On a news item on my local news about the new offshore wind-farm off the coast of Humberside, the spokesman Patrick Harnett of Orested said that one turn of a turbine's blades (which takes 6 seconds) generates enough energy to power an average home for 24 hours.
That sounds a very large amount of energy. Is it correct or did I misunderstand somewhere?
They also said that the intention is for three offshore wind-farms in that area to supply about 1/4 of the country's electricity needs once all the farms are working by the end of the decade.
They are supposed to be 14MW platforms. Let's assume one is running at full output. At 6 secs per rotation, you will get 600 rotations per hour. So one rotation will generate a 600th of 14 MWh, or ~23kWh
A fairly meaningless statement since it is an unreliable supply.
True, but one solution would be to retain gas powered generation to fill in the gaps.
We don't know how much of the time the wind speed is high enough to generate that amount of electricity, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is 80% of the time. An 80% reduction in the gas used compared to the present position would be a pretty good result.
Interestingly, I'm by the coast at the moment. It's a warm sunny day, and I'd say it's pretty calm in the garden. However, the weather forecast says that the wind speed is currently 15MPH, which is probably plenty to run the turbines, particularly as there is more wind offshore.
Offshore windfarms are a great solution, as they are maintenance-heavy, thus providing loads of relatively well paid jobs locally.
But BEIS says the average house usage uses 3731 kWh/year which = 10 kWh/day
p.s. but if John Rumm's figure of 14 MW for offshore turbines is correct
then 6 seconds worth is 23 kWh, which seems to better align with the traditional figure of 1kW load per house as the tabloids' measure of power station capacity, e.g. HinkleyC = 3 GW = powers 3,000,000 homes.
There is virtually no reductin in gas used, because the CCGT stations are constantly being ramped up and down and stopped and started, and like a car in traffic, they don't achieve the same efficiency as if they were simply running as base load.
Additionally, when you build a new gas power station that you know will be switched off most of the time, you don't build and expensive CCGT. You build a cheap gas guzzling OCGT because when power is short you can justify the cost of the fuel, Net result: more gas burnt.
Everything about renewable energy is a carefully contrived fraud.
Offshore wind farms are utter crap, and they are maintenance heavy, which makes them, expensive and means lots of extra diesel is burnt on boats and helicopters and extra CO2 generated making spare parts.
It seems its not just the supply that's unreliable, but also the information.
Orsted's main web site for Hornsea 2
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scroll down to and click on Hornsea 2) says there are 165 turbines delivering 1.3 GW of renewable electricity, and that one revolution of the blades can power an average UK home for 24 hours. I make that
7.9MW per turbine. At 600 revs per hour, one rev generates 13kWh. Various sources on the internet say that average UK domestic electricity use is between 8 and 10 kWh/day. So on that basis, the Orsted claim is OK.
But that capacity factor is calculated from output over a whole year, surely. If the turbine does one revolution in six seconds, that's what the calculation is based on and implies enough wind to achieve that rate, rather than performing sub-optimally for a significant time, as is the case for a whole year.
"The 1.3GW project comprises 165 wind turbines which will help power over 1.4 m homes."
Lets dissect that.
That implies each turbine is 7.8GW
Is that average? Is that peak?, is that nameplate capacity? It's carefully never specificed.
"leverages 165 x 8 MW wind turbines manufactured by Siemens Ga"
(of course its Siemens, who else funds the tory party? who else has the money for renewable brown envelopes to Brussels?)
Now what we know is that the claims of 40% capacity factor are utter f****ng nonsense to begin with, as as GB has pointed out these things are 'maintenance heavy' and the true figure revealed by Gridwatch is nearer 27%, so in reality, the average generated will be about 27% of the nameplate
So in reality the final figure is about 2.7 kWh. Enough to maybe run a washing machine for an hour
This is how the green fraud goes, They disregard all the external carbon emissions all the externalised costs, pretend the windmills run full chat all the time and that they will last as long as a nuclear power station, ignore the ROCS and carbon credits, and if you dare call them out, they brand you a climate denier.
Siemens are way worse than Volkswagen in terms of lying to the public.
My point is that the the turbine doesn't do one revolution in six seconds. And doesn't generate 8MW. Unless the wind is exactly right. The blades are variable pitch. Even if they DO do 10RPM in light winds, they woint be generating more power than is in the wind. Cant you see that?
You can go to gridwatch and look at the monthly and yearly figure for wind generation for the 10,000+ wind generators we already have. On a good day they can generate a total of around 15GW but in the past month they have struggled to generate a continuous 3GW. (in the past 3 months close to 5GW). For long periods (months) only 30% of their maximum.
But the promise of renewable energy was cheap energy. It is only the consumer that is going to pay the cost of loads of well paid jobs maintaining offshore facilities. It would be much cheaper to maintain generators if only they could be build on land in a few locations already served by the national grid.
Yes, but I'm taking the figures as quoted at face value. _If_ it rotates at 10rpm it will generate 13kWh in one revolution. Whether that is sustainable over anything more than a few minutes or a few hours or a few days is another matter.
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