The Lemon Fool

50 mph gusts here today in NE Scotland.....nice day.

Just thinking.....how well are these super large wind turbines designed for significant winter storms and what would it take to do substantial damage to a large North Sea wind farm investment.

scotview wrote:50 mph gusts here today in NE Scotland.

Just thinking.....how well are these super large wind turbines designed for significant winter storms and what would it take to do substantial damage to a large North Sea wind farm investment.

Wind turbines are designed to adjust the angle their rotor blades present to the wind according to the wind speed, basically to reduce both the resistance they present to the wind and the energy they extract from it in order to reduce stresses they place on the whole structure and to prevent them overloading the generator / other components as the wind speed rises above what the turbine is designed to cope with most efficiently. I'm fairly certain I've read somewhere that this includes cutting off power generation entirely by minimising the resistance presented to the wind, to the point of not rotating the generator at all, if the wind speed becomes too high.

Given the sums of money involved, I'd be absolutely staggered if the control systems for that functionality weren't designed to work off not just the average wind speed, but how much it varies around that average - i.e. how gusty the conditions are. And I'd be similarly staggered if wind turbines weren't designed to be structurally safe against very high wind speeds indeed when taken down to that minimal resistance to the wind / no power generation state.

So the main risk from severe storms would seem to me to be that of not generating power and so receiving no revenues during them, rather than of severe damage to the installations. That's assuming they're well-maintained: non-obvious cracks can severely weaken any structure, so regular inspection using suitable technology to find such cracks is important - and I'd be worried if the companies decided to skimp on such maintenance in order to reduce operating costs.

Gengulphus

scotview wrote:50 mph gusts here today in NE Scotland.....nice day.

Just thinking.....how well are these super large wind turbines designed for significant winter storms and what would it take to do substantial damage to a large North Sea wind farm investment.

As G says, they feather them at high wind speeds. But to give you an idea, new turbines at the test centre in Aberdeen Bay were spinning in gales with an average wind speed of 67mph, with a blade tip speed of ~200mph. Of course it's the gusts that kill you rather than average speeds, but even by Aberdeen standards, 67mph is fairly breezy - it's force 11 "violent storm" on the Beaufort scale and within 10% of a category 1 hurricane.

https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables- ... st-200mph/

Hallucigenia wrote: with a blade tip speed of ~200mph.

As a matter of interest, how many birds does that kill?
I have read that seabird numbers this year are significantly down for several species, with no apparent explanation.

Nimrod103 wrote:

Hallucigenia wrote: with a blade tip speed of ~200mph.

As a matter of interest, how many birds does that kill?

It depends how many are flying around in a force 11 storm...

Hallucigenia wrote:

Nimrod103 wrote:

Hallucigenia wrote: with a blade tip speed of ~200mph.

As a matter of interest, how many birds does that kill?

It depends how many are flying around in a force 11 storm...

The answer will be not many (flying around in a force 11 storm).

One of the studies being done with the Trump turbines (the ones in Aberdeen bay) is an environmental study looking at bird kill and how seabirds interact with the turbines. There are links to the environmental studies here:
https://group.vattenfall.com/uk/what-we ... ent-centre
and this is the bird avoidance report:
https://group.vattenfall.com/uk/siteass ... inal-2.pdf

Anecdotally there are a lot of turbines around me in Aberdeenshire/ Moray some of which I walk, cycle, xc ski close to and one small scale (20kV farm scale turbine I pass regularly as its on a friends farm. I've seen no sign of bird kill at any of the turbines. For comparison I regularly see bird kill on the roads.

Hallucigenia wrote:As G says, they feather them at high wind speeds. ...

Thanks for supplying the succinct term that I couldn't think of when I wrote my post yesterday - I could remember that there was a word for it and even that the word started with 'f', but couldn't dredge it out of my memory...

Gengulphus

Interesting view on the economics of wind power:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... rgy-rates/

Over in France, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has her own response to the energy crisis – a pledge to tear down wind turbines.
Ms Le Pen said she will also end all subsidies for renewable energy if she is elected president next year, shifting focus instead to nuclear sources. She told French radio: "Wind and solar, these energies are not renewable, they are intermittent. If I am elected, I will put a stop to all construction of new wind parks and I will launch a big project to dismantle them."The politician said subsidies for wind and solar added up to €6bn or €7bn per year and put a heavy burden on consumer energy bills. Ms Le Pen said she would support France's nuclear industry by giving the green light for the construction of several new reactors and funding a major upgrade of existing infrastructure.

We got the results of the Scotwind auction today - 25GW in 17 leases for offshore wind, half of which is floating. The likes of BP and Shell are both up for 2GW, although Scottish Power lead with 3GW of floating and 2GW of fixed.

https://www.crownestatescotland.com/new ... spirations

Looks like the consent process is going to be challenged by that volume of applications. A good time to be a seabird ecologist...

Hallucigenia wrote:We got the results of the Scotwind auction today - 25GW in 17 leases for offshore wind, half of which is floating.

Thanks for posting this H.

In the event of Scottish Independence (God forbid) who would "own" the acreage, government revenues and grid generation.

scotview wrote:In the event of Scottish Independence (God forbid) who would "own" the acreage, government revenues and grid generation.

IANAL, but I assume that since the leases are being granted by the Scottish Crown Estate, and the lease monies are going to Holyrood, then it would be "owned" by the relevant government in a similar fashion to oil leases.

Which in some cases would be the Orkney/Shetland government should they choose liberation from the colonial power a long way to the south...

Typical government though, they use different numbering schemes on the map and the full list of lessees...

But there's some interesting names in the long list, notably 2GW in 13/N1 west of Orkney which has gone to Offshore Wind Power, a group including Macquarie, Total, Siemens, RIDG etc with the intention of powering the Flotta Hydrogen Hub at the existing oil terminal.

Hallucigenia wrote:

scotview wrote:In the event of Scottish Independence (God forbid) who would "own" the acreage, government revenues and grid generation.

Which in some cases would be the Orkney/Shetland government should they choose liberation from the colonial power a long way to the south...

Interesting, thanks.

Thanks for the previous post, your right, a lot of interesting developments here eg Flotta Hydrogen.

Hallucigenia wrote:Scottish Power lead with 3GW of floating and 2GW of fixed.

I see SP are claiming 7GW, and on closer inspection they're a partner in the 2GW in 4/E2 led by Shell near Buchan out towards Forties, and Shell New Energies Holding/Shell Petroleum/Shell Overseas Investments BV/Shell Research are all partners in the 3GW in 11/NE7 led by SP just to the north, on the way to Claymore/Piper.

Would be interesting to see a proper overlay of how these wind licences relate to existing hydrocarbon infrastructure - looks like they are somewhat closer to shore than the main oilfields but makes sense to start with ones near Aberdeen.

I wouldn't fancy 15/N3 fixed/floating north of the Butt of Lewis, although you can see why the Stornoway Port Authority is involved in that one. They're certainly guaranteed winds up there though...

To add, the scale of the new developments is actually impressive. Assuming all the projects do actually get built then it trebles the current UK off shore wind generation installed capacity. That's pretty much game changing. I own SSE that I bought partly on the strength of the Dogger Bank development. They are in there with new capacity, as is Shell which I also own.

It is now desperately overdue that the UK gets really serious about manufacturing the entire turbine and it's infrastructure. Apart from blades, just about everything in a wind farm from end to end is imported. Meaning that the wider UK economy does not benefit one bit from the thousands of skilled jobs building wind turbine infrastructure. That's truly awful. If it comes to it, legislation needs to be passed to force renewable energy projects to invest in UK manufacturing. It's extremely common in oil and gas energy projects that the host country mandates minimum domestic investment levels. If push comes to shove, the UK should do the same. We have always been very, very poor at looking after our own wider economic interests. Post Brexit that really ought to be changing.

BullDog wrote:To add, the scale of the new developments is actually impressive. Assuming all the projects do actually get built then it trebles the current UK off shore wind generation installed capacity. That's pretty much game changing. I own SSE that I bought partly on the strength of the Dogger Bank development. They are in there with new capacity, as is Shell which I also own.

It is now desperately overdue that the UK gets really serious about manufacturing the entire turbine and it's infrastructure. Apart from blades, just about everything in a wind farm from end to end is imported. Meaning that the wider UK economy does not benefit one bit from the thousands of skilled jobs building wind turbine infrastructure. That's truly awful. If it comes to it, legislation needs to be passed to force renewable energy projects to invest in UK manufacturing. It's extremely common in oil and gas energy projects that the host country mandates minimum domestic investment levels. If push comes to shove, the UK should do the same. We have always been very, very poor at looking after our own wider economic interests. Post Brexit that really ought to be changing.

To put that another way, does that mean that none of the "picks and shovels" (tools or materials) being used to build these projects are made in, or by, the UK? If so, that truly is a disappointment.

richfool wrote:To put that another way, does that mean that none of the "picks and shovels" (tools or materials) being used to build these projects are made in, or by, the UK? If so, that truly is a disappointment.

Supposedly they've committed to a spend of around £1bn in the UK per GW, but a lot of that may be the lower-value stuff like foundations.

richfool wrote:

BullDog wrote:To add, the scale of the new developments is actually impressive. Assuming all the projects do actually get built then it trebles the current UK off shore wind generation installed capacity. That's pretty much game changing. I own SSE that I bought partly on the strength of the Dogger Bank development. They are in there with new capacity, as is Shell which I also own.

It is now desperately overdue that the UK gets really serious about manufacturing the entire turbine and it's infrastructure. Apart from blades, just about everything in a wind farm from end to end is imported. Meaning that the wider UK economy does not benefit one bit from the thousands of skilled jobs building wind turbine infrastructure. That's truly awful. If it comes to it, legislation needs to be passed to force renewable energy projects to invest in UK manufacturing. It's extremely common in oil and gas energy projects that the host country mandates minimum domestic investment levels. If push comes to shove, the UK should do the same. We have always been very, very poor at looking after our own wider economic interests. Post Brexit that really ought to be changing.

To put that another way, does that mean that none of the "picks and shovels" (tools or materials) being used to build these projects are made in, or by, the UK? If so, that truly is a disappointment.

Siemens and Vestas both have turbine blade fabrication factories.

GE have nothing in the UK.

The turbine generators, gearboxes etc.... (that's where the serious mechanical engineering is) of the big player's machines are all imported.

GE are looking at opening a factory in the UK but that could be sheer bull to make them look better when they were bidding for Dogger Bank 1 and 2. Those projects are being supplied by GE from France. GE are perhaps going to start manufacturing in the UK for Dogger Bank 3. Perhaps. Maybe.

The off shore jackets which are basic offshore engineering of the type the UK used to excel in are made abroad, the last big project in UAE in fact. There are a couple of yards now gearing up and the future could be brighter. Yards in North East England and Scotland were world leaders in that kind of technology when the North Sea industry was developing.

Then there's the subsea cables, the substations switch gear, control systems etc.....

Bulldog wrote:Siemens and Vestas both have turbine blade fabrication factories.

GE have nothing in the UK.

The turbine generators, gearboxes etc.... (that's where the serious mechanical engineering is) of the big player's machines are all imported.

GE are looking at opening a factory in the UK but that could be sheer bull to make them look better when they were bidding for Dogger Bank 1 and 2. Those projects are being supplied by GE from France. GE are perhaps going to start manufacturing in the UK for Dogger Bank 3. Perhaps. Maybe.

The off shore jackets which are basic offshore engineering of the type the UK used to excel in are made abroad, the last big project in UAE in fact. There are a couple of yards now gearing up and the future could be brighter. Yards in North East England and Scotland were world leaders in that kind of technology when the North Sea industry was developing.

Then there's the subsea cables, the substations switch gear, control systems etc.....

Thanks for that informative reply Bulldog.

I have Siemens and Vestas covered through BERI and JETI European IT), and exposure to SSE and Shell though UK IT's., but was wondering if I was missing any other opportunities.

richfool wrote:

Bulldog wrote:Siemens and Vestas both have turbine blade fabrication factories.

GE have nothing in the UK.

The turbine generators, gearboxes etc.... (that's where the serious mechanical engineering is) of the big player's machines are all imported.

GE are looking at opening a factory in the UK but that could be sheer bull to make them look better when they were bidding for Dogger Bank 1 and 2. Those projects are being supplied by GE from France. GE are perhaps going to start manufacturing in the UK for Dogger Bank 3. Perhaps. Maybe.

The off shore jackets which are basic offshore engineering of the type the UK used to excel in are made abroad, the last big project in UAE in fact. There are a couple of yards now gearing up and the future could be brighter. Yards in North East England and Scotland were world leaders in that kind of technology when the North Sea industry was developing.

Then there's the subsea cables, the substations switch gear, control systems etc.....

Thanks for that informative reply Bulldog.

I have Siemens and Vestas covered through BERI and JETI European IT), and exposure to SSE and Shell though UK IT's., but was wondering if I was missing any other opportunities.

It seems we are covering the same bases with BERI, Shell and SSE

I also have exposure to energy storage with Gresham House Energy Storage GRID and Harmony Energy Income Trust HEIT.

Bulldog wrote:It seems we are covering the same bases with BERI, Shell and SSE

I also have exposure to energy storage with Gresham House Energy Storage GRID and Harmony Energy Income Trust HEIT.

Yes, I too hold energy storage storage through GRID and GSF. I'm not familiar with HEIT, so will have a look at that.

My more recent addition was BSIF, which whilst solar, is broadening its mandate to include wind, hydro and storage technologies.

(PS. EGL holds a number of energy and utility companies).