With Wind Turbines Is It Bigger Are Better?
The offshoreWIND.biz web site has two stories today, with a similar theme.
- Scots Greenlight Slimmed-Down Turbine Plan For 100 MW Pentland Floating Offshore Wind Farm, which described how the Pentland wind farm is reducing the number of turbines from ten to seven, but increasing their size from 10 to 14 MW, to produce the same power output.
- Fred. Olsen Seawind, EDF Slash Turbine Count For Codling Wind Park, described how in the Irish wind farm; Codling wind farm, the number of turbines are being reduced from hundred to seventy-five.
There are also some wind farms, where capacity has the potential to be increased.
- Ossian Floating Wind Farm Could Have Capacity Of 3.6 GW
- Crown Estate Mulls Adding 4 GW Of Capacity From Existing Offshore Wind Projects
Note.
- With the exception of the floating Pentland wind farm, all wind farms have fixed foundations.
- It certainly does look, that larger turbines may have reasons to be used.
- Perhaps installing a large turbine is very much the same as a small turbine.
It looks like a victory for the accountants.
The Anonymous Widower 
On sea literally shipping large turbines is straight forward, although erecting them is not.
On land moving huge [one piece] turbine blades is very difficult, in particular to what are remote windswept locations.
Comment by R. Mark Clayton | April 8, 2024 |
A 14MW nacelle weighs in at over 500Tonnes sticking 140-150m above the sea has a huge moment around the base to manage have to wonder on the viability of them working on floating platforms and would be quite a scale up from the Hywind prototypes.
Separately although there must be huge opportunity to repower the earlier build windfarms even if they aren’t life expired to improve the amount of energy captured.
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | April 8, 2024 |
Whe I was writing Artemis in the 1970s, I talked to a lot of project managers, who were installing larger and larger structures in the North Sea.
More than one told me, that as lifting capabilities got bigger, this both improved productivity and allowed larger modules to be installed at sea.
It could be that this larger lifting capability, is making up-sizing of turbines possible.
I agree, that we could see some wind farms being retrofitted with large wind-turbines.
Comment by AnonW | April 9, 2024 |