Offshore wind, Renewable energy | Norway must invest heavily in offshore wind – the major disadvantage is rarely talked about
This requires far more power production in the years and decades to come. There is hardly anyone who believes that you can save money through the green switch.
The problem is that everyone previously for power production is hated. No matter what is proposed, there will be strong protests.
- Hydropower destroys nature
- Wind power destroys nature
- Gas power releases a lot of CO₂
- Coal-fired power emits far too much CO₂
- Sun is at best an add-on
- Nuclear power has perhaps the most resistance of all
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I think the solution is sea wind
In Norway, the government has therefore decided that the new power must mainly come from offshore wind. They want to build out roughly as an unregulated effect on the seaas is already the case in Norwegian hydropower plants.
The beauty of offshore wind is that you can build far from where people live, and the wind conditions at sea are usually much better than on land. The potential is therefore extremely large.
On top of it all, thanks to the fact that offshore wind will become a huge technology export opportunity for Norway, offshore expertise can be used for floating offshore wind. Equinor has, among other things, built a handful of floating turbines in Scotland.
Ambitions for offshore wind have been increased a number of times, and work is now underway on the river expand capacity even before anything is built.
Norway is not alone – or first
The offshore wind farms are already clearly visible if you fly over the North Sea. In particular, England and Germany have installed large quantities.
In 2020, 25 GW capacity was passed in Europe. By comparison, Norway has 4.6 GW of onshore wind power.
These are also absolutely crazy big ambitions for expansion in the years to come.
Before today’s energy crisis was a fact, there were plans for around 100 GW of capacity around the North Sea by 2030. Earlier this year, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium joined forces to develop 150 GW in the North Sea. A similar collaboration is planned in the Baltic Sea.
The EU targets were approximately 400 GW by 2050. Norway’s ambitions for å assign areas for 30 GW comes in addition.
Aim to build more than you need
A lot of power is a good thing, but too much of a good thing can also be a problem.
Although it seems like a distant past, experienced Norway for the first time negative electricity prices in 2020.
This means that power producers had to pay to send power to the grid. In wind-dependent Denmark, this has happened in the past, and has also happened in Norway subsequently.
Very simply, what happened was that for a period it blew so much on the wind turbines that more electricity was produced than it was possible to both use and export to the surrounding countries.
Also through this winter and summer with extreme prices, almost the same thing has happened – especially in Denmark, Germany and Sweden, the price has been pushed down towards zero in periods with a lot of wind power.
27 July electricity costs 1.3 øre in Denmark (DK2) at the start of the day. Later that day, wind production was halved and consumption increased. The price thus jumped up to almost 5 kroner. Before taxes.
With a doubling of the development of offshore wind, it is expected that this type of overproduction will become more common.
It can be difficult to see how much 400 GW of offshore wind, which is the target for Europe, actually is. Øystein Heggdal put it into words in a chronicle at Europower last year:
“This is more power than what Germany, France, Great Britain, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands combined have in power demand at any time of the year. Even if electrification were to increase the power requirement somewhat, this would mean that occasionally all capacity in the grid would go to offshore wind and the price would have to go to zero or become negative.”
The reason why you want to build more than you need is that wind power produces extremely at maximum power, but somewhere between 0 and 100 percent. But with quantities as large as this, there is talk of becoming both 0 and 100 a problem.
It often blows a bit over everything – at the same time
The North Sea has largely become the tenderloin for offshore wind investment. This is where Norway wants to build, and this is where a lot has already been built.
The challenge is that it is largely the case that it blows a lot or a little in the entire North Sea at the same time. Roughly speaking, this means that both Denmark, England, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium will experience their wind turbines producing a lot or a little at the same time.
This means that when it’s windy the most, and builders really need to be able to earn the large investments, they hardly get paid for the power they store, because everyone else also has to deliver at the same time.
So what happens when wind turbines that have enough capacity to cover most of Europe’s demand don’t blow much?
Yes, then the power must come from somewhere else.
Reserve power
Experts will disagree about what this “somewhere else” is. Men since the current must produces at the same moment as it is consumed, must Europe has an alternative to periods of virtually zero offshore wind production and very high consumption.
The horror scenario is perhaps a week at the start of January, and high pressure settles across Europe with very low temperatures and little wind over several days. In a European context, a heat wave in summer can be just as bad.
In Norway we have hydropower. In the rest of Europe it is coal, gas, nuclear power, oil power – one-or-other which is ready at short notice to produce when needed.
But having such reserve power standing is very expensive.
If you were an investor: How much money would you demand for the electricity you had to keep a coal-fired power plant ready all year round, but were only allowed to produce for a few hours when it was urgently needed? At least it won’t be 30 cents.
This price is not taken into account when talking about how much it costs to develop and operate new power generation – often referred to as «LCOE» (Levelized cost of electricity). According to figures from NVE, onshore wind is now the cheapest to develop.
– LCOE is probably one of the most misused costs associated with energy. Often people just use the formula without understanding how to use it. Within Life-Cycle Costing, we always use to specify the performance in order to be able to compare something, and this is also the basis for LCOE.
– It is technically completely wrong to compare the LCOE for wind power with the LCOE for nuclear power. Wind power differs in finding and needs large mixer backup/balancing, while nuclear power does not. This means that the LCOE figures are many users compared to wind and solar is completely wrong, writes NTNU professor Jan Emblemsvåg in a comment on Facebook recently.
What about storing the energy?
When it produces too much power in some periods, and too little in others, the obvious solution is to store the power for later use.
It’s easier said than done. With today’s batteries, it is completely prohibitive to store sufficient quantities in a traditional battery.
Last year, Australia commissioned a new battery for power storage, the largest in the southern hemispherebased on standardized solution from Tesla. The price of just over one billion kroner gave 450 MWh (450,000 kWh) of storage. In comparison, Norway can transfer almost four times as much electricity as it does to Denmark at one time.
As of today, it only exists for various realistic solutions: Hydrogen and pumped-storage power plant.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen can function as a giant battery, and Norway has big plans for hydrogen investment.
The principle is simple: First you send electricity through water, which splits the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can be stored in tanks under high pressure for later. It is much cheaper than batteries and it can simply be scaled up.
The hydrogen can later be used to generate electricity by sending it into a fuel cell (as in a hydrogen car). The spill is just water.
The really big challenges with this is that you lose much much of the energy in the process. Estimates differ slightly, however Roughly speaking, 60 percent of the energy you put in disappears.
This comes on top of the fact that offshore wind is among the most expensive power generation that can be developed.
In addition, it requires an industrial scale for hydrogen production, which is unplowed ground today. The new power cables to England and Germany are 1400 MW each, while they were sent as last year plant of around 24–25 MW considered the largest in the world, while 100 MW plants are planned.
Pumping power
A far simpler and more efficient solution is what lay behind the idea of making Norway Europe’s green battery: Pumped power.
This is very simply about using electricity to pump water up into the reservoirs when there is a surplus of electricity. The water can be used to produce ordinary hydropower when needed.
Hers only loses about 20 percent of the energy.
Norway has some solutions for this for the usual hydropower plants, including at Blåsjø. Abroad, there are dedicated pumped-storage power plants whose only job is to act as a battery for shorter or longer periods.
In 2012, Sintef looked for a solution with a large enough scale that it would actually work.
Siemens Energy has proposed to build a huge pumping power station at Lysefjorden in Western Norway, where surplus power from sea wind is used to pump seawater up the mountain.
Pump power, on the other hand, is not unproblematic either. Sintef writes himself that filling and emptying the magazines leads to erosion and a number of undesirable effects.
The Minister of State: Cannot accept all the power from offshore wind
Nettavisen has asked Oil and Energy Minister Terje Aasland (Ap.) the following questions:
– How does the government look to say that you have to solve problems with a massive offshore wind that produces most when the price is zero and all our trading partners are also producing at full effect? Should Norwegian hydropower plants be converted to pumped-pump power plants?
– For Norway, hydropower has given us, and continues to give us, the ability to regulate, which is necessary to deliver power to consumers when it is needed. Today it amounts to approx. 90 percent of the power production is ours and will be the backbone of the power system in the future. Norway has many different types of reservoirs with different properties, which give Norwegian hydropower and unique regulation ability, Aasland writes in an e-mail.
– A greater share of weather-dependent power production, both in Norway and in the countries around us, makes adjustable hydropower increasingly important. There is potential for increased power production through other upgrading and expansion (O/U) of existing hydropower plants. The government will increase Norwegian hydropower production, secondly on the basis of the Storting’s decision on the cash flow tax for hydropower and by continuing to prioritize the upgrading and expansion of existing hydropower plants in the licensing process.
Read also: Why don’t we just upgrade hydropower?
At the same time, he is clear that the goal is to develop far more power than Norway can handle:
– At the same time, it is important that we continue to invest in other energy sources such as solar and wind on land and at sea when society needs to be electrified more. This is part of the background to why we have put forward an ambitious target for the development of offshore wind on the Norwegian shelf, but this must be done incrementally through regular announcements and allocations of land for offshore energy production. The government’s offshore wind ambition is not only to produce more renewable power in the future, but also to contribute to industrial development, innovation and the new jobs we will need in the green transition. The government will stand up for the first projects to be realized and assess state aid for the first round of allocations. Later development on the allocated area will depend on sufficient willingness to pay in the market.
– What the total expansion will be depends, among other things, on the players’ investment decisions. The Norwegian power system, as it is currently designed, cannot receive 30,000 MW of unregulated power, such as offshore wind. The government therefore assumes that different network solutions will be used. Cables with two-way power transfer, radials to Europe and radials to Norway will be assessed for each announcement, he says.
Read also: Norway gets climate refs from high up: – Is far behind