’s a wasting….
The developers don't seem to agree, for example BlueFloat's Celtic Sea wind farm is planned to produce 1GW from 50 turbines, so 20MW turbines, with construction starting in 3 years, so they will be using small numbers of the largest available turbines. The UK now has 30GW of installed wind capacity, but not a single vertical axis turbines as far as I know. Using untested technology on GW scale farms is not sensible, especially floating farms located in the windiest of places!
They are a massive scam it's all to take the tax payers money wake up
@@nigels.6051 Aha - a fellow enthusiast! No, there are no VAWTs I know of in the UK. This particular VAWT is being developed in Holland. So far he has only tested a small model, but a larger test model is underway. It is fantastically clever in its simplicity, though. I do maintain that we need to industrialise the entire process of turbine production in the UK to scale it up. Delivering a turbine should be no more than towing it out and plugging it in. Removing a broken turbine should be no more than towing it back and fixing it. The spar buoy turbines are amazing - and I note the Hywind turbines are all being taken back to Skandy for refitting - already.
@@ThinkermanQuindo I have seen a vertical axis turbine in the UK, many years ago in South Wales. Looked a fantastic design and was obviously better than the horizontal axis machines next to it, but the test results didn't agree! We have already had this competition back in the 90's, vertical lost, and if it is to have another go, it needs to prove itself on land first, or in very small and easily accessible offshore test farms as we are maybe seeing with SeaTwirl, expect it to fail again! The Celtic Sea floating area does seem to be getting quite a few designs, it will be a competition between the farms to find the right design, but the turbines will be conventional technology because the farms are too big to risk anything else. I agree that it needs industrialising, but that is now underway along the South Wales ports, the Celtic Sea turbines will be simply towed out of port and anchored, then brought back for servicing. Massive investment needed for the ports, the turbine manufacturers and the wind farm operators, so the first farms will be a bit expensive, but after that... 20GW of cheap green power coming up, the bigger the scale, the cheaper it will be, the bigger the turbines, the cheaper it will be! Floating wind is capable of having larger turbines that anything else, expect them to continue increasing in size...
what a powerful update video, thank you for this great info again
You use excellent analogies!
I am coming to Australia i like how you are telling how it is heppolt wind
Ever thought of the costs for maintaining and replacing the moving parts of these wind turbines?
I have. Wind and solar are infinitely-expensive, on a sustained basis
I know some trainees in Danish Folkecenter for Rewable Energy perhaps started this concept about floating wind energy because. they made an own design years ago.
Cabling must be a challenge for floating wind/deep water windfarms.
The additional loads on cables due to a moving turbine, plus the much longer cables will be a quantative difference in difficulty from fixed turbines.
As an engineer, I’m disappointed smarter minds haven’t harnessed the potential power of endless waves and tides. Are we generating electricity anywhere using these natural power sources?
a few, yes. Tidal : Rance, Sihwa (dam). MeyGen underwater . Wave: MANY small prototypes, most smashed by waves
Many years ago the question for floating wind was 'how will the main bearings do being slopped abut like that' (so adding significantly to the dynamic loads). I guess if Hywind has been dragged back to port for major bearing work, that suggests that those fears were real. I'm sure I read that bearings could be replaced out st sea, because they are built as 3 segments precisely to allow in-situ replacement. But perhaps the point is that they have realised that beefier ones are needed, not just replacements of the standard ones, which is to hard to do out at sea. Looks like the bearing life is half or 1/3rd of a fixed turbine. Does anyone have details of what has been discovered?
Anyway, yet another 'yay' for a quality video.
You need to remember that Hywind was built as an experiment, they wanted to find out how long the bearings would last, without having to wait for 30 years. So they would not have used extra durable components. I'm not sure that they are actually worn out anyway, it may just be that they want to see the results and upgrade them to test the next generation of technology, and the easiest way to do a thorough examination is to tow them into port. Also, we are now about to start serious bidding for GW size floating wind farms, those results are needed this autumn. We did already have some large size floating wind auctions, but nobody bid, too much risk for the price our government was asking, but this time there is more sensible money available for the risks that need to be taken... floating wind is about to get serious.
Great video!
Another great vid thanks Rosie.
Great video Rosie very informative without any basis. What off shore wind turbine would you recommend for the off shore wind farms in Bass Strait ?
Underneath couldn't they also harvest the power of the current?
That's MeyGen in Scotland
As an electrical engineer I was wondering if floating has a major problem with reliability of the electrical cables connecting to them. Love your videos as they are full of technical details and generally always include the effects of $. Thanks
Hey Bertie, subsea umbilical cables are used in practically all FPSOs and floating platforms - I can say from personal experience that they operate very reliably. Practically all technical impediments to floating offshore wind have already been solved in the oil and gas industry - which is good and bad. Makes floating wind viable, but also means the video is overly optimistic on future reduction in cost.
@@kindling1191 thanks but just saying they are reliable from experience does help me imagine how they solve the fundamental problem. To my simple mind a floating platform will always move. This movement must translate to the connecting cables. How do they solve the fatiguing effects on these cables. Is the solution that they simply replace them once fatiguing is found? Or is there another method. Or is fatiguing not really an issue and if so why? Thanks for replying anyway.
@@bertiewalker5140 Hi Bertie, I was only responding to your original question “if floating has a major problem with reliability of electrical cables”. A detailed explanation of how that is achieved is a bit beyond the scope of a TH-cam comment, and not one that Rosie could realistically answer as a mechanical engineer. Fatigue is only one small part of the reliability issue but I’ll give a brief response on that point. Copper is very resistant to fatigue and the range of movement is restricted by the outer armouring applied in a helical formation. Cable movement is further constrained by supporting it via submerged buoyant arches that are tethered to the sea floor, combined with strategically located deadweights. This ensures the cable makes a controlled “S” shape as it rises from the sea floor to the floating topsides. Hope that goes some way to answering your question.
@@kindling1191 better understood, thanks
Hi Rosie, question: could off-shore wind turbines be used to re-charge battery-based container ships (maybe which are supported by attached sail / wind turbine / tide turbine generated electricity)?
We would need new battery technology to power a container ship at reasonable cost, they travel huge distances, and can't afford the time for many recharges, but smaller battery ships that make short journeys, such as the wind farm support vessels are already being recharged at the wind farms. For container ships, in the near future, they will be powered by synthetic fuels created by the wind farms, and will be able to refuel at the wind farm or nearby. Maersk said recently: "660,000 standard shipping containers transported on green fuels in 2023", "Maersk is investing in new methanol enabled vessels of which the first eight very large ships (16,000 TEU each) are entering Maersk’s fleet in 2024, with the first vessel, “Ane Maersk” already deployed. "
I'm personally skeptical about the synthetic fuel idea, in part because making it in a way that doesn't directly spew CO2 into the atmosphere likely requires several times the electricity input compared to charging a battery (similar problem as with hydrogen). This makes production of the fuel very expensive, to the point where it's uneconomical without huge, never-ending climate subsidies (or government mandates that would dramatically increase the cost of shipping).
Realistically, I see container ships continuing to just run off fossil fuels for a long, long time, until, eventually, battery technology catches up to make the battery solution feasible. I don't see them every switching to a synthetic fuel, at least not beyond token demonstration gimmicks, solely for greenwashing purposes.
@@ab-tf5fl On a container ship, if you fit an extra battery, then you have to carry one less container, that is a big impact on profits, So unless batteries become much smaller, I suspect they will stay with liquid fuel for the big ships that routinely travel half way around the world. Also, recharging a container ship for a long journey is going to take time, and time is the biggest cost for a container ship, they can't make profits if they are not moving. This means that they need to be refilled with fuel while unloading/loading. While you can charge batteries quickly, supplying enough electricity to do so is going to be a big problem, they will want the entire output of a GW windfarm to charge in the required time, and that is going to be a problem if the windfarm that particular port is connected to has a calm day! It is hard to see batteries winning over liquid fuel for ocean journeys, and that applies to both ships and planes. Short journeys are a different matter, really short journeys already make economic sense for both ships and planes. There will have to be liquid fuel available, and as long as the whole shipping and aviation industries change at the same time, and we don't end up with some companies using fossil while others use green, then there will not be a problem. Once wind-synthetic fuel infrastructure is operational, the costs will not make a big difference to shipping and aviation costs, that is why we already see both shipping and airline businesses starting the transition, new ships and new planes are being built to be synthetic fuel compatible.
Also note that ships currently run off what is left over after refining petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, rocket fuel, etc. Once people stop using those other products from fossil sources, fossil shipping fuel will become very expensive, and unavailable, this is already happening with the move to electric vehicles reducing petrol/diesel use, the change will soon become quite rapid.
@@ab-tf5fl Sufficient batteries for a trip around the world currently take too much space = less containers = lost profit.
Charging in the ocean instead of in port means lost time = lost profit.
Charging in port, while unloading/loading is fine as long as the port has a 1GW wind farm nearby and you can take all its power and there is a good wind at the time, but a calm day would be a disaster for profits.
Realistically, ocean going container ships need liquid fuel available in port.
Synthetic fuel should not be expensive, it can be created from overnight electricity in windy weather and then stored, that electricity is cheap, currently sometimes negatively priced, so you are paid to take it. Currently people complain about wind turbine operators being paid to turn their turbines off, that power can instead be used to make synthetic fuels, we already have "free" power available and the amount is going to increase hugely as we build enough wind turbines to power the country on a calm day. Synthetic fuel will be cheap, once the infrastructure to create them is built, seems likely that they will become cheaper than fossil fuels in a couple of decades time, even without carbon penalties for fossil fuels.
Emergence: A complex behaviour arising from simple roots. Studies show (easy to find Texas scientists plus others) kiwifruit are way, way, way... more beneficial to eat than their individual mineral components. As Rosie points out maybe... just maybe offshore wind has an emergence value too.
Can large offshore wind turbines rocking motions themselves be used to generate electricity?
7:38 As mentioned in this video floating wind turbine generator can have a huge long term advantage over fixed offshore wind turbine generators in that they can be towed to near shore for major repairs and overhauls. This makes them far safer for human's to service with that service able to be done in a low wind environment near full scale machine shops onshore. Floating wind turbine generators would be some of the largest floating structures with no crew posing a navigation hazard if they were to loose their mooring.
Hi Rosie - you didn't talk about Enerkite, which could potentially be ideal for floating offshore: low mass = small buoyancy - body, low center of gravity = high stability, no tower to climb for maintenance since all relevant stuff is down on the platform, and more..
I'd love to hear your asessement of this technologie!
I wonder if a spar buoy paired with a two blade turbine could be the technology that conquers the market. With the blades aligned with the tower, the whole assembly can be put together on shore and launched along a track into a dredged pit. A spar buoy may not be the best from a moments perspective, but keeping the whole assembly linear has a lot to be said for it when assembling thousands of turbines
Excellent !!!
For another platform design see "Marine Power Systems". Al least they are getting traction and are starting production.
I would love to hear your thoughts on t-omega wind - their floating turbine solution seems much simpler, cheaper and more robust.
yep, countries and areas with big coastal cities and not a lot of shallw water are interested. California and teh west coast showing a big pottential, but also the atlantic shores in europe and probably the indian shores and huge coastal cities in addition to Japan China and Korea. For me that is more than just a niche. I remember a figure in the direction of 50% of world population being less than 50km of the sea shore. that´s no more a niche.
the advantage of floating wind, is that you can assemble it on teh shores at a factory and float it to it final position. that would indeed avoid the complicated intsallation of the blades on the fixed offshore turbines. only time will tell if it becomes cheaper or not.
Hi Rosie, can you help us understand why wind turbines have the heavy generator on top of the tower instead of at the bottom, connected with a drive shaft to the rotors? Is it because the mass of the generator stabilizes the tower against gusts?
Wouldn't a driveshaft to the bottom of the tower weigh more than the generator? A 20MW driveshaft must weigh a fair amount, and need quite a few bearings on the way down the quarter Km high tower. The generators seem to work perfectly well at the top!
I imagine that having the generator at the bottom is going to cause issues for the yaw motors, they would have to fight against the torque on the generator?
@@nigels.6051 Good point!
@@erikhy I expect generator mass is negligible compared to blade mass, especially as to turbines get bigger.
10:50 I would have thought Japan would be more interested in wave power than wind but are there still questions over RoI and power output linked to what designs should be used & with a common design come with reduced costs of manufacturing and installation etc?
Generation systems typically have redundancy factor like 10-30%, I'm sure it's practical 20% are down for maintenance at any point in time. Maintenance is done "run of the mill" rather than emergency or disaster basis
Thank you Rosie.
I would not dare to suggest this if it was not far from your usual area of expertise, but if you want to know a bit more about vessel stability at sea I would recommend C.A. Marchaj "Seaworthiness. The Forgotten Factor". It is an oldish book now.
While this is a book about yacht design, it gets into how floating bodies respond to wave systems, including large ships. As you were showing the various platform types, I was thinking about how Machaj depicts their roll behaviour. I am sure there are more academic works out there.
On one hand, offshore wind seems a no brainer because of availability of consistent wind. The, for me, not a no brainer is the transmission of the generated electricity to land. Of course the large capital expenditure and operating expenditure are obstacles, but they're just part of the operating plan. When they're in place and operational, they seem economically sustainable.
It's not a no-brainer but also not rocket science. Sea floor cables are a very established technology, and HVDC is fairly established and can make it work for the required distances. What still requires work is rigging up many turbines to the cable.
That said, I find the most interesting option to _not_ transmit the electricity to land but instead use it for energy-intensive processes near the turbines, or for charging electric ships.
@@leftaroundabout Good thought. What about a battery depot, full of batteries that can be charged and swapped for discharged batteries? Nah, probably never work. Anyway, I am not an engineer or scientist all my questions are valid?
What happens when the turbines start to suffer erosion to the blades due to the salt in the air how do you replace them after 15 years when they are suffering motor damage
I've been reading some challenges with gearbox life in some of the larger offshore turbines - would be interested in what you thought about this. i.e. whether it's a big challenge or just one of the more minor issues.I was intrigued by one company that has a magnetic gearbox for wind turbines and I always wondered why that idea got stuck in the "valley of death." It's not dead but one might imagine it getting a much bigger boost if the problem was really that bad.
Actually, the most recent designs of offshore wind turbines don't use gearboxes anymore but rely on frequency converters to match the grids frequency.
The Lazard’s 2024 LCOE+ report is out now! Do you working on a update?
Can you also incorporate wave energy converters in these offshore platforms?
There are about 3,000 miles (4800 km)of offshore pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, I wonder if they are conductive enough to double as transmission lines for offshore wind?
Probably, but high current in a gas pipeline seems problematic both due to losses from lack of insulation and, you know, combining combustible fuel with high current. Can fix second by stopping gas extraction, first by insulating but is probably even more difficult than just recycling the pipelines for cables.
The catamaran type
could be combined with wave energy and solar the added productivity will of setthe extra $$$
I'd be interested in learning how offshore wind turbines are designed & tested. For example, ocean labs centers that mimic marine conditions or is everything done on computer using AI models? In terms of materials: there have been several underwater tidal turbines in service for a few decades - how have they contributed to the suitability & use of materials for floating wind turbines.
My country requires around 60 GWh electricity. We have 3 major coastal development areas (and 3 major inland development areas) so offshore wind could significantly contribute to our country's energy needs (when it's a lot cheaper). We also have great solar potential similar to Oz, awa on shore wind potential. We also have 3 or 4 hotspot areas for geothermal. We have only recently completed several new coal fired power stations with one near completion - it would be great if these could be converted to run on renewables instead of coal, so we don't (a) lose our investment and (b) take advantage of existing transmission & distribution infrastructure. Rooftop solar is taking off slowly, but it's still unaffordable for most.
I'm also interested in how off shore wind could eventually contribute to a global energy grid, perhaps managed by an international organisation similar to Interpol - perhaps via the UN (using UHVDC cables at the backbone of the network?). These wind farms could be located in the middle of vast ocean expanses eg between Africa & S America, usa & europe etc.
I hadn't thought of mid-ocean refueling stations for ships - interesting concept! Would ships also only charge to 80% 🤔
It's just going to be too expensive. Very hard to get below 250€/MWh in today's prices. Could end up being even more than that, even with possible technology improvements.
The cost is infinite, on a sustained basis.
This technology is needed along the west coast of Canada. Lots of wind out there, but its too deep for conventional turbine assets. And as the technology is perfected and advanced, like all technologies, they will become cheaper. From a materials perspective there is no reason for floating to be more expensive than fixed installations.
I think you might be underestimating the cost of a floating platform capable of holding a 20MW quarter km high turbine reasonably vertical, plus the cost of the anchor cables and moorings required to hold onto 20MW+ of power! Fixed bottom in shallow water must take less materials. The advantage of being able to install the turbine while still in port may pay for the extra cost, but I think more materials will be used for floating?
I wonder what happens when we have a cyclone?
Or even worse, what happens when there's no wind.
0:03 "dive deep"
0:13 "revolutionise"
where're my snare drum & crash cymbal?
If I wanted a 3-phase supply to my home, then the street loads would have to be considered, and I may be denied.
If the 30 homes on my street wanted a 3-phase supply and the street has gas supply, then our street transformer might have to be upgraded first.
I am just talking about 3phase, 3 times more electricity.
So if gas cooking and gas hotwater and gas home heating is replaced with electric and BV oversized battery charging for 2 or 3 cars in every home.
Then we may wait months or a year or 2.
Now, if 20 million buildings on the grid went 3phase, I think anyone could see a problem.
Now add industrial heating demand.
I think we would see glowing wires in the streets.
Does anyone see a grid capacity problem 🤔 ??
Is there something that can be done about steel corrosion in these turbines? Like some kind of electrolysis?
Typically you would use cathodic protection and paint. Also you estimate the amount of material you will most likely loose over the structures lifetime and add it to your design thickness. That works pretty well.
What often kills offshore structures is fatigue, then at welds. This is why offshore wind likes monopiles much better than jacket structures: Much less welds to inspect and to possibly fail.
Have a look at my comment above. The use of basalt fiber, including to substitute steel rebar, ups the life from around 35 years to around 100 years, as it does not corrode.
It is also very low carbon to produce, and totally recyclable using biomass PECAN resins.
Im somewhat surprised not to hear anything about tuned mass dampers.
I realize that weight, high up in a floating platform, seems counterintuitive one would think stability of the nacelle and hub would be important.
Isn't it a little difficult to tune a mass damper to the frequency of the waves? That is why Rosie mentioned "active" stabilisation, it can cope with anything thrown at it.. Active may include mass, but also aerodynamic.
The cable connected to the floating turbines is moving .It is a dinamic cable. Some say it is a major problem. What about some comment from Rosie about it.
@@HendrikStander-v1l The drill pipe from a floating oil rig is probably a hell of a lot more prone to damage, and yet there seem to be hundreds if not _thousands_ of them, in operation for decades... 🤔
If these designs are borrowed from the oil & gas industry, how do they maintain their platforms??
Cost is never an issue for oil & gas platforms....what needs to be done, to redress that imbalance?
In the case of an oil well, the platform *has* to be maintained until the well is completely sealed, otherwise, you end up with a huge spill costing the company billions of dollars in fines. Google "Deepwater Horizon" for a recent example.
In the case of a windmill, neglecting the platform simply means that the company no longer gets revenue for sending power to the electricity grid, but it's not the environmental disaster that you'd get from a poorly maintained oil rig.
I dunno. It seems to me that a deep sea floating platform will always be more expensive than shallow water turbines - the higher cost of connection alone will make sure of that. Which would not be a huge problem if there was a real shortage of places to put shallow water turbines but there most certainly isn't. I don't think the higher capacity factor of a deep water turbine is going to overcome this.
There is a shortage of shallow water. Offshore wind farms take a huge amount of space to maximise performance, and even the UK, which has more shallow water sites than most countries, is running out. Plus our best wind is over the deeper waters, that is why the new wind farms off our south west coast are going in the deep waters of the Celtic Sea, not in the shallow waters nearby, we have 12GW allocated for floating wind in the Celtic Sea alone, and none in the shallow water nearby!
It's not just capacity factor, but also the ability to have wind farms widely spaced around the country so they produce at different times and reduce intermittency. When the wind is calm in the North Sea, it's often blowing on the other side of the UK. There's currently very little on the west coast because the sea there is so deep.
There may also be cases where the shallow-water site you would ideally like to locate a windfarm is a protected marine sanctuary, so you have to move it further away.
Tip them upside down and place them about fifty or a hundred metres below the surface, preferably where seafloor topography gives you a strong, steady current. The kinetic energy of water will always beat that of air, and the reduction or elimination of problems caused by the intermittent nature of wind would reduce the need to incur the cost of battery storage. Call it offshore hydropower
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That's MeyGen in Scotland
@thomasgade226 what's the cost of electricity produced compared to other renewables?
@@dennisenright9347 dunno, but these are prototypes, so unit cost is much higher than mass production. Rosie says this for the floating wind turbines too
How bizarre that the renewable wind energy is used to power oil and gas platforms. Even the fossil fuel companies know renewables are better.
I suspect that the real reason is just to claim to be powered by renewables in some advertising campaigns
@@dennisenright9347this, plus perhaps it is possible to suck some of the taxpayers money
@@dennisenright9347 Buying diesel and shipping it to offshore oil platforms is very expensive as well. The less you do that, the more money you save.
Rosie love your work.
But if every Australian 20million vehicles were BVs with oversized battery and parked 23hrs every day, and every Australian building rooftop PV covered only 33m² then when the sunshines the grid cashflow is DEAD.
The grid is a massive $1TRILLION infrastructure investment and needs $100BILLIONs in cashflow every year.
Dead cashflow is a financial disaster far bigger than a grid generator's dead cashflow.
Do you see the problem.
A little more rooftop PV and then the customers can be the grid supplier.
So step 1, unload the customers load.
Step 2, keep the customers connected and supplying the grid back to its maximum capacity, 600gWh daily.
Step 3, add industrial heavy user customers and RECOVER CASH FLOWS.
Step 4, avoid more grid capacity construction, it is incredibly expensive. $1, 2, 5, 6, 10 millions per km is the published facts and professional construction opinions. (TRILLIONS)
Step 5, protect grid cashflow.
Step 6, understand that the grid was built out over 10 decades.
Step 7, understand that not only transmission lines and infrastructure, but distribution lines and infrastructure to millions and millions of customers who need no breaks in supply 24/7 is 1million km.
Step 8, customers pay for rooftop PV and maintain it.
Step 9, customers pay for BVs oversized battery parked 23hrs every day.
Step 10, Expensive ANY GRID GENERATION will fail financially and want government money, tax payer's money.
Nuclear promoters are the pits of economic disgusting.
Snowy 2.0 in future droughts and even today is the pits of economic disgusting.
Nuclear want to stop worldwide CO2 emissions and for Australia to buy more nuclear submarines and USA weapon systems.
Nuclear want to export uranium yellowcake to 9billion people including the dictatorships nuclear electricity industries.
Nuclear wants the world and the USA to police nuclear weapons non proliferation.
Nuclear want to add military exploding budgets to grid electricity costs.
Nuclear Australia wants the world to buy Australian iron ore and coal and copper and zinc and aluminium and uranium yellowcake and electrical grid raw materials.
And Electric Vehicles or BV batteries materials.
Australia nuclear electricity stations are also military targets.
And todays grid handles only part of Australia's energy, only 15% of Australia's energy.
So 100% energy as grid electricity, FMD.
The old Australian saying.
$7TRILLION to $70TRILLION plus generation plant costs $1TRILLIONs to .....
Then look at the cashflow the new grid must achieve. FMD. I said it again.
Here in British Columbia the latest mega dam is now filling for the fist time. We have a long Pacific coast line but, a short continental shelf that was used as the excuse for the Site C dam, $20 Bn all debt and, 60 miles of arable land flooded the reason for the dam was put power the new LNG industry which ironically sits on the coast, there are hundreds of miles of new power pylons between the two projects, you can't make this shit up.
This video got me wondering that if offshore wind is such a great energy resource, would it make sense to have these facilities serviced by industrial scale electric 'tankers'. In this model a series of large battery ships could rotate from the offshore wind farm to a seaside city or even a site of a fossil fuel power plant or nuclear power plant which has been deactivated. Once the ship had discharged its power into the grid, it could travel back to the offshore farm replace a now fully charged ship which would return to the land based grid connection.
Ever noticed that batteries get hot when you change or discharge them? That heat is wasted energy, and probably makes ‘battery ships impractical. But impracticality doesn’t seem to deter governments nowadays so I look forward to seeing huge fleets of battery ships.
We can just connect cables from the turbines to the grid, it will always be cheaper to do this.
@@SocialDownclimber
Yeah, moving electricity via cables is much more efficient than storing the electricity in a battery and physically moving the battery.
The latter approach may sometimes necessary in temporary, one-off situations, but not for permanent infrastructure.
Floating offshore carries higher capital expenditure by order of magnitude. Does it provide availability of output at rates orders of magnitude greater than the close to shore or onshore turbines?
2-4x is not an order of magnitude (10x). .
9:17 Wind turbines providing electricity to oil and gas rigs? Sick burn by the people that made that happen! 😂👍
Hi Rosie. Thank you for all of your informative videos. I was wondering of your opinion about the feasibility of using multiple power generating technologies on offshore wind turbines. Ie. cladding The Tower of the turbine with solar panels & connecting to its base or immediate vicinity some Wave or Tidal Generators such as CorPowerOcean.
2 or 3 source's of power generation is better than just one on its own. You would even save money on the transmission lines as you'd only use one rather than three.
Unless the answer to my question is what (@EngineerLewis) & company are facing with there TLP Substitute.
The amount of solar would be minute and Wave and Tidal on any structure just costs to much. So YES they share a common connection but NO that still does not make the economics stack up.
It kind of will be suboptimal in everything. Fabrication and installation of the steel structure will be hard when the parts are too fragile. For solar, without any axis tracker the amount produced will be also small.
Rosie, the real energy is in underwater current generation. If you took all the nuclear weapons ever made, the energy released would be equivalent to 30 seconds of energy available in the Eastern Unitted States gulf stream current!!! The currents that go around every continent and also where there are two islands with constricting terrain on the ocean floor create a 100% duty cycle current for generators. This current varies very little from season to season.
Since water at the ocean-atmosphere interface is 760 times as dense as the atmosphere, the potential is astronomical in creating energy for underwater electrical generation.
The challenges are to create seals around the shaft that interfaces with sea water. The challenge to slow down the blades so fish are not hit by the can be mostly solved by using a reduction gearbox, BTW....is already used on commercial land based wind generators. A sonic system to keep whales etc away. can be devised. A cable system to lower and raise the wind generator for maintenance is being used by the offshore systems already.
Lastly you don't need very many of these systems because they generate a couple of orders more energy, than even the best onshore or offshore wind generations can provide. So lets take a very lo ball figure of 1 water current equals 100 offshore generators; the cost differential per M wh/hr is so much in favor of underwater generators.
I can imagine floating recharging stations in the middle of the ocean charging ships that come by. They would have to be charging with a C rating that would make today's batteries look like capacitors. Arcing hundreds of thousands of volts per second with amp ratings that would blow your mind. No humans allowed in the area when charging. Make lightning look tame by comparison. Is that the imagination you wanted?
Normal Lithium batteries can be recharged perfectly safely in 40 minutes, doesn't matter what size they are.
For an ocean going container ship, that is going to require a charging cable capable of carrying gigawatts of power, which at first thought seems a little impractical.
The real issue is that no shipping company is going to want to stop in the middle of the ocean, they will want to charge while unloading and reloading, thus taking zero time, time is big money for container ships, so unless there is going to be a port in the middle of the ocean, with most container ships visiting it to load/unload, then I can't see this happening.
Multiple turbines tied together to make a floating community of turbines? Is that a recipe for massive failure of the turbines at once or is it a possible solution for stable buoyancy?
`"Hywind Scotland was the world’s best-performing offshore wind farm as it achieved a capacity factor of 54 per cent over its five years of operations."
Do we know why the world's best-performing wind farm is floating?
Is it because it is floating? It doesn't have the biggest turbines, only 6MW each.
Probably because floating turbines can be use where the wind is best, rather than needing a shallow area. West of Sheltand is a really windy patch of sea, while places like the Thames estuary are more sheltered.
@@robinbennett5994 Hywind Scotland is located a short distance from the port of Peterhead, it appears to be a convenient test site, rather than the location of the best wind. Of course floating wind does have the choice of the best wind sites, but I'm not convinced this is the reason in this case.
My guess is that they used turbines rated for use in lower wind areas, hence they did better than they were designed for, and also wore out rather fast! I'm not sure how capacity factors are calculated though.
I wonder how these installations will affect wildlife?
Probably better for birds than on or near shore, but not sure about marine life. Deep drilling platforms are actually known to improve some ecosystems as they provide habitat, these platforms could possibly do similar.
@@szurketaltos2693 I'm sure you're right about that, but I wonder about the effect on marine mammals, especially whales and dolphins. Any sound transmission from these units is likely to be wide-ranging.
@@mattlodge7305 hm, boat props don't seem to be a huge concern for sound and those are in the water; sonar is the real whale killer it seems. But maybe props are a bigger problem than I'm aware of?
Chinese twin rotor looks interesting generating around 12 Mwhrs?
How about large tankers with Turbines that can also be used to transport goods with Electric Engines??
Bird strike can’t be detected either 😢
why not put them on retired ore and oil ships
I forget the accent sometimes. Where the hell is Kin-car-deen? 😅 I’ve never heard of it.
We pronounce it Kin-card-inn
It appears to be spelt wrong then!
Gaelic spelling also agrees with Rosie rather than with you: Cinn Chàrdainn
Maybe it is time to change the spelling to match the current pronunciation?
Why we can't farm around and up to windmills 🤔 instead of adding Salt water to electrical power generation dubble the cost and matainanc 🤔
Because we are building the offshore wind farms at much larger scale with much larger turbines than is possible onshore, thus it will be much cheaper than building onshore. The Dogger Bank fixed bottom Offshore Wind area is 8,660 square Km in size, that is one wind farm, although built in stages of around 500 square Km each, the Celtic Sea floating wind farm area is 6,700 square Km, together that is almost the size of the country of Wales in two wind farms. When people say that onshore wind is cheaper, they are not comparing the same things, often it is the sort of turbine erected by a farmer with two or three on his farm, built to a design that has been in use for.a couple of decades, because that is all we have been installing onshore for the last decade, compared to the latest prototype offshore turbines on a farm that will produce 10,000 times more power. We are still developing the offshore technology, and are still in the early stages of floating offshore, the development and risks have to be paid for until the technology matures, but it will mature, and then it will be much cheaper than onshore, and more importantly, actually possible to build.
Yeah, no. Doesn't make sense for most applications/locations.
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14:08 Translation from Hillbilly to English: "Learnings" = Lessons
Lessons are taught, learnings can be gained with or without a teacher.
In my view, this was a nice use of the word "learnings", perfectly valid, and better than using "lessons" or "insights", which have slightly different meanings.
Not everyone uses the same English, it is a rule of English that it is open to evolution, with no single authority defining correct English, this makes Rosie's English perfectly valid.
@@nigels.6051 Another bloody hillbilly!
I don't know about the Australian market but Britain already has too much wind power on some days. Then they are being paid to dump power. Conversely there can be periods with no wind at all. What do you do then? France puts out less CO2 than Britain or Germany and has far cheaper electricity thanks to nuclear. There Iis NO way to store enough electricity to tide a country over for a few days. Batteries are only suitable for grid smoothing.
No, we don't have too much wind. Yes, we sometimes turn some turbines off, but so infrequently that nobody has bothered to make use of the excess power yet, even though that excess power is available at very cheap/free/negative prices. If there was enough excess then somebody would invest in some batteries or hydrogen electrolisers, or an aluminium smelter to make use of it. You shouldn't worry about paying to turn turbines off, that is just the way the system works, quite often they are turned off because France is paying us to take their excess nuclear power, because nuclear can't be turned off overnight, so they are happy to pay us more to take their excess than we pay to turn the turbines we would otherwise be using off. Turning a turbine off is cheap and easy and extends the turbine lifetime, but you have to compensate the turbine operator for choosing to turn off that particular turbine and not somebody else's. If you have enough turbines to provide enough power on calm days, then it is inevitable that you will have excess on windy days, but we should be able to find ways to use most of that very cheap excess power, maybe for generating synthetic aviation fuel, maybe for generating synthetic "natural gas" (methane) that can be stored for use in our gas power stations in calm weather.. France doesn't really have cheap electricity, their nuclear power is partly paid for through taxes instead of electricity bills.
@nigels.6051
So how do we get through a 2 week winter wind lull? This is usually caused by an area of high pressure sitting over the whole of Northern Europe. The Germans have a term for it. Dunkelflaute. It happens more often than people think.
@@codprawn This year, May had 3 weeks with low wind, July had 4 weeks, and we used a lot of gas for 2 weeks in December and 3 weeks in January. We have been filling in with coal, but I think that is ending this year with decommissioning of the last coal plant? The summers seem to be more of an issue than the winters because there is a lot less wind power in summer.
Low wind does not mean zero wind throughout the UK, if we had triple the current amount of wind power, most of those periods would have had enough wind to have needed no coal or gas, only the odd day would have been short of power. We already have a system where many industrial processes that are heavy users of electricity can be shut down for a day if necessary, so I suspect three times the current wind would have been just about enough. As more industries convert to using electricity, there will be more scope for shutting things down for a day or two, so I suspect we do not need battery storage to cover days, only for hourly peaks. We need much more wind power to replace our current use of oil, petrol, diesel, heating gas, etc., if some of that is done via synthetic fuels, as aviation fuel almost certainly will, then the electrolysis for that can easily be shut down for a few days, I'm not convinced that we need much storage. Germany has enough natural gas storage to last them 6 months without any new supply, that can store synthetic fuels without modification. UK has closed down its natural gas storage, considered unnecessary!
Having some spare wind turbines is not a problem, if they are not generating power then they are not wearing out, so they become a long term investment, and given that nuclear is many times more expensive than wind, it makes much more sense to build twice as much wind as needed than to build nuclear, but we don't need that much spare.
"This is usually caused by an area of high pressure sitting over the whole of Northern Europe" - this is why we have a lot of interconnectors, when we are sitting in the calm centre of that high pressure, Denmark and Norway are sitting in the strong winds at the edge, if it moves east a bit then Ireland is in the strong winds at the opposite edge, and Portugal is down on the southern edge. With floating wind, we are expanding our wind generating area to the West into the Celtic Sea, and north to Shetland, so will be less affected by large high pressure areas anyway. Our friends in Denmark and Ireland have much more of a problem with high pressure areas than us, and they also have problems with low pressure areas as the centre passes over them, so they are always going to want to work together.
Currently we don't have enough wind turbines, once we have enough, the problems will disappear, except for the problem of what to do with our very expensive nuclear power that nobody wants to pay for!
@@nigels.6051 "...and given that nuclear is many times more expensive than wind..."
Uranium-fired power is the cheapest power, on a sustained basis. This is because uranium is the densest fuel. Wind and solar are infinitely-expensive, on a sustained basis. This is because wind and solar are the *_least_* dense fuels.
Could these giant barges offer a safer option for offshore wind? When I hear bearing issues - that sounds like too much wind. th-cam.com/video/2qPiE4pJimw/w-d-xo.html
Moor stablised?
Teams of Moors swimming in the ocean holding onto to guy wires?
Seems rather fantastical to me.
Do Moors even exist in the modern day?
Great Vid Rosie, OOPs forgot to mention what these do to nature, birds killed, whales thrown off course or collide with the structures etc. I still think solar in deserts is the big win and don't forget to get everyone an EV bicycle, the other big win.
Yes! We can keep burning stuff and hope the birds and whales enjoy their new heated sea, and its acifidification with rising CO2 levels!
if you care so much about birds you should oppose the construction of any building taller than a shed
Offshore birds need offshore food, and currently our offshore birds are loosing their food due to rising sea temperatures. Burning of fossil fuels needs to end if our offshore birds are to survive, and for not so sunny locations, away from the equator, floating wind has the biggest potential to replace fossil fuels. As for the whales, the only significant problem with the fixed offshore turbines seems to be the noise of construction, which isn't going to be much of a problem if the turbines are constructed in port.
Desert solar would be fantastic in Australia, but useless in the UK or Norway.
Whales can swim around turbines.
No reference at all to the environmental damage from wind turbines; from the devastation of environments thru extraction processes for their materials, to the destruction of biodiverse habitants to the harm these turbines cause to the other species (especially marine life) that we are suppose to share this planet with.
Until we focus on solutions that protect all life on earth, not just human life, there will be no mitigating, much less solving, the climate crisis.
The frogs in a slowly boiling pan of water is completely false.
Frogs know enough to jump out.
Humans apparently aren't as smart as frogs.
I'll run it down for you:
Extraction: Minimal harms compared to other technologies. Wind Turbines are more materially efficient than all other types of generation except hydro if you discount the structure of the dam.
'Devastation' of environment: Minimal compared to all other generation types except geothermal and rooftop solar. Marine environments experience very little disruption from offshore wind, even in the case of turbine failure.
Your comment about 'solutions that protect all life on earth' is stupid, as we need to take urgent action now to protect all life on earth, and if we wait for a perfect solution we will all boil. You have this very wrong if you actually care about our biosphere.
@@SocialDownclimber good evening. I just had a discussion with a friend about this. Wind turbines seem to me to generate about 10% of their installed capacity over a long period. So often, when I look, the 33 gigs we have installed is only generating 300 megs. Lots of machinery doing very little. lots of redundant machinery be dumped when it ages. On humans boiling; I think we are better than that. We; our children, will find ways not to boil. There is a lot of thinking that the increased temperatures will result in lower death rate due to cold and increased food production. Regards; Peter
@@peterwundersitz3715 Ok well you seem to me to be completely unable to fact check anything, since wind farm capacity factors are more like 30-40% onshore and higher offshore. Why bother to even write a post if you aren't going to base it on reality? Was it your 'friend' who told you about the capacity factor of wind farms? Maybe rethink that friendship.
Fortunately, most population centers are near the coastline. Of course this is also unfortunate because of rising sea levels.