Tag Archives: floating offshore wind

Can ‘clean energy’ schemes get any crazier? 

From Watts Up With That?

Materials, costs and survivability for wind turbines on massive floating platforms defy reality

Paul Driessen

The US Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management recently designated two Wind Energy Areas in deepwater areas off the Oregon coast. BOEM is also reviewing offshore wind energy development options for the Gulf of Maine, Central Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and maybe Great Lakes.

They’re part of Team Biden’s plan to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030 and 15,000 MW of floating offshore wind energy capacity by 2035. Capacity is what the turbines could generate, when the wind is blowing at optimal speeds, perhaps 30-40% of the year.

30,000 MW is what 2,500 12-MW turbines could generate. It’s enough to meet New York State’s current peak electricity needs on a hot summer day. Add the electricity required to replace gasoline cars and natural gas furnaces and stoves, meet surging AI, data center and streaming video demands, and charge grid-scale backup batteries – and New York alone would likely need 10,000 12-MW offshore turbines.

Meeting the soaring electricity needs of all US states would require hundreds of thousands more.

BOEM nevertheless insists that “Offshore wind is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a new clean energy industry, tackle the climate crisis, and create good-paying jobs, while ensuring economic opportunities for all communities.”

Note to be outdone in baseless puffery, the Department of Energy extols the Administration’s goal of “decarbonizing” the entire US electric grid by 2035 and says “offshore wind is especially well-suited” for generating “clean energy.” Two-thirds of all US offshore wind potential, it says, exists over ocean areas so deep that turbines must be mounted on floating platforms anchored to the seafloor by mooring lines tied to suction piles sunk into bottom sediments.

DOE even claims it will somehow reduce the cost of floating deepwater wind energy to $45 per megawatt-hour by 2035. (That’s 45¢ per kilowatt-hour, triple what most Americans now pay.) To buttress its claims, DOE presents maps, artist’s renderings and images of floating turbine arrays.

It’s almost as though these government officials actually believe they can solve the alleged climate crisis by simply issuing proclamations, regulations, drawings, press releases and subsidies – and Voila!

Mines open, raw materials materialize, and millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of vehicle and grid-scale batteries, millions of miles of transmission lines, millions of transformers and other technologies get manufactured and installed – affordably and with no fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, toxic air and water pollutants, child and slave labor, or other evils (all at minimal cost), while endangered species and other environmental conflicts disappear (or are relegated to irrelevance) …

and cornucopias of clean, renewable, reliable, affordable electricity are rapidly generated worldwide.

It’s impolite to question fervently held beliefs in fossil-fuel-free utopias. However, a little reality is urgently needed before activists and bureaucrats take us any further down this primrose path.

12-MW offshore turbines are 850 feet tall, carry three 350-foot-long blades, and weigh thousands of tons. To date, few have been installed anywhere, none have been subjected to major hurricanes, and none have been mounted on deepwater floating platforms. Indeed, no such platform-mounted turbines exist outside the realm of concepts and ten-foot models in wind tunnels and test tanks.

The Kincardine floating turbines in the North Sea southeast of Aberdeen, Scotland are much smaller, and the strongest wind gusts recorded there were in the 83–123 mph range. Sustained wind speeds for category 3-5 hurricanes range from 111 to 157 mph and greater. Some of the worst US landfalling hurricanes reached 126 mph (Katrina, 2003) to 167 mph (Andrew, 1997). The strongest winds ever off the Oregon coast exceeded 100 mph (1962 and 1995).

Subsurface and semisubmersible structures for the smaller 2.0–9.5-MW deepwater turbines weigh 2,000 to 8,000 tons. New semisubmersible platforms for deepwater oil production can be over 30,000 tons and cost a billion dollars or more. Yet even they are probably not large enough for the monstrous 15-MW beasts that the Biden Administration, CNN and others are extolling.

Says CNN: “The first, full-sized floating offshore wind turbine in the United States will tower 850 feet above the waves in the Gulf of Maine…. The gigantic machine, with 774-foot diameter blades and tethered to the seabed with thick metal cables, is planned to be put into the water” by 2030.

It’s almost impossible to conceive of the amounts of steel and other raw materials that would be needed for each of these gigantic turbines and support systems; the amounts of ore that would have to be extracted to obtain those materials; the fossil fuels required to mine and process the ores, manufacture the turbines, blades and support systems, and transport and install them; the cost to build each of them.

Based on average deposits being mined today, the 110,000 tons of copper required for 30,000 MW of offshore turbine alone would require removing some 65,000,000 tons of ore and overlying rock. That doesn’t include copper for marine cables, transmission lines, transformers and other equipment – or the other metals and minerals.

It is inconceivable that these deepwater wind turbine systems could ever recoup all the energy and costs – or offset all the greenhouse gas emissions – involved in building them, no matter how many years they generate electricity. Indeed, those years may be very short, due to violent storms and constant salt spray. 

It’s equally inconceivable that they could survive major storms. As a deepwater oil production expert explained, the major unexamined issue is the enormous dynamic loads the mooring systems impart on support structures and turbines.

Floating offshore structures are designed to move on their mooring systems, to adjust for wind and waves. But if 115–160 mph winds hit the structures and equipment on their decks, they can be pushed to the limits of survivability. That’s what happened to the Mars TLP rig during Hurricane Katrina.

Some of its mooring lines (tethers) failed, the entire rig was pushed over onto its side, and the 200-foot-tall derrick snapped off and sank. Subsequent analysis found it was not the high winds that caused the failure, but the total structure’s return motion – its restorative forces or “whiplash” – as the wind speeds suddenly dropped from 126 mph, with gusts of 200 mph, to 15 mph.

Now picture 850-foot-tall turbines, with huge blades designed to catch the breezes, atop enormous semisubmersible platforms, being caught in a hurricane or other fierce storm; being pushed over further and further; until wind speeds suddenly plummet, and the turbines whiplash violently – and snap off.

That Shell Oil, among the world’s most experienced offshore oil developers, has dropped out of deepwater wind projects should say a lot about the viability of the far-fetched deepwater schemes Team Biden is promoting, to forcibly transform America’s energy and economic system.

That some companies are still in the game underscores how their risks are being forcibly subsidized and underwritten by taxpayers and consumers, who are being dragooned into these schemes by politicians and bureaucrats who likewise have no real skin in the game. Their leasing bids are plummeting, their electricity price demands soaring.

It’s time to say, “Enough! We’re going to keep our nuclear and fossil fuel energy, until you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that your alternatives provide equally abundant, reliable, affordable energy.”

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor to the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)  and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

China & India Reject West’s Suicidal Wind & Solar Obsession

From STOP THESE THINGS

While Europe, the UK, US and Australia are busily destroying their energy supplies, China and India are building coal-fired and nuclear power plants, hand over first – providing reliable and cheap power to industry, businesses and households is central to their economic development.

There was nothing sustainable about subsidised wind and solar. The sudden and catastrophic collapse in the value of wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers; the raft of grand offshore wind projects which have been scrapped; and the improved electoral fortunes of political parties ready to call the scam for what it is, look entirely inevitable.

Start at the beginning: without massive subsidies there would be no wind or solar industries. Full stop.

In the article below, David Blackmon draws a stark contrast between the delusional ideology that has driven energy policy in the wealthy West and the perfectly practical approach adopted by China and India.

The US should take warning from the huge costs of British floating wind power
The Telegraph
David Blackmon
20 November 2023

I must admit I laughed out loud when reading a November 16 report by the BBC detailing the Rishi Sunak government’s latest award of massive new subsidies to the UK’s offshore wind developers.

“The price paid to generate electricity by offshore wind farms has been raised by 66 per cent as the government tries to entice energy firms to invest,” the BBC report begins, adding, “It comes after an auction for offshore wind projects failed to attract any bids, with firms arguing the price set for electricity generated was too low. The government has lifted the price it pays from £44 per MWh to £73. It is hoped that more offshore wind capacity will lead to cheaper energy bills.”

That doesn’t make a lot of sense: paying (a lot) more for electricity is going to mean cheaper bills?

The UK has also raised the price for floating offshore wind to a staggering £176/MWh. That’s bad news for us here in the USA, as we don’t have a lot of seabed suitable for fixed offshore wind. Most of our offshore wind power is planned to be hugely expensive floating plant. Yet government officials and most media continue to parrot the idea that renewable energy is cheap without apparent curiosity.

Meanwhile in the US, the Biden government continues to license more offshore wind projects even in the face of recent major write-downs by big wind developers and the decision by Orsted to cancel two major projects off New Jersey. On October 31, the administration awarded Dominion the license to develop the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) commercial project, a 900 MW development off Virginia Beach. At the same time, Biden regulators continue their work to shut down the US coal-fired power generation fleet entirely.

While the Sunak government in the UK focuses on ways to disguise what is a de facto bailout for the financially troubled Big Wind operators, Xi Jinping’s communist government in China is busy devising ways to add even more new coal-fired power generation to its own grid. To that end, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently announced a new program in which the Chinese government will subsidize the building of new coal-fired electricity generation plants. The new subsidy goes into effect January 1, and is a key part of an effort to ensure power grid reliability and stability into the future.

The Chinese government understands the vital need for abundant thermal baseload and dispatchable generation in any stable and reliable power grid. Whether London, Washington DC, or the UN like it or not, coal remains the cheapest and most abundant fuel source available to fill this role in most developing nations. So, China, which already has more new coal plants in the development chain than the rest of the world combined, will now subsidize the building of even more new capacity starting in 2024. China says it will achieve “carbon neutrality” – this is not the same as net zero, as it doesn’t include other greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide – in 2060, ten years after the US and UK will apparently be at net zero.

India, too, is moving more heavily to reliance on coal. India’s Coal Ministry announced on November 13 plans to increase domestic coal production to 1.404 billion tonnes by 2027, with plans to raise production to 1.577 billion tonnes by 2030. The Ministry said the increased production plans are in anticipation of the addition of another 80 GW of new coal-fired generation capacity in the coming 6 years. Domestic demand for thermal generation has risen by 20 per cent in just the past year, and India says it’s not doing net zero until 2070.

The BBC quotes unnamed corporate sources as claiming, “electricity produced out at sea would remain cheaper and less prone to shock increases compared with power derived from gas-fired power stations.” There have certainly been gas price shocks in Europe following Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, but UK wholesale electricity prices have dipped below the new offshore-wind strike price this year: and that is by no means the highest strike price being offered.

This reliance on tired narratives that have shown little if any relationship to observed results as the basis for massive debt-funded spending compelled by government policy mandates perfectly illustrates why the political class is the worst possible segment of western societies to be making these energy decisions for the rest of us. This reality also illustrates why this effort to override the market is leading inevitably to bad outcomes.

The hard fact is that wind power and other renewable energy sources are expensive, not cheap. If they were actually cheap, we would have started using them without any government action. The Western world will make its industries uncompetitive (or in some cases, such as primary steel, non existent) and its people poorer by adopting renewables, and will still have to retain a duplicate thermal power sector to take over when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Texas is now having to subsidise the building of gas generation for this purpose, as renewables subsidies have warped the markets beyond recognition: there’s no shortage of gas in Texas.

And no matter what anyone tells you, there is no move away from fossil fuels taking place in some very large world economies. An “energy transition” which is not happening in China or India isn’t really a transition at all.
The Telegraph