The world’s first floating wind farm has started to deliver electricity to the Scottish grid.
Comprising six 5MW floating turbines, the 30MW Hywind Scotland project is located 25km offshore from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and will provide power for approximately 20,000 households. The £190m Hywind project is operated by Statoil in partnership with Masdar.
“Hywind can be used for water depths up to 800m, thus opening up areas that so far have been inaccessible for offshore wind,” said Irene Rummelhoff, executive vice president of Statoil’s New Energy Solutions business. “The learnings from Hywind Scotland will pave the way for new global market opportunities for floating offshore wind energy. Through their government’s support to develop the Hywind Scotland project, the UK and Scotland are now at the forefront of the development of this exciting new technology.”
The onshore operations and maintenance base for Hywind Scotland is located in Peterhead, while the operations centre is located in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
According to Statoil, recent years have seen significant cost reductions in onshore and bottom fixed offshore wind sectors and floating wind is expected to follow a similar downward trajectory over the next decade.
“Statoil has an ambition to reduce the costs of energy from the Hywind floating wind farm to €40-60 €/MWh by 2030. Knowing that up to 80 per cent of the offshore wind resources are in deep waters [+60 metres] where traditional bottom fixed installations are not suitable, floating offshore wind is expected to play a significant role in the growth of offshore wind,” said Rummelhoff.
Second wind: could floating turbines reshape offshore renewables?
Commenting on today’s development, Tom Delay, CEO, The Carbon Trust said: “A decade ago Beatrice Offshore Wind Demonstrator in the Moray Firth was the world’s first deep-water project with fixed foundations. Today marks another crucial milestone in the development for offshore wind, and again it is happening in Scotland – the world’s first commercial floating wind project.
“This will be the beginning to expand the global deployment of offshore wind to areas where fixed foundations are not feasible. With the opening of the Hywind Pilot Park today, Scotland becomes the world leader for floating wind deployment and we can say with confidence that floating wind is viable. However, it is crucial that innovation continues to drive down costs and the right policy is in place to increase investment.”
Battery storage has the potential to mitigate intermittency and optimise output, and to this end Statoil and Masdar will also install Batwind, a 1MWh lithium battery storage solution in conjunction with the Hywind Scotland project.
Thank you Statoil, well done and good luck to all involved with the Hywind Scotland floating wind farm project.
I have described methods for integrating wind farms into the electricity grid so as to provide power on demand whatever the weather.
My Wind Generation Capacity Focus Table (for 30MW Wind power) recommends the usual energy storage of 5 hours times wind power capacity or about 150MWh (150 times more than Statoil’s ridiculously small and ineffective “1MWh Batwind battery” plan).
Scottish Scientist
Independent Scientific Adviser for Scotland
* Wind, storage and back-up system designer
* Double Tidal Lagoon Baseload Scheme
* Off-Shore Electricity from Wind, Solar and Hydrogen Power
* World’s biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme, for Scotland?
* Modelling of wind and pumped-storage power
* Scotland Electricity Generation – my plan for 2020
* South America – GREAT for Renewable Energy
A 1.5 tonne flywheel spinning at 4000RPM can store 100 MJ of energy which is enough to supply a house for about 8 hours or charge a small electric car. They are simple, non-toxic and will last for hundreds of years – I think they’re much better and far greener than batteries.
Independent Scientific Adviser for Scotland
* Wind, storage and back-up system designer
* Double Tidal Lagoon Baseload Scheme
* Off-Shore Electricity from Wind, Solar and Hydrogen Power
* World’s biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme, for Scotland?
* Modelling of wind and pumped-storage power
* Scotland Electricity Generation – my plan for 2020
* South America – GREAT for Renewable Energy
How about the energy required to spin such a heavy flywheel, how feasible is it?
Great development work by Statoil. However, it must be remembered that they are being handsomely paid by the UK for their “green” electricity. Norway is the most brilliant energy rich country in the world: it could easily develop any of the unreliable energy sources for its own use as it has hydro back-up, but looks for the profitable applications.
Would any of these schemes have a chance if we (UK) were not guaranteeing well over £ 100 / MWh for the power? The question is rhetorical! Scotland’s part in this is a small as the rest of the UKs: it is all about subsidies unfortunately, as the development is very clever.
A battery that holds 1000 units of electricity, or 3600 MJ seems only sufficient to cope with peaks of demand – a few minutes for 20000 households. Or, another way 120 seconds of power generation.
Hardly the sort of intermittency that is the worry of wind dropping for days on end.
The wind turbines themselves – or rather their implementation sound much more interesting than the battery.
Though perhaps the publicist did appreciate that the right policy would be for innovation in the energy storage???
{And just to put energy storage in context the largest pumped hydro can store 126GWhrs. And, in the UK, Dinorwig has about 10 GWhrs –but not sure how many suitable UK sites there are}
I’m not sure why you have borrowed my signature text there Richard? Those are post topics from my wordpress blog.
Well they do say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. LOL.
San Luis (William R. Gianelli) Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Powerplant, Merced County, California
Rated Power – 424 MW
Maximum duration at Rated Power – 298 hours
Maximum energy stored = 424 MW x 298 hours = 126 GWh
There is one site in the UK which I have found which could store 50 times the maximum energy which can be stored in San Luis and it is only 90 miles west of Peterhead, in the Scottish Highlands, near Inverness.
STRATHDEARN PUMPED-STORAGE HYDRO SCHEME (up to 180 GW / 6,800 GWh)
World’s biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme, for Scotland?
“The map shows how and where the biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme could be built – Strathdearn in the Scottish Highlands.
Energy storage capacity
The scheme requires a massive dam about 300 metres high and 2,000 metres long to impound about 4.4 billion metres-cubed of water in the upper glen of the River Findhorn. The surface elevation of the reservoir so impounded would be as much as 650 metres when full and the surface area would be as much as 40 square-kilometres.
The maximum potential energy which could be stored by such a scheme is colossal – about 6800 Gigawatt-hours – or 283 Gigawatt-days – enough capacity to balance and back-up the intermittent renewable energy generators such as wind and solar power now in use for the whole of Europe!”
Power
There would need to be two pumping and turbine generating stations at different locations – one by the sea at Inverness which pumps sea-water uphill via pressurised pipes to 300 metres of elevation to a water well head which feeds an unpressurised canal in which water flows to and from the other pumping and turbine generating station at the base of the dam which pumps water up into the reservoir impounded by the dam.
To fill or empty the reservoir in a day would require a flow rate of 51,000 metres-cubed per second, the equivalent of the discharge flow from the Congo River, only surpassed by the Amazon!
The power capacity emptying at such a flow rate could be equally colossal. When nearly empty and powering only the lower turbines by the sea, then about 132 GW could be produced. When nearly full and the upper turbines at the base of the dam fully powered too then about 264 GW could be produced.
Norway’s conventional hydroelectric energy storage is around 80,000 GWh I think and some of that could be converted to pumped-storage operation if required.
Additionally, Norway’a fjords are ideal for the most cost-effective sea-water pumped-storage hydro-electric schemes.
There looks to be an opportunity for Norway to make a profit from arbitrage trading of electricity for customers in the low countries, Germany, Denmark, the Baltic states, Poland etc.
Norway can buy electricity when the price is cheap, when wind and solar power is in surplus, conserving conventional hydroelectric power or pumping up hydroelectric reservoirs. Later, sell electricity when wind and solar power is in short supply, demand is high and the price is high.
I can imagine that Norway might well have a crush of customers for its energy storage and that’s why I suggest that Britain becomes self-sufficient in energy storage which we can easily do.
Yes, if I were religious I would say that Norway is thrice blest…. oil, hydro and fjords. Only curse is that most of the land is uninhabitable! I have a great admiration for their demonstrated common sense approach their wealth and energy management. The UK is more like the foolish virgins who wasted their oil and gas!
In addition to the numerous lakes and dams , at mountain altitudes, providing a generous head of water for lower level turbines, it has a rather wonderful seasonal water storage medium in the form of snow , which melts in late spring, to carry the load through the latter part of the heating season. Norway uses a large number of heat pumps for main house heating, along with direct electric water heating and smaller secondary panel heaters as required. Rather different to the UK, which relies heavily on direct gas heating