Equinor and SSE Renewables’ Dogger Bank Wind Farm Reaches Financial Close
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Energy Global.
It is a very matter of fact article to record the fact that SSE and Equinor have raised three billion pounds for the first two sections of their 3.6 GW wind farm on the Dogger Bank, in the middle of the North Sea.
Wikipedia indicates, they will be operational around 2023-2025.
All very boring! But we’ll see a lot more deals like this.
Battery Life: The Race To Find A Storage Solution For A Green Energy Future
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the Financial Times.
It is a long article, that gives a good review of the technologies available to store energy from wind and solar power.
It gives a lot more details and an image of the Siemens Gamesa hot rock energy storage system in Hamburg.
- It uses a thousand tonnes of volcanic rock.
- It can store 130 MWh of electricity.
The system has apparently been designed to re-use the turbines from closing coal-fired power stations, which is an innovative idea.
Can The UK Have A Capacity To Create Five GW Of Green Hydrogen?
This article in The Times today is entitled Net Zero By 2050: Bold Aims Are An Example To Other Nations.
It is an analysis of the Government’s plans for a greener future.
This is a paragraph.
Only a few small-scale green hydrogen plants exist globally, and so five gigawatts of low-carbon hydrogen generation by 2030 is a bold commitment. For context, BP recently announced that it was building its first full-scale green hydrogen facility, in Germany — with a 50-megawatt capacity.
I don’t think from the tone, that the writer thinks it is possible.
On the other hand I do believe it is possible.
ITM Power
ITM Power are the experts in electrolysis and have the largest electrolyser factory in the world, which is capable of supplying 1 GW of electrolyser capacity per annum.
It would appear they can supply the required five GW of electrolyser capacity in time for 2030.
The Herne Bay Electrolyser
Ryze Hydrogen are building the Herne Bay electrolyser.
- It will consume 23 MW of solar and wind power.
- It will produce ten tonnes of hydrogen per day.
- The hydrogen it produces will be mainly for hydrogen buses in London.
- Delivery of the hydrogen will be by truck.
The electrolyser will consume 552 MWh to produce ten tonnes of hydrogen, so creating one tonne of hydrogen needs 55.2 MWh of electricity.
To produce five gigawatts of hydrogen would require nearly 220 electrolysers the size of Herne Bay.
ITM Power and Ørsted: Wind Turbine Electrolyser Integration
But ITM Power are working on a project with Ørsted , where wind turbines and hydrogen electrolysers are co-located, at sea to produce the hydrogen offshore.
ITM Power talks about the project in this press release on their web site.
This is the introductory paragraph.
ITM Power, the energy storage and clean fuel company, is pleased to share details of a short project sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), in late 2019, entitled ‘Hydrogen supply competition’, ITM Power and Ørsted proposed the following: an electrolyser placed at the wind turbine e.g. in the tower or very near it, directly electrically connected to the DC link in the wind turbine, with appropriate power flow control and water supplied to it. This may represent a better design concept for bulk hydrogen production as opposed to, for instance, remotely located electrolysers at a terminal or platform, away from the wind turbine generator, due to reduced costs and energy losses.
The proposed concept is also described.
- A marine environment capable electrolyser
- ‘Type IV’ wind turbine generators and their ‘DC link’ have the potential to power the electrolyser directly
- This enables fewer power conversion steps and thereby reduces both energy losses and electrolyser footprint
- Readily abundant cooling capacity via the sea water
- Energy in the form of Hydrogen gas supplied to shore by pipe rather than via electricity
- Connecting one electrolyser with one turbine wind generator
- Other avoided costs of this concept include permitting, a single process unit deployment
Note.
- I can’t find a Type IV wind turbine generator, but the largest that Ørsted have installed are about 8 MW.
- This size would require 750 turbines to provide the UK’s five gigawatts of hydrogen.
- 12 MW turbines are under development.
The Hornsea wind farm is being developed by Ørsted
- Hornsea 1 has a capacity of 1.2 GW and was completed in 2020.
- Hornsea 2 will have a capacity of 1.8 GW and will be completed in 2022.
- Hornsea 3 will have a capacity of 2.4 GW and will be completed in 2025.
- Hornsea 4 will have a yet-to-be-determined capacity and could be completed in 2027.
This wind farm will probably supply over 6 GW on its own, when the wind is blowing.
Bringing The Hydrogen Ashore
This has been done since the 1960s in UK waters and it will be very traditional projects for the UK’s engineers.
- Some of the existing pipes could be repurposed.
- Worked out gas fields could probably be used to store the hydrogen or carbon dioxide captured from gas- or coal-fired power stations.
I’m fairly sure that by the use of valves and clever control systems, the pipes linking everything together could be used by different gases.
Conclusion
Producing 5 GW of green hydrogen per year by 2030 is possible.
Ireland’s First Green Hydrogen Project To Come On Stream ‘In Weeks’
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the Irish Times.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Belfast is set to receive Ireland’s first hydrogen-powered double-decker buses in coming weeks using fuel coming from wind energy generated in nearby north Antrim.
The initiative is the first “green hydrogen” project on the island of Ireland and the first step to decarbonise Northern Ireland’s public transport by 2040, according to Mark Welsh, energy services manager with Energia, which is generating the hydrogen at its wind farm near Ballymena.
Green hydrogen is produced by an electrolyser powered by renewable electricity.
The article gives a good summary of the use of hydrogen in Ireland in the future.
But isn’t all hydrogen created and used on the island of Ireland green?
Could A Gravitricity Energy Storage System Be Built Into A Wind Turbine?
On Thursday, I watched the first programme in a BBC series called Powering Britain. This programme was about wind power.
The program had close-up views of the inside of a turbine tower in the Hornsea Wind Farm in the North Sea. The spacious tower enclosed a lift for engineers to access the gubbins on the top.
In the Wikipedia entry for wind turbine, there is a section, with is entitled Most Powerful, Tallest, Largest And With Highest 24-Hour Production, where this is said.
GE Wind Energy’s Haliade-X is the most powerful wind turbine in the world, at 12MW. It also is the tallest, with a hub height of 150 m and a tip height of 260m. It also has the largest rotor of 220 m and largest swept area at 38000 m2. It also holds the record for the highest production in 24 hours.
Two certainties about wind turbines are that they will get larger and more powerful, if the progress over the last few years is continued.
So could a Gravitricity energy storage system be built into the tower of the turbine?
A lot would depend on the structural engineering of the combination and the strength of the tower to support a heavy weight suspended from the top, either inside or even outside like a collar.
To obtain a MWh of storage, with a height of 150 metres, would need a weight of 2,500 tonnes, which would be over three hundred cubic metres of wrought iron.
Gravitricity are talking of 2,500 tonnes in their systems, but I suspect the idea of a wind turbine, with a practical level of storage inside the tower, is not yet an engineering possibility.
Are Floating Wind Farms The Future?
Boris Johnson obviously thinks so, as he said this about floating wind farms at the on-line Tory conference today.
We will invest £160m in ports and factories across the country, to manufacture the next generation of turbines.
And we will not only build fixed arrays in the sea; we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times floating windmills, fifteen times as much as the rest of the world put together.
Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in such places as Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world.
Just because Boris said it, there is a large amount of comment on the Internet, describing everything he said and floating wind turbines as utter crap.
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry for floating wind turbines is particularly informative and gives details on their history, economics and deployment.
This is a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry.
Hywind Scotland has 5 floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW, and operated since 2017. Japan has 4 floating turbines with a combined 16 MW capacity.
Wikipedia also has an entry for Hywind Scotland, which starts with this sentence.
Hywind Scotland is the world’s first commercial wind farm using floating wind turbines, situated 29 kilometres (18 mi) off Peterhead, Scotland. The farm has five 6 MW Hywind floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW. It is operated by Hywind (Scotland) Limited, a joint venture of Equinor (75%) and Masdar (25%)
Wikipedia, also says this about the performance of Hywind Scotland.
In its first two years of operation the facility has averaged a capacity factor in excess of 50%.
That is good performance for a wind farm.
Hywind
There is more about Hywind on this page of the Equinor web site, which is entitled How Hywind Works.
This is the opening paragraph.
Hywind is a floating wind turbine design based on a single floating cylindrical spar buoy moored by cables or chains to the sea bed. Its substructure is ballasted so that the entire construction floats upright. Hywind combines familiar technologies from the offshore and wind power industries into a new design.
I’ve also found this promotional video on the Equinor web site.
Note that Statoil; the Norwegian government’s state-owned oil company, was renamed Equinor in 2018.
Balaena Structures
In the early 1970s, I did a lot of work for a company called Time Sharing Ltd.
At one point, I ended up doing work for a company in Cambridge started by a couple of engineering professors at the University, which was called Balaena Structures.
They had designed a reusable oil platform, that was built horizontally and then floated out and turned vertically. They couldn’t work out how to do this and I built a mathematical model, which showed how it could be done.
This is said about how the Hywind turbines are fabricated.
Onshore assembly reduces time and risk of offshore operations. The substructures for Hywind Scotland were transported in a horizontal position to the onshore assembly site at Stord on the west coast of Norway. There, the giant spar-structures were filled with close to 8000 tonnes of seawater to make them stay upright. Finally, they were filled with around 5500 tonnes of solid ballast while pumping out approximately 5000 tonnes of seawater to maintain draft.
It sounds like Statoil and Equinor have followed the line of thinking, that I pursued with the Cambridge team.
My simulations of oil platforms, involved much larger structures and they had some other unique features, which I’m not going to put here, as someone might give me a nice sum for the information.
Sadly, in the end Balaena Structures failed.
I actually proposed using a Balaena as a wind power platform in Could a Balaena-Like Structure Be Used As a Wind Power Platform?, which I wrote in 2011.
I believe that their designs could have transformed the offshore oil industry and could have been used to control the Deepwater Horizon accident. I talked about this in The Balaena Lives, which again is from 2011.
Conclusion
It is my view, that floating wind farms are the future.
But then I’ve done the mathematics of these structures!
Did Boris’s advisors, as I doubt he knows the mathematics of oblique cylinders and how to solve simultaneous differential equations, do the mathematics or just read the brochures?
I will predict, that today’s structures will look primitive to some of those developed before 2030.
Ulstein Designs Hydrogen Powered Wind Turbine Installation Vessel
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on 4c Offshore.
This is the introductory paragraphs.
Ulstein has revealed its second hydrogen hybrid design for the offshore wind industry, the ULSTEIN J102 zero emission wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV). The shipbuilders claim the vessel can operate 75% of the time in zero emission mode. Using readily available technology, the additional cost is limited to less than 5% of the total CAPEX.
Most new jack-up designs are featuring a battery hybrid system in addition to diesel gen sets, with a future option for hydrogen powered fuel cell system. Ulstein stated that the down side of a high-power battery energy storage system (BESS) is its heavy weight and cost.
The article shows how hydrogen could be the power source for large specialist equipment.
Ulstein are a Norwegian company.
New Transmission Technology Is Helping UK Offshore Wind Farms Go Bigger, Farther
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Reve.
It is rather technical, but it describes how the electricity is brought onshore from the 1.4 GW Sofia wind-farm, which is being built 220 kilometres out in the North Sea on the Dogger Bank. where upwards of 5 GW of capacity is proposed.
New lighter equipment is being used to convert the electricity to and from DC to bring it ashore at Lazenby, on Teesside. Note that sub-sea electricity links usually use high-voltage direct current or HVDC, The equipment has been designed and built by GE in Stafford.
It looks like the North East of England will have enough power.
The North Sea Wind Power Hub
The North Sea Wind Power Hub, will lie to the East of the UK capacity on the Dogger Bank in European territorial waters. This is the introductory paragraph from Wikipedia.
North Sea Wind Power Hub is a proposed energy island complex to be built in the middle of the North Sea as part of a European system for sustainable electricity. One or more “Power Link” artificial islands will be created at the northeast end of the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea, just outside the continental shelf of the United Kingdom and near the point where the borders between the territorial waters of Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark come together. Dutch, German, and Danish electrical grid operators are cooperating in this project to help develop a cluster of offshore wind parks with a capacity of several gigawatts, with interconnections to the North Sea countries. Undersea cables will make international trade in electricity possible.
So will the connection to Lazenby, also be used to bring electricity from the North Sea Wind Power Hub to the UK, when we need it? And will electricity from our part of the Dogger Bank be exported to Europe, when they need it?
The North Sea Intranet of electricity is emerging and it could be one of the biggest factors in the decarbonisation of Western Europe.
The technology developed at Stafford, will be needed to support all this zero-carbon electricity.
Gresham House Energy Storage Fund Has Staying Power
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in the Tempus column of The Times.
It is a good explanation of how energy storage funds like Gresham House work.
I believe they are very much the future.
Some of the new forms of energy storage, that I talk about on this blog tick all of the boxes and may even satisfy an extreme supporter of Extinction Rebellion.
- Extremely environmentally friendly.
- Higher energy-density than lithium-ion
- Lower cost per GWh, than lithium-ion
- Much longer life than lithium-ion.
- Safe to install in built up areas.
- GWh-scale storage in a football pitch space or smaller.
The UK’s largest battery is the 9.1 GWh Electric Mountain pumped storage system in Snowdonia and there is talk about over 100 GW of offshore wind turbines in UK waters. There will be masses of energy storage built in the UK in the next forty years to support these wind turbines.
Conclusion
Companies like Gresham House Energy Fund seem to have developed a model, that could provide the necessary energy storage and a safe reliable home for the billions of pounds in the UK, that is invested in pension funds.
Lithium-ion batteries will be reserved for mobile applications.
Germany Builds The World’s First Hydrogen Train Filling Station
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on electrek.
Hydrogen Trains In Germany
The hydrogen filling station for trains is described under this heading.
This is the introductory paragraph.
The town of Bremervörde in Lower Saxony, Germany, has broken ground on the world’s first hydrogen filling station for passenger trains. Chemical company Linde will construct and operate the hydrogen filling station for the Lower Saxony Regional Transport Company.
It will provide approximately 1600 Kg of hydrogen per day.
The Supergroup Of ‘Green Energy’
This is a second section, which I find an interest sting concept.
These are the introductory paragraphs.
Oil giant Shell and Dutch utility Eneco have won the tender to build a super-hybrid offshore wind farm in the Netherlands. It will consist of two sites located 11.5 miles (18.5 km) off the west coast, near the town of Egmond aan Zee.
The Shell/Eneco consortium, CrossWind, will build the Hollandse Kust (noord) project. They will pair the offshore wind farms with floating solar facilities and short-duration batteries. It will also generate green hydrogen via an electrolyzer, according to GreenTech Media.
It will be operational in 2023 and have an output of 759 MW.
The Anonymous Widower 