U.K. offshore wind park may generate power cheaper than by burning coal

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-20/plunging-offshore-wind-costs-could-soon-end-u-k-subsidies

by Anon84 • 7 years ago

140 99 7 years ago

Offshore turbines also access more consistent winds, so not only will the turbines be cheap, they will be reliable, which will reduce grid integration costs.

Edit: The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid, this is an extra 6GW of capacity, and goes on top of previous auctions which are currently under development, it looks like we’re headed for 60-70% in the mid to late 2020s.

sempron64• 7 years ago

Silly question, but is wind at sea guaranteed? What if weather patterns change? It's really expensive to put up these offshore turbines, but with systemic climate change is it possible they'd be becalmed?

martinald• 7 years ago

No but you can put far larger turbines up at sea (much easier to transport a 100m blade at sea than taking it down windy back roads up a hill on land).

Larger turbines are more productive especially at lower wind speeds as far as I know.

benj1112• 7 years ago

Nothings guaranteed.

Worst case scenario for Britain would be a period of little wind in the North sea, in Winter. That would be unusual, but not unheard of.

I'm not aware of any plausible scenarios where global warming would lead to less wind, but I suppose its locally possible.

marcosdumay• 7 years ago

The sea is a huge area without hills or mountains to reduce the wind speed, and near shore there is a daily guaranteed temperature differential nearby to generate some wind.

So, yes, it's so likely that it's practically guaranteed. Too much wind is an orders of magnitude more likely problem.

Reason0777• 7 years ago

"It's really expensive to put up these offshore turbines"

They are more expensive than on-shore wind turbines, but still significantly cheaper than other forms of generation (such as nuclear).

With geographic and technological diversity, "smart grid" demand management, inter-connectors, storage tech, and a modest investment in nuclear baseload, we can get pretty close to 100% low-carbon generation in the UK over the next few decades. Even as grid demand increases with the gradual electrification of heating and transport.

isostatic4• 7 years ago

No. Wind production in the UK over the last 12 months has varied from 12,456MW (on Jan 7th at 21:00) to 142MW (May 1st 08:50)

Most of that is from the sea.

jsingleton• 7 years ago

You can explore the data here: https://electricinsights.co.uk

You can even split wind into onshore and offshore, although the data is patchy.

Wind varies, but from a quick look offshore hasn't gone to zero over the past year and neither has onshore.

mattmanser• 7 years ago

It's not guaranteed, if you'd ever been sailing you'd know it's definitely not guaranteed!

mjlee• 7 years ago

Some winds are generated because of the Earth's structure.

The trade winds are pretty consistent.

My favourite bit of meteorology trivia is that the wealthier areas in British cities are almost exclusively to the west - this is because the prevailing wind is from the west and so pollution producing factories have been placed in the east of the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds

cal97g• 7 years ago

Often that wind is too strong for these turbines and they have to stop completely to save literally breaking themselves.

belorn3• 7 years ago

https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...

Looking at that I get a very different view of UK electricity grid, one where natural gas plays its very very common role when wind/solar is not at its peak production.

Would be very interesting to see the UK pledge to get rid of the natural gas plants at some date in the future, rather than say build more of them.

Reason0777• 7 years ago

It depends on how storage tech develops, but natural gas turbines will continue to play a role for the foreseeable future.

However, that role will increasingly be as contingency/backup for times of scarcity rather than as a continuous baseload. They will only be used during demand peaks that correspond with unfavourable weather conditions, or other unusual scenarios.

This is similar to the current role of the UK's few remaining coal plants.

(I should also note that natural gas use is already in decline in the UK, as is gas turbine generating capacity)

Brakenshire8• 7 years ago

I'm talking about aggregate figures for last year. Even looking at the figures on the website you linked, which provides production figures just over the last hour, it shows 21% solar, 20% nuclear and 7% wind.

The current plan is to maintain about 30% of the grid as gas, to provide backup, and then to deal with the carbon emissions using carbon capture and storage. The target is for a net zero electricity grid by 2030.

mhandley• 7 years ago

Looking at the last week's production, there's a fair way to go before gas is only being used at times of scarcity: https://electricityproduction.uk/from/all-sources/?t=7d

Notice how the gas usage cycles up and down, tracking the inverse of solar and wind. But add another 10GW of wind and solar, which is likely by the mid 2020s, and gas won't be used at all pretty often. But it isn't going away completely unless storage gets much cheaper.

The biggest challenge now is to start moving residential heating from gas to electric heat pumps. That's a large fraction of our CO2 emissions, and it requires individuals to spend money.

isostatic4• 7 years ago

The UK’s already up to 50% nuclear and renewables on the electricity grid

In the last year UK produced

  Coal: 3%
  Gas: 42%
  Nuclear: 20%
  Wind: 17%
  Solar: 4%
  Hydro: 1.4%
  Biomass: 6.4%
  Pumped 0.66%

So 28% renewable, 20% nuclear, total of about half.

Wow.

The good news is we're not overproducing - even on the most renewable days (Aug 17 at 15:15) when 44% came from wind and 25% from solar, we still had 12% coming from gas, 5% from biomass

(edit - looked at wrong row on my spreadsheet!)

hollerith• 7 years ago

Do you happen to know if all the natural gas used to generate electricity in the UK comes from the UK's territory (e.g., the part of the North Sea where they enjoy mineral rights)?

fyfy18• 7 years ago

For anyone curious, most of the UKs nuclear power is due to be comissioned in the next decade. However most reactors have received short term extensions.

There's currently one reactor under construction, and a bunch more planned, so I expect the current reactors will receive extensions until these or renewables take over.

Bjartr4• 7 years ago

There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now. Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

Almost all of them are now only visible to people with showdead on.

danw19792• 7 years ago

yeah they're attaching Bloomberg specifically in a couple of the posts too.

I wonder if someone somewhere has a large vested interest in fossil fuels and is annoyed about the BNEF and Bloomberg's mostly positive reporting on renewables.

WhompingWindows4• 7 years ago

I've noticed a few very pro-fossil comments in threads. I don't know if there are shills or if there are simply propagandist fossil fuel lovers? Is there any way to empirically study HN commenters? Data scrape + analyze?

pjc505• 7 years ago

It's a perfect topic for the "middlebrow dismissal". Contributors can start from a true-but-myopic fact, that renewables are intermittent. They can then deploy their biases that "everyone else is stupid and hasn't thought about this", and/or "everyone with the opposite opinion is a paid shill", and get very exercised about it.

Global warming attracts a certain kind of "gotcha" nerd who will hunt for the one set of data that can be arranged to make it look not so bad while ignoring all the evidence on the other side of the scale. There's an entire site devoted to that (WUWT).

Meanwhile there's a set of quietly competent engineers keeping the lights on and ignoring all this social media nonsense.

concordDance2• 7 years ago

To see why wind can't get much bigger without a giant breakthrough in storage see these graphs of power production and consumption:

http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Bjartr4• 7 years ago

I don't see an obvious connection between those charts and why wind can't get much bigger. It just shows that wind is currently producing ~26% of the power demand. Would you mind spelling it out since it is not self-evident to me?

danmaz74• 7 years ago

The money quote: "The price of 39.65 pounds per megawatt-hour ($49.70) was 31% below the level in a similar auction two years ago."

Brakenshire8• 7 years ago

The graph below has £120/MWh in 2015, £57.5 in 2017, and £40 in 2019. Gas costs about £50/MWh.

kmjg88nvf84• 7 years ago

"may"

wake me when it does.

Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid. A lot of nonsense is going on in that area.

Ma8ee• 7 years ago

That sounds bad. Where can I learn more about it?

kmjg88nvf84• 7 years ago

I couldn't immediately find a good link (via Google). This one mentions unused capacity, but no further background I think https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-ca...

saalweachter• 7 years ago

Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany it sounds like there is just a perpetual lag, where offshore wind is built and then it takes awhile to get it hooked in. It's been going on since at least 2014, and since that time like 5GW of offshore wind looks to have been hooked up, so I'm not sure there's a problem beyond "things take a while to build".

rcMgD2BwE72F• 7 years ago

Here in Germany we have offshore wind parks that are not connected to the power grid

Source (incl reason for lack of grid connection) please?

kmjg88nvf84• 7 years ago

Can't find a good source immediately. This article mentions "276 MW of fully installed turbines far out at sea not yet feeding power to the electrical grid" https://energytransition.org/2019/02/german-offshore-wind-ca...

Sorry, maybe more googling would bring up something better. It is well known in Germany.

Bjartr4• 7 years ago

Wake up

"The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :) (1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=... "

As mentioned by daveoflynn elsewhere in these comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21028451

Reason0777• 7 years ago

Here's a list of off-shore wind projects in Crown Estate waters. Currently, there's about 8GW of capacity in operation, and a further 19GW in various stages of construction or planning.

(This does not include on-shore wind farms, or projects in Scottish waters)

https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/3308/offshorewindproj...

tpurves• 7 years ago

The british once built an empire with large thanks to off-shore wind power.

stuaxo• 7 years ago

I read it as " U.K. offshore wind prank may generate power cheaper than by burning coal" which is a much more fun story.

JulianMorrison• 7 years ago

Onshore wind would be even cheaper if the Conservatives hadn't all but banned it to appease NIMBYs.

Brakenshire8• 7 years ago

You can build bigger, more efficient turbines offshore, and the winds are stronger and more reliable, so offshore being inherently more expensive isn’t actually a solid assumption. All the more so if you include the costs of integrating the generation into the grid.

Robotbeat5• 7 years ago

It is still a pretty good assumption that on-shore is significantly cheaper, even including grid integration costs. After all, a significant portion of off-shore wind's cost is the expensive seaborne transmission.

WhompingWindows4• 7 years ago

On-shore is bound to be cheaper for a good while, but fortunately offshore is experiencing a big Renaissance, especially in the USA. I would be surprised if offshore wasn't cheaper by the middle or end of the century, as it does have numerous advantages to on-shore.

KirinDave5• 7 years ago

So just some basics out of the way:

1. Yes, this is good. They should do this and 2. coal is an awful and inefficient power source with lots of carbon emission which is bad. 3. the way we harvest coal is deleterious to humans and bad for the environment even if we ignore carbon. It's an ancient technology we should leave in the dustbin of history next to lead piping.

The challenge of wind turbines is that they're actually fantastically plastic hungry things. While inexpensive in their current state, we need to heavily invest in more sustainable turbine blade options that don't contribute to our other problems (carbon emission in plastics manufacturing and huge unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades). [0]

Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage (with sodium ion batteries removing our reliance on lithium[1]) and Gallium Arsenide greatly reducing the cost and size of electrical components while increasing their heat tolerance [2]). Essentially what's left here is tooling and contracts and for dinosaur energy providers to be displaced by newer options.

[0] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...

[1] https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-io...

[2] https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-ap...

ourlordcaffeine• 7 years ago

To add, I see down at the bottom people fighting over "consistency".

Wind power is almost always producing something. This production can be statistically modeled. Thus, you can overprovision wind and say that on average, your target of <x> MW is met or exceeded <y> percent of the time. So wind, if planned well, doesn't really need big storage.

Baseload generation is also a fallacy. It only matters that demand is met. Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK in that wind operators always undercut everyone else on the market, thus displacing other generation.

Baseload demand is the point which demand never falls below. Back in the age of coal, it made sense to meet this baseload demand with large baseload plants, that were big and did not change output and gained economies of scale.

One challenge that I think people overlook in the shift to renewables is grid frequency stability. Big thermal plants have heavy rotors that have a lot of inertia, stopping the grid frequency from changing too quickly in an imbalance. Replace these with inertia-less wind and solar, and you will need another solution for grid stability.

sremani2• 7 years ago

> Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK

Give me another place in Europe where Wind is more abundant than UK ?

https://globalwindatlas.info/

Putting wind mills in Greenland and Arctic may produce a whole lot but bringing it to population centers is an issue.

Base load is a bitch, UK is the best case scenario enjoy it.

telchar• 7 years ago

Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime.

Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from having too large an immediate impact on the grid.

You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them.

With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.

pjc505• 7 years ago

Frequency stability was discussed recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513

The wind farm tripped unexpectedly easily .. but apparently this can be solved with a software update. As and when we start rolling out batteries they are excellent for frequency response, and are already getting paid for that purpose in some places.

sremani2• 7 years ago

> Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage

Solar peaks around noon 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (I am being charitable here) do we have solid storage that would hold this generated power for delivery from (4:00 pm - 7:00 pm) peak ?

That 4 to 6 hour storage window is still a big issue - if you are talking about Sodium batteries we are a decade or more away from them to be grid scale!

(The reference [1] article still suggests it is in labs not in production)

KirinDave5• 7 years ago

Solar peaks around noon 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (I am being charitable here) do we have solid storage that would hold this generated power for delivery from (4:00 pm - 7:00 pm) peak ?

In limited deployment? Yes, absolutely. Sodium batteries make this proposition cheaper. You could make your house entirely off-grid and run-off-storage if your local production options are good.

That 4 to 6 hour storage window is still a big issue - if you are talking about Sodium batteries we are a decade or more away from them to be grid scale!

No, we're not 10 years away from using sodium ions batteried at this scale. The bulk scale problem is MUCH easier than the micro-scale package problem. Ongoing work on sodium ion batteries will be to work on equivalent package competitors for lithium ion polymer batteries, which still have unparalleled density.

For less robust, large packages the work is done, the compound required is done. We already use old and inefficient batteries in these applications. It's one of Tesla's major business models and why they take your battery pack back from you at the end of life of the car.

pjc505• 7 years ago

Realistically it's not so much "stored" as "used to displace CCGT generation". The solar peak in the UK, from my own measurements is not so much "middle of the day" as "middle of the year". The seasonal variation is pretty huge up here in the northern latitudes.

Have a click about on https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html - the best case is getting over 50% of the generation from 9AM to 6PM. The worst case is getting almost nothing for three months in the winter.

epistasis• 7 years ago

We do have solid storage technology, deployed in the field at smaller scales around ~100MWh, with many GWh installations planned soon: lithium ion:

For example, this recent LA contract got lots of press:

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/14/green-keynes.html

The technology is not hard or mysterious for storing during the daily cycle, it's just a matter of costs falling. And costs are falling dramatically.

The bigger question is what we may do for seasonal storage, or if instead of seasonal storage we just have capacity for 200% of generation and overproduce for much of the year.

cromulent• 7 years ago

This is the argument about renewables as far as I'm concerned.

Even if there was no such thing as climate change, long-term we still need to eventually move to renewables.

We have all the non-renewables as the fuel to do so. We can't continue to waste them - once they are gone, you can't bootstrap a renewable energy system.

eloff4• 7 years ago

That's a joke. There's so many things we should worry about before "unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades" become a major issue. It's such a tiny problem even next plastic shopping bags or water bottles. Everything has some drawbacks, but this is so far down the list it's not even worth thinking about.

KirinDave5• 7 years ago

Given my obvious enthusiasm for the project in hand, I'm not sure why you're so negative about discussing some of the challenges they face.

WhompingWindows4• 7 years ago

Another aspect of turbines is that they are huge steel towers. How is steel made? With fossil fuel and fossil-fuel electricity, in places like China or the Midwestern USA which are, at best, less than 20% clean grid. So, even though we desperately need renewables, it is a sad reality that fossil fuels will aid in producing said renewables.

Robotbeat5• 7 years ago

It's unavoidable that fossil fuels will be needed to spin-up the infrastructure of a total clean global economy. However, there's no better use that fossil fuels can be put to than preparing the ground for totally clean and abundant energy.

However, it's most certainly feasible to make steel without fossil fuels. In the US, many newer iron makers use Direct Reduction of Iron in furnaces fed with CO and H produced from natural gas (and then this DRI product is refined electrically in electric arc furnaces at so-called "Mini Mills" which are not so mini). There's no reason you couldn't just use hydrogen directly produced via electrolysis instead.

...and power-to-gas is also feasible (although approximately twice as expensive to produce per unit energy as electrolytic hydrogen is). And with that synthesized gas, you can also produce any kind of petroleum-derived product via Fischer-Tropsch, including graphite and coke and the resins needed for wind turbine blades. And all these products would be higher purity than those produced from fossil fuels (although the price WILL be higher).

So let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good. Let's transition now as soon as possible whatever we can. And that means off-shore wind.

daveoflynn• 7 years ago

The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results.

In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :)

(1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=...

tshanmu• 7 years ago

May be stupid question: I have always wondered if we build enough windmills will it affect the global windpatterns? What will happen to the place where all this wind energy goes if we extract it before there? Could it affect rainfall in directly unconnected places? The butterfly effect?

remarkEon• 7 years ago

I've always wondered if it would affect bird migrations.

Robotbeat5• 7 years ago

It can, but the change can be a good thing. For instance, enough off-shore wind can reduce the intensity of hurricanes (in places like New Orleans).

Farmers plant trees for wind-breaks in the Great Plains to reduce erosion of the soil. Wind turbines can serve the same purpose.

hutzlibu• 7 years ago

Butterfly effect means, small effects CAN induce big ones. But not necessary in a significant lasting climatechanging way.

Windmills do not change much different, than I would say, a city with scyscrapers does. So it is changing, but to affect the global jetstreams, we probably would have to build really big windmills, directly exploiting those winds on a big scale ...

So sci-fiction we are talking about, not at all, what we have now...

Bjartr4• 7 years ago

Building towns, cities, roads, farms, and other comparatively large surface area artificial structures impact windflow, solar absorptance/reflectance, rainfall absorption/runoff, thermal conduction/convection, and others I'm sure. All of which can have an impact on local and in turn regional and then global climates and winds (although not usually in a way we can trace all the way through).

It's worth understanding the impact of all of these in addition to what you ask as well.

ncmncm• 7 years ago

I look forward to the day when all the windmills have worn out, and the towers are standing around unused, mined out for rare-earth elements, but too expensive to take down. Then, we can stretch cheap mesh between them and generate power with no moving parts, by releasing ions to be carried away by the wind. Alvin Marks (holder of the patent on polarizing sunglasses) got a patent for that back in the '80s.

But the most important recent development in wind power has nothing much to do with windmills, as such. Roger Ruan at UMn, and Roger Gordon in Canada have both invented small-scale, efficient reactors that can turn power, water, and air into ammonia. This is important because the overwhelming majority of places with useful wind are nowhere near an electrical grid, but many of them have immediate uses for ammonia.

Now, you can put up a windmill anywhere, and it can produce useful liquid fuel and fertilizer any time the wind blows, with no inconvenience to anyone when wind doesn't blow. Farms need large amounts of both fuel and fertilizer, and have lots of space for windmills. Any extra ammonia can be sold to neighbors, so wouldn't need to be transported far. Ammonia is directly useful for fertilizer--you pipe it right into the ground behind plow blades, and soil microbes fix it instantly.

Any manufacturer of windmills should be very excited by this development, because it stands to radically increase the market for windmills. A single windmill is now a useful purchase, and any farm can use one. Industrial ammonia production consumes huge quantities of natural gas, and belches 10 megatons of CO2 every year, not counting exhaust from transporting it and processing it to solid form.

U.K. offshore wind park may generate power cheaper than by burning coal

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