Offshore wind farms solve one of renewable energy’s biggest problems: unreliability. With wind almost always blowing on sea, there is no lack of power. But the technology is struggling with a bunch of other hurdles.
We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
#PlanetA #Offshore #Energy
Study: Levelized cost of renewable energy technologies: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-of-electricity.html
Environmental impacts of offshore wind farms in the belgian north sea: https://odnature.naturalsciences.be/downloads/mumm/windfarms/winmon_report_2020_final.pdf
Offshore wind farms in Germany:
http://www.offshore-stiftung.de/status-quo-offshore-windenergie, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-onshore-wind-power-output-business-and-perspectives
Different offshore wind farm concepts:
https://acee.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/AndlingerDistillate_Article7.pdf
0:00 Intro
0:43 Advantages offshore wind energy
3:54 The grid problem
5:28 Expensive offshore wind
7:38 The space problem
9:03 Environmental concerns
12:18 Floating Windfarms
13:01 Conclusion
Report: Kai Steinecke (IG: https://www.instagram.com/supersteinii/)
Kamera: Henning Goll
Video Editor: David Jacobi
Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk Video Rating: / 5
The Future of Energy – Episode 2: Offshore Wind Power
***Music***
First Light by Dotlights – Copyright Chillhop Music – https://chll.to/f65afbc5
Swimming by Sleepy Fish – Copyright Chillhop Music – https://chll.to/d983758d
The global annual potential of onshore and offshore wind power is around 840,000 TWh, that’s almost 40 times that world’s annual power consumption!
The Global Wind Power capacity has more than doubled since 2012 from around 280 GW to over 650 GW today.
650 GW power capacity generates enough electricity to power the US and India combined.
Along with the growth in capacity, the wind turbines themselves have grown over the years.
The diameter of commercial turbine rotors was around 17m in the 1980s and generated around .07 MW.
Today, the average rotor is over 116m and generates over 2.4 MW.
The giant turbines used today are made possible by the advancement of material science, allowing the giant blades and shafts to withstand a tremendous amount of stress.
These larger turbines have led to a substantial drop in cost over the past 40 years.
The cost of wind power was 38 cents per kWh in 1980: today, it’s less than two cents!
Alright, so how do these incredible devices work?
Wind turbine are like plane propellers but in reverse.
Instead of an engine powering propellers to generate a wind force, the wind blows through the rotors and powers the engine.
This boils down to the Bernoulli Principal.
The shape of the blade causes air to take a longer path around one side compared to the other.
And this creates a difference in air pressure causing the blade to pull toward the low-pressure side, which spins the rotor.
Inside the turbine housing lies coils of wire that spin inside a magnetic field generating an electric current.
The downside to wind power is that only certain parts of the world have consistent wind at the ideal speed, which is between 21 and 26 km/h.
This map highlights the area that contains ideal wind speeds.
The areas in yellow, orange, and red are great places of wind turbines.
However, the map does not cover the shorelines, where the winds are much more constant than on land.
Offshore wind power is the fastest-growing sector in wind power lead by the UK and Germany.
The UK has three of the largest offshore wind farms in the world, the largest at the moment being the Hornsea Farm.
Hornsea has a massive 1.2GW capacity and is located 120 kilometers off England’s Yorkshire coast and will produce enough energy to power 1 million homes.
The farm has 174 turbines, each standing 100 meters tall.
Each Turbine can power the average home for an entire day with just a single rotation.
And if you think that’s impressive, General Electric has developed a wind turbine that makes the ones on the Hornsea farm look like children.
Enter the Haliade-X wind turbine.
The Haliade-X is gargantuan, standing 260 meters tall, equipped with 107 long blades.
With a 12MW capacity, a single Haliade turbine can power 16,000 homes.
GE recently constructed a prototype Haliade in the Netherlands; this is a time-lapse of the construction.
GE plans to commercialize Haliade by 2021 and will supply up to 300 of the massive turbines to the Dogger Bank wind farm.
Dogger Bank Wind Farm will be the largest offshore wind farm in the world with a massive 3.6 GW capacity and will power 4.5 million homes in the UK.
