Norway is set to become the home of Europe’s largest onshore wind project, as plans have been announced for six new farms in the centre of the country with a combined capacity of 1000MW.
A joint venture between Statkraft, TrønderEnergi and the European investor consortium Nordic Wind Power DA, the €1.1bn Fosen Vind development is due to begin construction later this year, with a completion date of 2020. In total, 278 turbines will be used, each with a capacity of 3.6 MW, and the project is expected to generate 3.4 TWh of power per year.
“This is an important day,” said Christian Rynning-Tønnesen, president and CEO of Statkraft.
“Together with our partners Statkraft has developed the largest renewable energy project in Norway in this millennium. With a 1000 MW project we become one of the leading onshore wind players.”
The six farms will be built on the Fosen peninsula, Snillfjord and the island of Hitra, in a coastal area near to the city of Trondheim where conditions for wind energy are ideal. Plans for a different project involving the same parties were abandoned last summer due to lack of profitability. This led to a new assessment process and a redesigned project with reduced costs and increased generation.
“Fosen Vind represents an exciting new chapter for renewable energy in Norway,” said Ståle Gjersvold, CEO of TrønderEnergi.
“In a challenging economic environment, TrønderEnergi and our partners will create value and jobs to the whole of Trøndelag.”
The first delivery of turbines is due to take place in 2018.
At least Norway can afford to invest in white elephants and has a robust grid with a lot of hydro power that can balance the unreliability of weather. Makes a lot more sense there than in UK or Germany which depend on imported fossil fuels to balance their grids.
Why were they not the first is an interesting question, given their cash resources and suitable grid?
As Prof David Mackay says on page 195 of his book “Sustainable Energy – Without the hot air” , free to download from http://www.withouthotair.com, “there is a beautiful match between wind turbines and electric cars. The Norwegians are buying electric vehicles like hot cakes so it makes very good sense to instal more wind turbines.
Because they have hydro and are so green compared to the coal belching Germans. Its hardly a white elephant if a proper eurogrid can be continues to be built. It’s coming together. The only white elephants showing their ugly heads are the new nukes in the UK and the fracking gas companies. They need to stop.
I am hoping that the UK’s tidal power projects start coming on line ASAP too. They are great.
And why am I supporting renewables so much; because the temperature where I live has increased by well over 2 ‘C already and is expected to change by 6’C in a few decades. That’s huge.
Why rather small power (3,2 MW) on-shore wind turbines were selected?
Because they’ve done their homework and not been fooled by the turbine makers’ false claims that bigger (6-10MW) is better. The manufacturers have backed the wrong horse on that one, but they’ll never admit it. The other state-owned business, Statoil, made a bad choice in their Hywind project. That’s the risk you take with Rdd&d, which is why private investors never get involved. Statoil failed to sell it to the US, but may succeed in UK waters, if the Scots don’t wise up PDQ.
Hywind is a top-heavy spar buoy design (draft 100m+) with a 6MW HAWT when it should be a 3MW floating VAWT with a very shallow draft. Technip engineers were involved in the prototype Hywind (2.3MW) and concluded it was a bad idea. . .
Because the size doesn’t matter. Since you have to keep a certain distance between the turbines due to wake losses. When a wind farm is laid out in multiple rows, and you have to keep 5D and 7D distance in along-wind and cross-wind directions, respectively, then the number of turbines you can put in a certain area is inversely proportional to the square of the rotor diameter (D^2).
The power produced by a turbine is also proportional to the rotor diameter P~D^2.
So the important conclusion is that independently of the size of the turbine, the power you can put in a given area is constant. The size of the turbine mainly matters when they are installed in a row instead of in a grid.
The fact of the matter is – the trouble with wind farms is producing too much power at the wrong time. If your principal supply isn’t dispatchable (nuclear, coal etc.), that means curtailment. . .
Norway imports cheap surplus wind power through international interconnectors. They have limited pumped hydro storage capacity, so it makes sound economic sense to switch off hydro generators and keep water reserves as high as possible. It’s easy, as hydropower is dispatchable. Then they can export more hydroelectricity when their neighbours run short.
This wind farm is additional insurance against periods of drought. Norway already has zero-carbon electricity and they’ve chosen to expand that capacity the cheapest way possible, unlike the UK, which is ruined by political incompetence. (let’s try using more gas – see if that will work!)
They’re not squandering any oil wealth and it’s no white elephant. It’s a good investment. When Denmark and Germany get their grids better organised, Norway will reap the benefit of exploiting their own very good wind resource.
http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/danish-minister-green-lights-baltic-interconnector-nid3259.html
About 1/4 the size of most coal plants and a lot less reliable.
Query, when we talk about the cost of on-shore wind being so cheap, do we account for the costs of revolutionising the distribution system, the interconnectors and pumped storage systems etc. on which we depend to make them work…. just asking.
And no, I’m not pro-coal, at least without CCS, and even then its a questionable technology. But I am wind sceptical nowadays. Politics has muddied the engineering and economics so much that it seems nearly impossible to make un-politicised statements on the technology.
Why not invest in tidal power . We can predict the tides for at least 1000 years ahead. Norway and the UK both have good access to a wide tidal range that is distributed around the coast. From my simplistic view at least 18 hours per day of generation, albeit not at the same output. Wind I feel is a poor political choice and a ‘blot’ on the landscape. Sub-sea turbines have little impact on sea-life and contribute to nursery sites for fish stock replacement (fishing near to sub-sea turbines would not be good for fishing boats). Given the energy density of water compared with air(wind), I feel the pressure should be on to invest in tidal power.
I have agree with Peter Hodkinson regarding tidal power, however I don’t think he can make an honest appraisal of the impact on sea-life as I think this is fairly an unstudied area, especially given that we don’t have much in the way of subsea turbines in the UK to study. I only know of one on-stream in the Orkney Isles, but I could be corrected on this issue. My person view would be that larger shoaling fish like Cod , Dolphins and Whales, would lack the acceleration to dodge a large turbine blade, such as used in the Orkneys, and with the large mammalian creatures a collision might result in wrecking the turbine and killing the creature. Therefore some guarding might be required and filtering of larger fish.
I do agree with Dave Smart that Norway is the ideal place for windfarms and, as it has considerable hydo-electric power available, is possibly even economic there. I stick by the point that generally wind-turbines are white elephants dependent totally upon massive subsidies for which we all pay; and will in future pay even more in terms of both unreliable power and cost.
Given Norway’s massive oil-wealth and suitability for wind, why has it taken them so long? Very sensible business people the Norwegians!
If battery storage or pumped energy were available economically, wind would possibly be worth considering as part of the UK power system but not otherwise.
“Why has it taken them so long?” – I imagine that a number of small but vociferous groups oppose on-shore turbines in Norway, same as the UK. If they had shallow seas, more expensive off-shore windfarms may have been a price worth paying. Their floating Hywind design only proved to be technically feasible – the prototype has been generating for 6 years. It’s not commercially viable, so they’re not using it themselves! You could say that the process of ‘due diligence’ took 15 years?
http://www.offshorewind.biz/2015/11/03/statoil-sets-aside-eur-214-million-for-hywind-scotland-pilot-park/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine
R&D is expensive, time-consuming and risky. The 100% StatoilHydro-owned floater project began at the end of the last century. At that time, they had a web page asking for new ideas to be sent in, but that’s unworkable, if the designer can’t afford to own the IP. . . .
http://www.statoil.com/en/TechnologyInnovation/NewEnergy/RenewablePowerProduction/Offshore/Hywind/Pages/HywindPuttingWindPowerToTheTest.aspx?redirectShortUrl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.statoil.com%2fhywind
“The Hywind concept combines known technologies.” Same old problem – a failure to innovate.
With this obscene proliferation of wind farms, has anyone considered the effect on the weather by removing so much energy from the wind?