Ocean Wind Now Mainstream
The World’s Biggest Turbines and No Subsidies: How Offshore Wind Is Entering a New Era
Geoffrey Smith, October 7, 2019 (Fortune)
“…The winning bidders [in the UK’s most recent auction of contracts for renewable generation] were the prospective operators of a new generation of offshore wind farms that will match nuclear power plants in their generating capacity, powering not thousands, but millions of homes, all developed without subsidies. Though not scheduled to come online until 2023, the projects point to a wholesale reinvention of much of today’s energy sector, as companies that cut their teeth in the world of offshore oil and gas morph into specialists in offshore wind electricity…[The 2014 auction price of over 117 pounds/MWh has] dropped to 40.63 pounds/MWh…[which is] as likely to shave customers’ energy bills as to add to them…This is all due ultimately to one thing: scale…
…The auction winners were three gigantic sites on the Dogger Bank—a large sandbank about the size of New Jersey 60 miles off the east coast of England—which will house wind farms capable of generating 1,200 megawatts of electricity, each one pumping out as much as the giant nuclear reactors and coal-fired stations that have provided ‘baseload’ (i.e. constant, 24/7) power to previous generations of consumers…To generate that, the joint operators of two of the three sites will be using General Electric’s new 12-megawatt Haliade-X turbines. These monsters—100 of which will be needed for each farm—are the biggest wind turbines ever built…[The Haliade-X’s 63% capacity factor is] more than coal-powered stations in the U.S…” click here for more
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