SOLUTIONS
Wind Power
The world's current largest onshore windfarm, Roscoe, Texas: capacity 782MW.
Wind Power is abundant, cheap, clean, inexhaustible, widely distributed, and climate-benign. No other energy source has these six characteristics.
U.S. Department of Energy studies have concluded that wind harvested in the Great Plains states of Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could provide enough electricity to power the entire nation, and that offshore wind farms could do a similar job. The wind resource over and around the Great Lakes, recoverable with currently available technology, could alone provide 80% as much power as the U.S. and Canada currently generate from non-renewable resources. Wind farm installations have grown by almost 40% annually in the U.S. for the past five years.
The largest onshore wind farm in Europe is located on 28 square miles of upland moor, currently generates 320MW of electricity and powers the city of Glasgow in Scotland. Denmark obtains a fifth of its total national electricity needs from wind and has a goal of 75% by 2025. Scotland plans to obtain 50% within a decade.
By 2008, wind power in China was growing faster in percentage terms than in any other large country, having more than doubled installed capacity each year since 2005. In 2009, China became the biggest wind power market in the world, installing over 13,000MW and surpassing the U.S. or Europe.
Although wind is intermittent, the generation of a quarter of national electricity requirements from it does not require special back-up provisions. The intermittency issue can be eliminated by storing wind power through pumped hydro storage or as compressed air in an underground reservoir. These energy storage options provide electricity-on-demand to the grid for use at peak times, making wind power "dispatchable" [1].
Offshore winds are strong and continuous, and suitable large turbines take advantage of the greater wind power density offshore. For example, a 1000MW offshore wind farm, ‘London Array’, now under construction in the River Thames estuary, will power a quarter of the homes in Greater London. The UK Crown Estate’s "Round 3" leasing programme for large offshore wind development has a capacity of 32,000MW and will employ 6400 new 5MW wind turbines todeliver a quarter of the UK’s total electricity needs by 2020. While the U.S., by comparison, has enormous unused capacity in terrestrial wind power, the offshore wind in the Great Lakes or off the east coast states has the benefit of proximity and easy transmission to a dozen major American cities.
The North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative is designed to unleash the power of offshore wind to meet Europe’s growing electricity demands. In the North Sea alone, 118 projected offshore wind farms with a combined capacity of 68,000MW would deliver 13% of the electricity demand of the 10 countries concerned, via thousands of miles of undersea cable carrying high voltage direct current (HVDC) to electricity substations across the region. The Memorandum of Understanding signed by the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and Norway confirms a major new role for offshore wind in European power generation. The €30 billion project, funded by electricity consumers, will unlock region-wide trading opportunities in renewable power and economies of scale during construction. It will balance out a drop in wind power in one place with higher production elsewhere, and provide experience with HVDC, a building block for the future European supergrid.
1. www.generalcompression.com