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

The Future of Wind

I’m working an application to RES, and I have to say that their application form is a lot more enjoyable to write than those of many large energy companies. One of the questions was so interesting that I completely went over the word limit: I’ve decided to write an answer to that question here in more detail. The question is:

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES FACING THE WIND INDUSTRY IN THE NEXT 5 YEARS?  

I'm going to split my answer to this question into offshore and onshore wind, as I think that they have different challenges facing them.

EWB workshop!

The view from the entrance

Today I helped out with an Engineers without Borders (EWB) workshop. The idea was to have a bike powering a projector, showing Family Guy episodes (a student favourite!). However, there were some problems with the dynamo we bought, so we couldn't get it to work in the end.
We had other stalls up to show other parts of EWB. These included:

The Future of Energy

Yesterday, I went to a fascinating series of talks as part of "One World Week" here at Warwick. The event was called "The Future of Energy: A Power Struggle". The speakers  included heads of large energy companies, a lawyer specialising in energy and an American researcher into energy systems.

It was really interesting to see where the emphasis was put in the different talks, in terms of the "future energy mix". For example, Kevin McCollough (NPower) thought that nuclear was an inevitable part of our future, whereas David Hone (Shell) focussed on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a technology to push, so that we can keep using the current fossil fuels that we do currently. Adrian Gault (Committee for Climate Change) suggested that it would be very difficult to meet our emissions targets for 2050 without significant bioenergy and CCS contribution, with all the new cars sold in 2030 being electrically driven. Mark Jacobson (Stanford) put forward an ambitious model based on Wind, Water and Sun (WWS) which the rest of the panel thought was too lofty a goal.

Wind Turbine on Campus: getting involved!

I've recently been getting involved with the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) society at Warwick, and went today to have a closer look at their wind turbine; I went there before and had a look, but this time I got the chance to look at the whole system up close, including the data logger and inverters!

It was great to see it up close, although it wasn't turning at the time, and I'm hoping to get involved on the data logging side. At the moment, the output power (and other data) is stored within the inverter for 10 days or so, and needs to be downloaded onto a computer. This would be a good starting point for a data report (perhaps weekly), where a graph of performance over the week, average power output, percentage of uptime and total energy generated could be put online.

Wind Turbine at University of Warwick

This post is a continuation of sorts of my post yesterday about how "green" the University of Warwick is.
I found out that a friend from school of mine, Andrew Wooldridge, was involved in the setup of a 1kW wind turbine on campus, only a few minutes away from my room!

I went to go have a look at it just now, and took a few photos. It's quite a still day so it wasn't spinning, but it was interesting to see. It really isn't that big, I was slightly surprised- but then, 1kW is not a huge amount of energy to produce.
Photos below!

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.