Wind power news and discussions

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Self-assembling crane promises to halve cost of offshore wind setup
By Loz Blain
March 25, 2024

https://newatlas.com/energy/windspider- ... ine-crane/
Part of the exorbitant cost of offshore wind energy is the massive crane ships required to install the damn things – but Norwegian company Windspider has come up with a brilliantly lightweight crane system that promises to slash costs in half.

A new generation of offshore wind turbines is pushing scale to the absolute extremes; colossal towers, taller than some skyscrapers, with gargantuan generator nacelles on top supporting three blades long enough to sweep a diameter greater than 310 metres (1,017 ft)... We're talking about some of the biggest machines humans have ever built.

Lifting those gigantic generators and blades up to the top of the tower is an epic logistical challenge – doing it from a crane ship that's bobbing and floating in the waves puts a hefty bonus multiplier on the difficulty level. And considering that crane ships this big can cost millions a day... Well, you can understand why offshore wind still looks so expensive compared to other renewables.

The solution, according to a few innovative companies, is to more or less make these turbine towers act like their own crane bases. Last year, we looked at a few different "climbing cranes" that are starting to hit the market. You stick down one segment of a tower, then lift the climbing crane up so it can hug onto the side of the tower and lift the next segment on. Then, it shimmies up the next segment and grabs on again, ready to lift the next bit up. You can watch Enercon/Lagerway's LCC140 machine do its very cool thing in the video below.

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Machine learning enables viability of vertical-axis wind turbines
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-mac ... -axis.html
by Celia Luterbacher, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

If you imagine an industrial wind turbine, you likely picture the windmill design, technically known as a horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT). But the very first wind turbines, which were developed in the Middle East around the 8th century for grinding grain, were vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWT), meaning they spun perpendicular to the wind, rather than parallel.

Due to their slower rotation speed, VAWTs are less noisy than HAWTs and achieve greater wind energy density, meaning they need less space for the same output both on- and off-shore. The blades are also more wildlife-friendly: because they rotate laterally, rather than slicing down from above, they are easier for birds to avoid.

With these advantages, why are VAWTs largely absent from today's wind energy market? As Sébastien Le Fouest, a researcher in the School of Engineering Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Lab ((UNFOLD) explains, it comes down to an engineering problem—air flow control—that he believes can be solved with a combination of sensor technology and machine learning.

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World's biggest floating offshore wind farm gets go-ahead off coast of Aberdeenshire

11:46, 22 APR 2024

The world's largest offshore floating wind farm is set to be constructed off the coast of Peterhead, following approval for the project.

Once operational, Green Volt will feature up to 35 floating turbines and generate 560 megawatts of energy off the coast of Aberdeenshire.

The energy produced will supply offshore oil and gas platforms, while also being connected to the UK grid. This dwarfs the current largest development off the coast of Norway, which has only 11 turbines and produces around 88 megawatts of energy.

The project, part of Crown Estate Scotland's Innovation and Target Oil and Gas leasing round, was lauded as "great news" by First Minister Humza Yousaf.

He stated: "Scotland is one of the best places in the world to develop offshore wind and its supply chain, and we are determined to maximise the huge economic opportunity offshore wind can bring."

https://www.aberdeenlive.news/news/aber ... nd-9239097

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Biden administration announces plans for up to 12 lease sales for offshore wind energy

Source: AP

By KEVIN McGILL
Updated 11:49 AM CDT, April 24, 2024

A new five-year schedule to lease federal offshore tracts for wind energy production was announced Wednesday by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, with up to a dozen lease sales anticipated beginning this year and continuing through 2028.

Haaland announced the plan at a conference in New Orleans.

Under the plan outlined Wednesday, which includes some previously announced lease auctions, three of the anticipated sales would be for Gulf of Mexico tracts to be offered this year, in 2025 and in 2027. Central Atlantic area leases would be sold in 2024 and 2026.

Other anticipated sale areas include the Gulf of Maine (2024 and 2028); Oregon waters (2024); an area of the Atlantic known as New York Bight (2027); and California, Hawaii, and an as-yet unspecified U.S. territory (2028).

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/offshore-win ... 6becd4fc74

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I truly hate this evil motherf*cker!

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Trump pledges to scrap offshore wind projects on ‘day one’ of presidency

Mon 13 May 2024 23.19 BST

Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” of a new term as US president, in his most explicit threat yet to the industry and the latest in a series of promises to undo key aspects of the transition to cleaner energy.

Trump repeated false accusations about wind projects as being lethal to whales during a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, a resort city on New Jersey’s coast, promising to stamp out an industry that has been enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden.

“We are going to make sure that that ends on day one,” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election, said of the offshore wind farms. “I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on day one.”

The twice-impeached former president, currently facing four separate criminal indictments, said aquatic wind turbines “cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales”. He added that whales “come up all the time, dead”, comparing a beached whale carcass to Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and rare Republican critic of Trump.

“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said of the wind turbines. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/art ... wind-power

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https://x.com/johnrhanger/status/1791800486187700716

Good morning with good news: France surges offshore wind, with 500 MW Fecamp fully operating & 496 MW Saint Brieuc more than half built.

France also announced winner of 250 MW floating offshore auction, world's first commercial scale, at $93/MWh. Floating tech is key innovation!

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Mississippi Just Got Its First Utility-Scale Wind Farm

By Maria Gallucci, 18 June 2024
Source: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wi ... -wind-farm

Wind energy development has long been stuck in the doldrums in the southeastern United States. Until very recently, nine states in the region had installed precisely zero megawatts of commercial wind capacity, even as turbines spread across every other U.S. state.

Mississippi, however, has just bucked that trend.

On Tuesday, the state officially marked the opening of its first utility-scale wind farm, which began producing clean electricity last month, according to an announcement shared exclusively with Canary Media.

AES Corp. owns and operates the 184-megawatt Delta wind project in Tunica County, which is nestled in Mississippi’s northwestern corner near the borders with Arkansas and Tennessee. Tech giant Amazon is purchasing power from the 41-turbine facility to support its growing data center operations and logistics hubs in the region.

Wind projects have historically struggled to take off in the U.S. Southeast for a few key reasons, including political opposition and a lack of favorable state renewable energy policies. The region also has relatively slower wind speeds at low altitudes, especially when compared with places like the Great Plains, which has made projects less attractive economically.

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