Webinar Review: Challenges with Round 3 Offshore Wind Farms

Yesterday, I watched a Webinar on the challenges ahead with the latest set of Offshore Wind deployment off the UK coast, known as Round 3.

The first speaker, Maf Smith of RenewableUK, discussed the current state of the industry and the ways that RenewableUK were mitigating the problems associated with the huge scales required for Round 3. A particularly interesting point Mr Smith made was around industry confidence. In the last year, a significant proportion of members of RenewableUK have decreased their expectation of GW of offshore wind power to be deployed by 2020. This can be seen at around 7 minutes into the webcast. The fact that projects of this scale under these hostile conditions have never been done before both increases the stakes and potentially increases the challenges faced by the industry.

The second speaker, Matthew Knight of Siemens, discussed in further detail the problems associated with the scale of the Round 3 project, which will be deeper, further and larger than any previous offshore wind projects. Interestingly, his focus was on the advantages of collaboration between all stakeholders, even those that are competitors. The nature of the offshore wind industry (first of a kind, complex, in a hostile environment, huge sums of money at stake) means that collaboration could give huge cost reductions (~20%),  outweighing the potential margins of a more competitive system (~1%). A quote from Mr Knight (at 31 mins) really sums this up well:
"[offshore wind]... cries out for collaboration at all levels."

In my mind, Mr Knight is calling for offshore wind to compete as an industry against other electricity sources (offshore wind, solar, fossil fuel etc) on cost rather than competing on cost within the industry.

Both speakers were really interesting and gave their own take on the potential problems and possible solutions, and I will be watching more Windpower Monthly webcasts in the future to learn more about this industry. I really enjoyed my time working on Round 3 at the Crown Estate so it will be interesting to see how the collaboration aspect of the industry develops; it was definitely something that the Crown Estate was focused on as well.

Overall, definitely worth watching!

The link to the webcast is below.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/webcasts?commid=90159&source=JHLI

Icelandic plan to export clean electricity could spark European super grid

Iceland has a huge geothermal energy resource, due to its volcanic origins. Plans to transmit this energy through an underwater cable over 745 miles (1198km) long to Europe are currently being considered. The high-voltage, electrical cable would be the longest in the world by far and is one of many international interconnectors that are proposed or in construction, adding to the 15 or so which already exist in Europe. It is part of an ambitious plan to have a highly networked European electricity super grid.

The potential implications of a pan-European super grid are huge. Energy trading would become truly Europe-wide, with large-scale electricity movement possible and prices varying on international levels of supply and demand. There is a long-running debate in Brussels about how exactly to build the EU energy market. The EU believes that ownership unbundling- preventing a firm from having both power generation and transmission assets-  is necessary, but some member states, led by France and Germany, are unconvinced this is the best option [1].

A large-scale international grid in Europe could help solve the problem of unpredictable supply from renewable sources and lack of electricity storage, as the market balances supply by trading surplus renewable-generated electricity with other countries. By having a larger market to sell to, problems like oversupply leading to working wind farms being temporarily turned off could be a thing of the past [2]: this energy could simply be sold to another country instead. This reduces the need for baseload generation such as coal or nuclear plants, which generate at a constant rate.

The plan estimates that Iceland could export 5bn kWh of energy each year, with a predicted return of $350-448 million [3]. The official costs have not been released, but a 1980s study predicts it to be profitable, even in the worst-case scenario of 1500km. A feasibility study has been carried out for the Iceland cable, and failed to find any insurmountable technical difficulties with the idea, although there are clearly engineering challenges associated with laying an underwater cable that far. The race is now on between North Sea countries to convince Iceland to route the cable to their shores. The UK energy minister, Charles Hendry, is heading to Iceland in May to discuss having the UK at the other end of the cable [4].

[1] http://www.euractiv.com/energy/eu-electricity-market-liberalisation/article-169597

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenpolitics/8978458/10m-cost-of-turning-off-wind-farms.html

[3] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/plans-afoot-to-tap-icelands-geothermal-energy-with-745-mile-cable.ars

[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/11/iceland-volcano-green-power

Macro- vs micro-generation

I was thinking the other day about how the electricity-generating landscape will be different in the future. There seem to be two sides to this: large power plants, generating a large amount of power for a large number of people (macro), or households and businesses generating their own electricity (micro).

There are many good arguments for both sides, and clearly as both exist as markets (there are both large offshore wind farms and small-scale solar systems being built, for example). However, I thought I would have a look at the arguments for both and see which I think is a more realistic option, if we had to pick just one.

I must apologise that this post may be lacking in numerical backup: I am writing this in a (rare) break from revision, and wish only to give an indication of the pros and cons for each, without concrete numerical evidence.