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True carbon costs of offshore wind are not being declared in order to make the solution seem more environmentally acceptable than it actually is, according to a leading academic.
Cambridge University senior teaching associate Jim Platts is a former partner at Gifford [now Ramboll] and has focused his academic career on manufacturing issues.
He told NCE: “The concept of offshore wind is being sold as being environmentally friendly but the reality is that it is ferociously costly and has a big carbon footprint.”
Platts believes that the energy companies developing offshore wind farms are hiding full details about their carbon footprints and is calling on the sector to be more transparent about them.
NCE also understands that a number of people in the industry have raised concerns about the issue but have been silenced by their employers. NCE has approached industry leaders in the offshore wind energy sector for comment.
“People are becoming concerned with climate change but there is a need to focus on the numbers to make a difference,” he said. “Offshore wind turbines stick out of the water but there is lots of under the water too that people seem unaware of – there’s lots of steel and cable connections.
“Working out the carbon footprint is not simple but it is currently an invisible issue to the public.
“An analysis process is needed to look at the carbon footprint of offshore wind but all the energy companies need to use the same approach.
"Just looking at the wind turbine and the foundations will give you one number but adding in the grid connection will give you another number. We need to be able to accurately compare like with like.”
According to Platts, driving down the cost of such developments does not always create a positive result for the carbon footprint.
Projects such as the Oxford University-led Pile Soil Analysis (Pisa) project has helped refine design of monopile foundations, which are commonly used for UK offshore wind farms, and – along with other innovations – has resulted in the cost of new offshore wind developments falling by 50% since 2015.
Nonetheless, Platts said that the market five years ago was very unstable with each scheme treated as an individual project.
“The lack of continuity between projects resulted in high risks and increased costs as a result,” he said. Platts believes that the falling costs since 2015 are more to do with de-risking in the market than with design improvements.
Platts has called for a re-think of the support structures used for offshore wind turbines with a view to cutting the carbon cost.
“An average designer will tweak the design rather than rethink it completely,” he said. “The current monopile or suction jacket foundations are not an efficient way of taking bending moments into the ground.”
According to Platts, spreading loads is key. He suggested that Eiffel Tower or radio mast style structures with anchoring would create more robust solutions that have a lower carbon footprint.
He described the monopile solution as a “brute force approach”.
Platts said that floating foundations have huge potential, especially as offshore wind farms move into deeper water, but said that development is 10 years behind that of seabed mounted turbines. “They have good potential in the long term but they have yet to be put into commercial operation,” he added.
“Nonetheless, we need to have better carbon footprint analysis of the current designs in order to be able to accurately compare new solutions in terms of environmental performance.”
Platts also called for the industry to focus on longer service life for offshore wind turbines. “The current turbines and foundations have a 20 year design life,” he said.
“The power stations they are replacing had service lives in excess of 40 years – why aren’t people asking why offshore wind farms are only being designed for 20 years? We should be doing better.
“In my opinion, anything that is only designed for a 20 year life span should not be called infrastructure. Infrastructure is what you design to meet the needs of future generations.”
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There’s an interesting mind game!
True costs. The Nuclear industry buries all its costs so we never got a true cost for that that, that included mining uranium right up to storing the high level waste for 150,000 years. Try getting those costs! Impossible
The beatrice wind farm had mini jackets. They looked pretty efficient. But there is a game to be played with one set up with a jacking platform and hammering in a monopile and then with beatrice that might have a bunch of smaller piles – not quite sure on the installation of these. But i do know the cost of offshore construction rigs and cranes and weather windows are the big cost/risk items, especially if you have a huge wind farm to build.
I also think there were a load of ideas for precast concrete platforms for shallow waters, of which i think only a few were trialled. I think they needed large sea bed preparations; a slow process.
Since the Grid is responsible for connecting to generators in the UK at least, would these necessarily be counted in the overall wind project? Is it worth the consulting cost of figuring the extra over cost of connecting a generator?
This is a welcome article. More people need to ask questions about the costs and viability of offshore wind. The energy economist Gordon Hughes points out that there is little sign of costs coming down, and certainly not at the rates claimed by the industry.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/07/WindPokerWeb-1.pdf
This view has been confirmed by recent research at Robert Gordon’s University.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421518308504
After reading the NCE weekly wrap circulated 4 April 2020, I don’t know where to start.
As if it wasn’t bad enough letting Architects tell Engineers how to design bridges – remember the wobbly millennium bridge fiasco resulting from elevated suspension points offending the concept architects’ aesthetic sensibilities? – now they think they can tell Engineers how to design tunnels.
Engineers must step up to the plate and counter the loud and more articulate architectural lobby because there are a lot of uninformed and easily persuaded accountants and politicians running the world who need to be protected.
Many of those same simplistic lay people think that if they can’t see smoke coming out of a machine or facility then it must be good.
The success and claimed economy of wind power is a result of huge taxpayer subsidies which have by themselves created a whole new industry.
As far as renewable energy is concerned:-
1 – wind power is random, unpredictable, a blot on the landscape or seascape, and not cheap.
2 – solar power is more predictable, but if you think that is good you should see what the moon can do.
An astronomer can tell you the potential power which can be generated every hour for the next few hundred years and furthermore with a little more imagination it can be precisely controlled as a continuing resource by tidal capture. No other ‘renewable’ source can do that.
An industry expert said about 20 years ago that 10% of UK’s power demand could be provided controllably by tidal capture around our coast. That is unique.
And I don’t remember it being put forward as one of the main advantages of the Thames estuary airport proposal. Maybe it could have mitigated the pollution arising from its associated worst offending industry currently in operation, which nobody wants to restrict, whether at LHR or anywhere else around the world. Although it currently appears that China has found a way to solve that problem, hopefully temporarily.
But wait for it, here we are arguing about how the forces of nature can most efficiently, or instead cheaply, be resisted in offshore wind farms and yet not notice that a major part of those problem forces are being allowed to flow past these expensive temporary facilities without anybody trying to harness them through undersea turbines.
It all looks like tunnel vision to me so maybe Engineers do need Architects to tell them what to do after all.