Wind power news and discussions

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Hornsea Four offshore windfarm given green light after five-month delay

Wed 12 Jul 2023 18.59 BST

One of the UK’s largest planned offshore windfarms will move ahead after the government gave the green light to a giant project off the Yorkshire coast after a five-month delay.

The fourth phase of the Hornsea windfarm development is expected to include 180 giant turbines, capable of generating the equivalent of enough green electricity to power 1m homes.

The 2.6GW North Sea project is the second-largest windfarm to receive government consent, following the Hornsea Three project which is being developed and will have a capacity of just over 2.8GW. The first two phases of the Hornsea development, which are operational, have a capacity of 1.2GW and 1.3GW respectively.

Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, approved the project on Wednesday after the UK’s planning authority handed the decision to the government earlier this year. The delay has reignited calls within the energy industry to overhaul the planning system to make it quicker for offshore windfarms to move ahead.

Shapps said that although the project would have some impact on the environment, these would be outweighed by “the urgent need for low-carbon energy infrastructure”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... onth-delay



Credit: Orsted/EPA

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World's largest wind turbine is now fully operational and connected
By Loz Blain
July 19, 2023

Three Gorges Energy has connected the world's first 16-megawatt monster offshore wind turbine to the power grid. With a mind-boggling 260-meter (853-ft) rotor diameter, this towering colossus will supply clean energy for about 36,000 Chinese homes.

It doesn't look all that out of place, standing in a field of other, lesser goliaths, but this MingYang Smart Energy MySE 16-260 is the largest ever connected to the grid. The "engine room" and generator housed in the hub on top of its 152-m (500-ft) tower weigh in at a gargantuan 385 tons, and each of its three 123-m (404-ft) blades adds another 54 tons, hanging off one side of the generator shaft.

Every time it completes a full revolution, it sweeps about 50,000 sq m (540,000 sq ft) of air (that's seven-odd soccer fields in the internationally accepted layman's units), and sends up to 34.2 kWh of energy into the Chinese power system. Annually, it's expected to contribute about 66 gigawatt-hours.

This demonstration unit sits in the Fujian offshore wind farm in the Taiwan Strait, where it'll take advantage of a natural wind tunnel effect. According to the Three Gorges Group, this location experiences level 7 "near gale" conditions with winds exceeding 32 mph (51 km/h) more than 200 days each year.

https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-larg ... se-16-260/

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Rishi Sunak to lift onshore wind ban as Tory MPs threaten revolt

7 minutes ago

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to ease an effective ban on new onshore wind farms in England to see off a rebellion by Conservative MPs.

Ministers are set to change planning rules to make it easier for onshore wind farms to to built.

Last year, the UK government promised to relax the rules by the end of April under pressure from some Tory MPs.

But with restrictions still in place, Tories have intervened again to force the government to act on its pledge.

A group of 25 Tory MPs, led by former COP26 president Sir Alok Sharma, had been attempting to push the government to ease planning restrictions, with an amendment to the Energy Bill.

The current rules, introduced under former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, mean an objection from just one person over an onshore wind development in England could stop it going ahead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66715141

[wjfox]

Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm at full power

2 hours ago

Scotland's biggest offshore wind farm has begun operating at full capacity, removing emissions from power supply.

Seagreen, off the Angus coast, can generate enough electricity to power two-thirds of Scotland's households.

The £3bn project, comprising 114 giant turbines, has been more than a decade in the making.

But operator SSE says the consenting time needs to be halved if there are to be enough turbines to meet the government's climate change targets.

The company says Seagreen will displace more than two million tonnes of CO2 each year, helping reduce the UK's reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67126815

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Wind power industry in moment of reckoning as stocks fall and earnings crumble

Source: DNuz

Renewable energy firms are mostly suffering a dire earnings season as struggling supply chains, manufacturing faults and rising production costs eat into profits.

With the world trying to transition at pace toward cleaner energy, equipment manufacturers are struggling to keep up with soaring global demand, leading to rising production costs and questions over the economic sustainability of large-scale projects from the industry’s major players.

Manufacturing faults, most notably at Siemens Energy’s wind turbine subsidiary Siemens Gamesa, have emerged as companies race to build turbines at a greater pace and scale.

The problems at Gamesa led Siemens Energy to scrap its profit forecast earlier this year, and last month the company sought guarantees of up to 15 billion euros ($16 billion) from the German government.

Read more: https://dnyuz.com/2023/11/13/wind-power ... s-crumble/

[firestar464]

NBC article on this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environ ... rcna124882

[wjfox]

China’s Goldwind installed a 16 MW offshore wind turbine in just 24 hours

Michelle Lewis | Nov 23 2023 - 2:11 pm PT

Chinese wind turbine maker Goldwind has installed its massive 16 megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine in a “record-breaking” 24 hours.

Goldwind has already brought another of its GWH252-16MW wind turbines online; in September, that turbine set a new world record for electricity generation – in a typhoon – by an individual wind turbine in a 24-hour period. (It produced 384.1 megawatt-hours in 24 hours – enough to power nearly 170,000 homes.)

Goldwind is now getting a whole lot faster at erecting its enormous turbine. The company claimed on LinkedIn today that it “has set a new record for the fastest installation of ultra-large-capacity #offshore units.” It’s not entirely clear what the company meant when it wrote that it achieved the 24-hour installation by “using strategies that preemptively optimized processes through stimulations,” but I’ll assume it meant “simulations.”

At any rate, Goldwind says that the speedy process reduced construction costs and that it’s a method it will be using again. It wrote that it’s a “vital breakthrough for scaling up offshore wind potential in future projects.”

https://electrek.co/2023/11/23/china-go ... -24-hours/

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Offshore Wind Miracle Happening In USA
5 hours ago
Tina Casey

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/14/of ... louisiana/
For better or worse, the offshore wind profile of the United States has broken down cleanly along partisan political lines. However, one huge crack has finally appeared. Officials in the deep red state of Louisiana have just approved not one but two new offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico. In an interesting twist, neither project is located in federal waters controlled by the Biden administration. Instead, dozens of new wind turbines will be planted in state waters — if all goes according to plan, that is.

Louisiana Leads The Southeast On Offshore Wind

Louisiana has a heavy footprint in the oil and gas industries, so it’s not surprising to see the state’s Congressional delegation consistently vote against federal renewable energy initiatives. Nevertheless, the state’s current governor, Jon Bel Edwards, has managed to jockey Louisiana into the pole position for offshore wind development among the five states bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

To garner support, Governor Edwards has apparently leveraged the fact that key elements of the state’s offshore oil and gas industry are transferable to offshore wind, providing existing stakeholders in the state with new business opportunities.

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[caltrek]

The Largest Wooden Wind Turbine In The World Has Been Switched On
by Tom Hale
December 29, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Staying true to the Swedish tradition of flatpack furniture, the world’s tallest wooden wind turbine has started turning near the town of Skara, not far from the city of Gothenburg.

With a total height of 150 meters (492 feet) including the blades, the turbine features a 105-meter (345-foot) tower constructed out of wood, according to the company behind the feat, Modvion.

As reported by BBC News, the tower’s 2-megawatt generator has started swirling and begun supplying electricity to the local electricity grid, providing power for approximately 400 homes.

Wind power is one of the lowest-priced energy sources available today and one of the more sustainable options. However, it comes at a price. Most turbines are constructed out of steel, a sturdy metal with a heavy carbon footprint. More powerful turbines require bigger towers, thereby increasing the demand for this burdensome metal.

In a push to overcome this problem, Modvion developed the so-called “Wind Of Change,” the first commercial wooden wind turbine tower.

Read more of the IFL Science article here: https://www.iflscience.com/the-largest ... n-72241

For the cited BBC report on the same subject: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67718719

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Flying Kites Deliver Container-Size Power Generation

17 Jan 2024

On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source. Even so, a wind turbine and its tower can sometimes be too cumbersome.

The still-nascent field of airborne wind energy (AWE) has a solution: Swap out the turbine for a kite on a string. Not only is a kite nimbler than a turbine, it can deliver a more constant energy supply.

One entrant trying to put AWE to market is the appropriately named Kitepower. This year, the Netherlands-based company will begin shipping its first system: the 40-kilowatt Hawk. Far from replacing traditional turbines, Kitepower hopes the Hawk can power sites that might turn to polluting diesel generators: temporary microgrids, for instance, or remote locations removed from the main grid.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/micro-wind-power-kitepower



An autopiloted, kite-based wind-energy generator pairs with its 400 kilowatt-hour battery pack for renewable, portable baseload power.
Credit: Kitepower

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