What a week! I attempted one of the longest commutes possible on Tuesday last.
This was High Wycombe, and back again, via Stockholm, to attend the the European Offshore Wind Energy conference and expo.
To give you an idea of the travel arrangements; I managed five trains, two planes, two buses, two trips on the London Underground and a taxi ride, all in a breathtaking 19 hours.
Never again, well not until next year ;)
The event was quite an experience. I came away with one very clear and strong impression: The European offshore wind industry has many businesses prepared to stake a lot of time, money and resources right now.
So what nuggets of insight can I provide? There were many bright people about, as you’d expect. I heard lots of views on everything from transmission and distribution challenges to the state of play in wind energy at a macro level of economics.
So many companies were revealing their latest technological breakthroughs that it’s tough to decide what to report on without boring you too much. So here’s one attempt at some insight:
I had an interesting discussion with Clare Lovett at the Crown Estate on what worked well in the applications for the Round 3 UK offshore wind sites, and what the views are on the potential announcement of the Round 3.5 or Round 4 applications.
How sites are chosen is obviously a key factor. Most of you probably know that a GIS (Geographical Information Sysytem) dataset is comprised using a wealth of data from multiple sources.
These include shipping lanes, fishing zones, bathymetric data, weather models which of course include the all important data on wind resource.
This then creates a digital map from which certain parameters can then be specified, such as show all sites that have average wind speed of +10ms-1 and a depth of <30m.
This then explains the oddity of the size, shape and position of the zones.
What becomes rather more intriguing is how these parameters are set and who sets them, as I recently learned whilst chatting to Clare.
For example, offshore installations in wind are really no different from offshore installations in oil & gas. There are 3 unique ways to secure an object to the seabed; Monopiles, Jackets and Tethers. Without going into the pros and cons of each (I’ll save that for another day) one limitation on monopiles is the depth of water to size/cost ratio means simply that the deeper the water, the more expensive and difficult they are to install.
So one of the parameters in the Round 3 GIS was to only include water with a depth of less than 40m (I think. Don’t hold me to that check this,).
But if you allow for the fact that floating or tethered wind turbines can be more easily and cheaply constructed in water >40m, a whole new area of development could become available.
And this is where the offshore industry now is. Conference and expo rooms full of people eager to find out not only when Round 4 is being announced, but also just what parameters are going to go into the GIS. Interesting times, indeed.
To lower the cost of offshore wind we really need to change the way we build offshore wind farms and this means also reviewing where we build them and what water depths to choose. It may be a closer to shore area that say Dogger or the Indefatigable Banks is available if we relax the water depth limitation.
At http://www.xanthusenergy.com we believe we can lower the cost of offshore wind - and not using any of the 3 unique ways you propose above!