Wind – No Problem Legacy For Future Generations
May 14, 2012 | 
Author Another turbophobic myth dispelled
When I started this blog fifteen months ago I had no intention of championing Big Wind, an entity very likely to be every bit as self-seeking and environmentally slapdash as Big Oil or Big Nuclear. However, I do feel compelled to devote a few electrons every now and then to refuting some of the more ridiculous arguments deployed against wind turbines by those who seek to couch their narrow and temporary self-interest in terms of the greater good.
When not fantasising about ‘bird mincers’ turbophobes may resort to the fanciful argument that wind turbines will become permanent eyesores when their working life is over. ‘We are saving the countryside for our children’ they say. They will triumphantly post pictures they have googled up of a handful of rusting turbines on Hawaii, proclaiming that this is the legacy we are leaving for future generations.
Of course, like most anti-wind rhetoric this argument does not bear close examination. Decomissioning arrangements are built into every planning approval , as they are with other large developments. Usually windfarm developers are required to put in place a bond to cover the cost of decommissioning in the event of the owner going bust. The actual dismantling of the towers is not technically challenging, and of course the metal can be recycled. Access roads may take some time to grow over, but not as long as slag heaps, mine tailings or quarries.
The blades of a typical 2-megawatt turbine weight 42 tonnes. So if we take a 500MW windfarm that means that at the end of (say) 20 years we will have 10,500 tonnes of difficult to recycle but inert and harmless material. This represents 1050 tonnes per year. I find this slightly less alarming than, eg, the waste created by a typical 500-megawatt coal plant, which includes more than 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber each year.
I don’t think wind is an ideal technology, but it is the only affordable low-carbon electricity generation technology that is currently deployable at scale. And of all the arguments stacked up against it this one – ‘We are preserving the landscape for future generations’ - is the one that rings most hollow. In twenty or thirty years I belive our children and grandchildren are more likely to bemoan our lack of appetite to tackle climate change than they are the existence of a few thousand metal towers and plastic blades that are no longer needed.
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Power House
Will Scotland become Europe’s ‘green power house’?
Directed by Cailean Watt, this short documentary examines the tensions that arise when questions are asked about the future of energy generation. For a small country peering into an uncertain future, the answers to these questions are crucial. Sustainable energy could reindustrialise and strengthen Scotland. But will Scottish people get behind the power house plan, and will the choices about how to enact the plan pay off?
Filmed around Scotland in 2011/12, the documentary bring together voices from government, industry and communities to capture the debate as it currently stands. From the Energy minister to an anti-wind turbine activist, a free market academic to eco-village residents, the film aims to ask the bigger questions that emerge from an extremely complex discussion.
The soundtrack is provided by Inverness-based electronic artist, Araya.
Transmission charging debate puts spotlight on Ofgem
by Martin McAdam, CEO of Aquamarine Power
Last week Ofgem announced (very quietly, under the cloak of the local government elections) their intent to retain locational charging as a principal element in the way in which generators pay to use the UK’s transmission network.
This is a real disappointment for all renewable energy projects in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, and presents a real challenge to Aquamarine Power – and the UK’s nascent marine energy sector.
It is a bitter pill that Ofgem, despite months and indeed years of debate and lobbying, has directed the industry panel (which will work out the details of the proposal) to continue to penalise renewable generation on Scotland’s islands – home to some of the best wind, wave and tidal resources not just in Britain, but in the world.
Our company has a 40MW wave energy project off the west coast of Lewis, in pole position to be the world’s largest fully consented wave farm.
All the elements are falling into place – we have a 40MW lease from seabed owner the Crown Estate; we are about to sign terms with the community-owned Galson Estate for the shore-based power plant; we have applied to regulator Marine Scotland for offshore consents, and are about to apply to local authority Comhairle nan Eilean Siar for planning permission.
That is why this decision is so disappointing.
Ofgem has not given any clear figures in its recommendation, but previous modelling suggests an annual charge of £77 per KW, which along with the annual connection costs will equate to over £3.5million each and every year for our 40MW Lewis project. This is a massive penalty for an early stage technology.
To put this in context, a renewable energy project the same size in southern England would pay just £40,000 a year. But we cannot choose where the best waves are – we have to put our projects at the periphery of the UK.
The economics of these first wave energy projects are challenging enough – and we have all the other arms of government, from DECC to the Scottish Government, Marine Scotland and local councils, doing their bit to help this industry get off the ground.
It is a big disappointment that Ofgem’s proposals are so out of kilter. We will continue to engage constructively with the industry to find a way ahead, and we would urge the Scottish and UK Governments to continue to work together to find an equitable solution for Scotland’s islands.
Martin McAdam is the CEO of Aquamarine Power .
This article originally appeared in the blog on Aquamarine’s website on 08/05/2012, and is reproduced here by kind permission.
The photo above shows Aquamarine’s Oyster1 wave power device in operation, and is supplied by and copyright to Aquamarine Power.
Resource analysis
by turbinetastic
Wind farms are pretty different to prior large-scale generating technology. A big way that they’re different is that we, as users, can’t choose ourselves how much fuel they need to provide us with the energy we want to use; we simply have to accept as much of the available wind energy as we can.
For some this is an insurmountable problem with the very technology. If the energy isn’t there on tap you might as well pack up and go home. To me that seems crazy. If someone offered you a £20 voucher towards your weekly shop, you wouldn’t toss it in the bin on the grounds that it wouldn’t buy your whole week’s food, you’d use it and make up the rest other ways.
Because of this intermittency problem, jobs like mine became available for the wind industry. Across the globe, whereever there are wind farms of any size, someone has to sit down with a computer and some wind measurements and try to assess what sort of production levels we can expect from them. In the early days, this was done based on some comparatively short measurement masts, using methods that were simplistic. Now, it’s a much better defined methodology, with larger masts, new technologies, and its own modelling tools to provide more accurate predictions of how the wind will vary in time and space.
The same sort of analysis techniques are used by the Energy Traders, who sell the generated energy under the system of the UK electricity market. Similarly, analysis of operational wind farms really benefits from that sort of detailed knowledge of the wind because it’s still key to understanding how far the wind farm is performing as expected.
So there are lots of benefits to the wind industry from this sort of work then. (Might be worth mentioning that these sorts of jobs are high skill, high demand and generally filled by people who live and work in the country in question.)
Even the most strident wind power advocate, though, doesn’t foresee a time when 100% of an electrical grid’s supply comes from wind power; not unless there’s a major leap forward in electricity storage. It is likely that other technologies like wave and tidal will start to mature to large-scale deployment.
When they do, those renewable resources will also need their resource assessed. And very similar techniques will be involved: make some measurements, assess their quality and representativeness, model where you have no measurements, and then feed through information about your machine and its output.
The national grid that was originally conceived to carry electricity from large-scale power plants to every home, factory and office was an astounding feat of engineering. However it was designed to match the supply to demand. The requirements of matching a variable supply with a variable demand are relatively new. Because wind power is the first renewable technology to get a substantial penetration into the generation market, the grid is learning to be more flexible. As we begin to use other renewable technologies — and we will — those lessons will transfer and we’ll have a system that can cope with the demands we ask of it.
Wind energy doesn’t have to be 100% of the answer to be a very important part of today’s and tomorrow’s technology mix.
Turbinetastic’ is a wind industry professional who has kindly agreed to syndicate their posts to this blog. This post was originally published on turbinetastic’s own blog on 05/05/2012.
Help For Community Renewables
Loans of up to £150,000 available to cover 95 per cent of agreed costs
Communities and rural businesses all over Scotland can now apply to a £23.5 million government loan scheme to help them get community energy renewable projects up to the planning stage.
The scheme is designed to make sure communities all over Scotland receive the maximum benefit possible from the projects it funds.
Energy Minister Fergus Ewing declared the scheme open in a speech to the Scottish Highland Renewable Energy Conference in Inverness last week.
Communities and rural businesses all over Scotland have already benefited from the loans, which are designed to help small-scale projects which directly benefit their local area, and which would not proceed without the loan.
Projects all over Scotland have already received more than £4.5 million in loans, including a Borders housing association which will use the proceeds to improve the houses it offers for rent, and a Highland charity which will become more financially sustainable thanks to a hydro scheme.
The Community and Renewable Energy Loan Scheme (CARES) is designed to support projects before they reach planning as this stage is considered too high risk for commercial loans.
Individual projects can receive loans of up to £150,000 to cover 95 per cent of agreed costs. Free local advice and support is also available.
Priority is given to projects which give the highest value of benefit to their local communities.
The scheme is open to community organisations, rural businesses and joint ventures between the two.
Alongside the scheme, Energy Minster Fergus Ewing updated on progress towards the community and locally owed target and launched the Community Benefit Register, designed to help communities all over Scotland maximise the rewards they receive from renewable energy developments, and a database of all community-owned energy resources in Scotland.
Energy Minster Fergus Ewing said:
“The Scottish Government is determined to ensure communities all over Scotland reap the benefit from renewable energy.
“We have set a target of 500 MW of community and locally owned renewable energy projects by 2020, which could be worth up to £2.4 billion to Scottish communities and rural businesses over the lifetime of those projects.
“I am delighted to announce today that we are making significant progress towards that target. The work done by the Energy Saving Trust to produce a database found as at the end of June 2011, some 147MW of capacity is operational in Scotland. This represents nearly 30 pe cent of our 2020 target.
“The CARES scheme empowers communities all over Scotland to capitalise on our Green Energy Revolution by developing their own community energy.
“They will in turn be able to take the profits from the schemes and plough them back into their own communities.
“Rural businesses who benefit from the scheme must commit to sharing their profits with local communities. All profits from the community-run schemes will remain with the communities, and all the schemes run by local businesses have committed to give a minimum of £10,000 per MW per annum to the local communities, ensuring the benefits of Scotland’s natural resources are shared with everyone, as well as the jobs and opportunities the schemes will create.
“In practice, this could mean communities have lower power bills, a new playground, a scholarship fund for young people – it is up to the imagination of local people. Communities will also be offered advice on use of the income from projects.
“Alongside this, our Community Benefit Register is now open for business. We are encouraging all scales of development to register – from single farm-based turbines upwards.
“By sharing this information and making it public, communities will be able to make sure they are getting the best possible deal.
“Scotland is blessed with astounding natural resources and has huge renewable energy potential. This Government is committed to ensuring that every community shares in the benefits. These schemes are a practical way of making that happen.”
Previous recipients of CARES loans include Barra and Vatersay Wind Energy Limited (BVWE), which is planning to erect a single wind turbine on a site at Gob Sgurabhal, the most northerly point on Barra. The community has now secured a number of their consents and are currently focused on finalising the turbine access route and progressing the proposal to financial close. It is hoped the group will be in a position to install their turbine by the end of the summer of 2012.
Reproduced under Crown Copyright – original document from the Scottish Government website