Renewable Revolution

November 13th, 2018 by Joshua S Hill



https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/13/scottish-wind-delivers-equivalent-of-98-of-countrys-october-electricity-demand/

CleanTechnica
Support CleanTechnica’s work via donations on Patreon or PayPal!

Or just go buy a cool t-shirt, cup, baby outfit, bag, or hoodie.


 


January 2nd, 2019 by Jesper Berggreen

Since New Years Eve, it’s been quite windy in Denmark, and of the +6000 wind turbines in the country one of them apparently had to succumb to the pressure after many years of service. TV2 TVMV.dk reports (with video) that the turbine caught fire on Tuesday afternoon, and that the fire subsequently spread to a farm below. Nobody lives on the farm, but it is still in use for livestock and between 30 and 40 bull calves were in the buildings.

“The turbine stands where just below there is a two-sided farm with these bull calves. The wings have fallen into the building, and the barn has caught fire, which we have tried to control,” says Lars Stensbjerg, who is the leader of Fire and Rescue MidtVest.

Lucky for the bull calves 🐂 the wind had a direction keeping them out of harm’s way. They are all being rescued. 


 
According to Vestas press officer Anders Riis, it’s an old turbine. “When the fire has stopped, we will initiate a study of what may be the cause of the fire,” he said to TV2 TVMV.dk.

With the address given I found according to thewindpower.net, this must be the turbine in question: “Commissioning: 1993/03 by Vestas. Hub height: 30 m. Total nominal power: 300 kW. Dismantled (2010/05).” That last bit of information is puzzling. Maybe at was decommissioned and replaced or maybe it was just standing there and the brakes wore out and made it spin again causing the fire? While accidents with wind turbines are indeed spectacular, let’s also keep in mind that they are very rare.

One year ago we reported that Denmark had a record wind energy year in 2017 and it will be interesting to see 🧐 if 2018 will beat that. Also, as turbines get larger, they get lower in numbers. In fact, if the current +6000 turbines in Denmark keep getting updated, it could easily mean a doubling of nameplate capacity with a third of turbines, and many new turbines are going to be off-shore in the future. So, accidents will probably be even more rare.


   
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/01/02/vestas-turbine-catches-fire-in-danish-new-year-storm/

First Turbine Installed at World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm
February 19, 2019 by Mike Schuler


The first turbine at the soon-to-be world’s biggest offshore wind farm has been installed and is now producing electricity off of England’s coast.

When fully operational, the 1,218-megawatt Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm will be nearly double the size of the current world’s largest offshore wind farm, Walney Extension, and capable of powering well over one million homes in the UK with renewable electricity.

The project is located 120km off the Yorkshire Coast and will consist of 174 Siemens 7MW turbines. The majority of wind farm’s blades are manufactured in Hull, from where they are shipped to the Hornsea zone.

To date, 172 out of 174 monopile foundations have been installed at the site, and turbine installation is expected to continue until late summer 2019.

The wind farm is a joint venture between Ørsted, a global leader in offshore wind, and Global Infrastructure Partners.

Ørsted began offshore construction and little over a year ago and expects the project to be completed by Q1 2020.

The electricity generated by the turbines will pass via undersea cables through one of three massive offshore substations, and the world’s first offshore reactive compensation station, all fully installed, before reaching shore at Horseshoe Point, Lincolnshire. The electricity is then transported via underground cables to the onshore substation in North Killingholme, where it will connect to the UK grid.

“Hornsea 1 is the first of a new generation of offshore power plants that now rival the capacity of traditional fossil fuel power stations,” said Matthew Wright, UK Managing Director at Ørsted. “The ability to generate clean electricity offshore at this scale is a globally significant milestone, at a time when urgent action needs to be taken to tackle climate change.”

“Ten years ago, the thought of a project of this size was just a dream, but thanks to continued innovation, a determined effort from both the industry and supply chain to drive down costs, and the natural geographical benefits that surround us, the UK has positioned itself as a world-leader in offshore wind,” Wright added.

https://gcaptain.com/first-turbine-installed-at-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm/

EcoWatch

By Olivia Rosane Mar. 19, 2019 02:17PM EST



Americans like wind turbines as neighbors, at least when compared with the alternatives.

That's the conclusion of a University of Delaware (UD) study published in Nature Energy Monday. UD Prof. Jeremy Firestone and undergraduate Hannah Kirk looked at data from a survey of people who lived within eight kilometers (approximately five miles) of a wind turbine. They found that around 90 percent of them preferred the wind turbine over an alternative plant located at a similar distance, whether it was fueled by coal, natural gas or uranium.

Firestone said the study offered a more realistic gauge of American's energy preferences.

"We've looked at social acceptance of wind projects examining factors such as effect of landscape change, sound and place attachment. In those studies, the ultimate question is whether a community member supports or opposes a local project — that is, wind power or nothing," he explained in a UD press release. "But that's not the societal choice, which is instead, among wind power, solar, coal or natural gas. Even when residents might have less than positive attitudes toward a local project, the majority appear to conclude that their local wind power project is better than the alternatives."

1. Here are some of the key findings, reported by the press release and additional comments by Firestone in Behavioral and Social Sciences at Nature:

2. Of the two-thirds who had a preference between living near a wind turbine or a commercial solar installation, three to one preferred wind.

3. The preference for wind held across states despite economic or geographic differences. For example, 86 percent of people in coal-mining states preferred to live near a wind turbine, while only around eight percent would have preferred to live near a coal plant.

The preference also held whether the state was considered 'Red' (voted Republican for president in 2012 and 2016), 'Purple' (switched between the two years) or 'Blue' (voted Democrat both years.)

"{P} references for wind power are bipartisan, " Kirk said in the press release.

The data set Kirk and Firestone used for their research was collected and made public by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Firestone, who also helped compile the original data, explained in Nature how it was done:

First, we subdivided the population. For example, the 8 km distance was broken into four groups to ensure that sufficient individuals were included who lived very nearby a wind turbine given their potential greater ability to hear operating wind turbines and to be affected by changes to the landscape. Second, we used three modes to contact individuals to take the survey: telephone, online, and on paper. To account for the complexity and to address the fact that not everyone contacted responds, the sample was weighted to match it to the population based on gender, age and education.

Firestone said that the wide support for wind projects by those who lived near them, even in coal states, was a positive sign for how the public might react to a shift away from fossil fuels.

"This suggests the energy transition that is underway in the United States may be embraced widely," he said in the press release.

https://www.ecowatch.com/wind-turbines-americans-2632137785.html

16 Apr 2019, 14:41 Benjamin Wehrmann #Renewables    #Wind    #Government


 
The opening of a new offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea gives Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel an opportunity to show her climate policy credentials and welcome the German-Norwegian project as a milestone for the energy transition and international cooperation.

But the opening comes at a time when the chancellor faces increasing pressure at home to come up with policies that help bring down Germany's emissions in line with its international climate action obligations. Moreover, the national wind power industry increasingly warns that local resistance and restrictive regulation could well mean that the country's renewables expansion targets are difficult to meet.

Ten years after Germany opened its first offshore wind farm in the North Sea, Chancellor Angela Merkel has opened the country’s newest offshore power station, demonstrating that early doubts about the technology were largely unfounded. In her weekly video podcast, Merkel said she was opening the project to make clear “how important the expansion of renewable energy is for us.”

The Arkona wind farm, named after a nearby cape on the island of Rügen, where Merkel’s constituency is located, was built over the course of three years and is the Baltic’s largest. With a capacity of 385 megawatts, the park built 35 kilometres off the coast could theoretically supply about 400,000 German homes with electricity, according to Equinor. It is operated by energy companies E.ON from Germany and Equinor from Norway, which is why Merkel was accompanied by Norwegian energy minister Kjell-Borge Freiberg at the ceremony.

Merkel said the Arkona wind farm was setting a new standard for the transformation of Germany’s energy system in the Energiewende. “But only changing the way we produce energy won’t be enough,” the Chancellor said, adding that changes in the heating and in the transport sector were also forthcoming.

The wind farm, operated by the utility E.ON, comes at a time when the German government is under pressure to formulate a clear climate policy. German students have been staging weekly “Fridays for Future” school strikes, demanding more action on climate change, and some lawmakers have worried aloud that many future voters could turn their back on the governing parties if Merkel’s government does not act.

At the same time, lawmakers run the risk of alienating voters in mining regions as they strive to implement the seminal agreement from the nation’s coal exit commission, announced this winter. The commission recommended ending coal-fired power generation by 2038 at the latest, and some voters fear their jobs are being sacrificed to fulfill national climate targets.

But there are also signs of progress. Merkel’s inauguration of the wind farm comes just days after Germany’s environmental agency, UBA, announced that the country’s carbon emissions had declined substantially for the first time in years. 👍

It was the steepest emissions drop in ten years - and it was made possible, in part, by the growth of offshore wind. “There used to be a great deal of scepticism at the beginning of the offshore era,” Jörg Buddenberg of energy company EWE told news agency dpa in an article carried by newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Buddenberg said early critics argued that the previously unexplored technology would never work. While offshore wind had to surmount several technical difficulties in its initial stage, Germany now has more than 1,300 operational turbines at sea with a combined capacity of 6.4 gigawatts (GW). Offshore wind farms produced nearly 19 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in 2018. That's about twice the average output per installation of their onshore counterparts, adding up to nearly one fifth of the country’s total wind power generation.

But the wind industry says the technology’s potential still is not fully appreciated, calling for the government to raise the country’s offshore wind expansion target from 15 to 20 GW by 2030 and to 30 GW by 2035. Offshore wind lobby group BWO argues that without the higher targets the government goal of 65 percent renewable power consumption cannot be achieved. According to research institute Fraunhofer IWES, Germany could potentially install up to 54 GW of offshore wind power and generate nearly 260 TWh of electricity at sea. An expansion of that magnitude has drawn skepticism from environmentalists, who worry that turning large swathes of Germany’s territorial waters into industrial zones could have grave consequences for already strained ecosystems in the North and Baltic Seas.

The wind lobby’s calls for greater expansion have been supported by a substantial decrease in the cost of offshore wind power, with the average generation costs per kilowatt hour (kWh) dropping from over 14 cents in 2013 to a little more than 8 cents in 2018. Several zero-support bids in Germany’s first offshore wind power auctions have further supported the conviction that the technology has vast potential for a cost-efficient energy transition.


But wind power companies and lobby group BWE have complained about the cost pressure created by the auction scheme. In what had been one of the biggest setbacks for a German wind company, turbine producer Senvion filed for insolvency in April. While the company’s demise was seen as partly due to managerial mistakes, news agency Reuters noted that cost pressure meant it could no longer compete with companies that have greater pricing power, such as German-Spanish Siemens Gamesa or Danish Vestas. Newspaper WirtschaftsWoche said despite growing wind power capacity around the world, small and middle-sized companies like Senvion or its fellow German turbinemakers Nordex and Enercon could increasingly face insurmountable difficulties – especially with Chinese companies hoping to make an entry into the German wind power market similar to China's takeover in the solar industry.

Wind power lobby group BWE says international market pressure is not the only obstacle, arguing thatnational regulation also poses an increasing challenge. Rising local resistance to new onshore projects is compounded by uncertainties following the switch to Germany’s renewables auction system. That means that reaching the climate and renewables expansion targets becomes increasingly uncertain, BWE says. In Bavaria, the BWE argues, a strict implementation of the so-called 10H-rule, which stipulates that turbines have to maintain a distance of ten times their height to the next residential area, means that the expansion in the state “has been throttled down to almost zero.”

The 10H-rule established in Bavaria has also been mulled by other state governments in a bid to ease resistance against wind power projects. Germany's environment agency UBA warned that a limit of only 1,000 metres, which would not even be enough for many of the new powerful but also very high turbines,  would reduce the land available for turbines by 20 to 50 percent. This would render a sufficient expansion of wind power to meet Germany's climate targets “almost impossible”.

All texts created by the Clean Energy Wire are available under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” . They can be copied, shared and made publicly accessible by users so long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/merkel-opens-baltics-largest-offshore-wind-farm-industry-warns-against-slow-down

CleanTechnica
Support CleanTechnica’s work via donations on Patreon or PayPal!

Or just go buy a cool t-shirt, cup, baby outfit, bag, or hoodie.

June 26th, 2019 by Joshua S Hill 

By gCaptain on Jul 18, 2019 03:41 pm


New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has executed the United States’ largest offshore wind agreement, announcing the winners bidders in New York’s first large-scale comprehensive offshore wind solicitation that will generate a combined 1,700 Megawatts of renewable for the state. Winning bidders were Equinor US Holdings, Inc. and Bay State Wind LLC, a joint venture […]  Read full story...