An interesting Tuesday

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Habebty

Habebty

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Had a meeting with Dong Energy (great name!)today - work related and got a trip on their workboat out of Brightlingsea to the Gunfleet windfarm.
For all you mobo types - twin 600hp waterjet catamaran 20-25knots. Got a good explanantion of all the techy bits to do with windfarms and the likely output.
Politics and aesthetics aside, the size of these things and the technology is impressive.
A few pics for your viewing pleasure =

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The offshore substation

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impressive mobo
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might even be able to answer a few simple questions /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

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The cable ashore is one single cable about 180mm dia. carrying three phase 132kv copper cores and fibre optic monitoring cable, v. heavily armoured in 3m deep trench.

Bases are steel cylindrical piles then sleeved with the yellow bit on which the white tower is bolted.

Due on stream early 2010. Current exclusion zone will be lifted and passage through the windfarm permitted (depth between 2m and 10m at HW)

Each turbine tower weighs 800t and generates voltage at 33kv and is uprated to 132kv by the offshore substation for transmission to the grid at Cooks Green N of Clacton.

The offshore sub station saves up to 5 cables running ashore and £2-3m.
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The offshore sub-station is 'interesting'. No such thing over here at the Kentish Flats wind farm.
They brought 3 cables ashore here, dirty great things about 9" diameter IIRC. We all assumed they were pos, neg, and earth but they were all the same colour.... /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
Soon you will be getting used to the sight of the turbines sitting there doing nothing 60% of the time. A good game is to count the number not working each day, even when the rest are - the % availability is terrible. Still, no doubt we are all paying for it.
 
What a great day out !. I would be really interested to know what power output is expected from them each/all, what the project cost is overall and what the life expectancy is.

Great pictures by the way !
 
Basic info HERE but somewhat out of date in terms of news.
As mentioned, observation of the Kent installation shows it seldom all working, often 3 or 4 out of 30 out of service, and the periods when there is not enough wind to turn the lot are suprisingly frequent.
So you have to take their output capacity figure and knock about 65% off it, based on published performance figures.
 
But still it is obviously all OK, the energy production is of little or no importance, 'cos Dong Energy have no doubt received substantial subsidies from the European Parliament, and no doubt similar subsidies floating around from Tony/Gordons Barmy Army, so they will have done quite nicely out of it...shame they are not an English Company, still we have to do our bit for our Euro neighbours I guess! /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif

Great shame that Billy Liar didn't have the balls to go with a full on Nuclear programme and wave two fingers at the enviro lobby!
 
[ QUOTE ]
Basic info HERE but somewhat out of date in terms of news.
As mentioned, observation of the Kent installation shows it seldom all working, often 3 or 4 out of 30 out of service, and the periods when there is not enough wind to turn the lot are suprisingly frequent.
So you have to take their output capacity figure and knock about 65% off it, based on published performance figures.

[/ QUOTE ]

So Gunfleet 1 will give rated 108MW x 65% estimated = 70MW. To compare, Drax (largest coal powered station in West Europe I believe) gives out 3960MW, Heysham 2 (nuclear) 1200MW day in, day out.

Whichever way you look at it, the output is extremely small and will not replace our ageing coal/nuclear generators, although may be a very small part of it.

Not intended to be political, argumentative or anything else, just trying to shed light on the reality.
 
48 turbines @ 3.6 mw ea. 172mw total. The next site on Long sand London array will be a gigawatt site exceeding Bradwell's old output. All the planned combined national sites will probably deliver 50% of national requirement and more as turbine efficiency climbs. Each new site is getting more efficient equipment than the last site as efficiency development grows. Dong need to make a profit on generation on this £480m site and are confident of doing so.
£1m day income from generating expected.

Design life is 25-30 years and could theoretically be all cleanly removed but if no alternative is forthcoming then piecemeal replacement of each tower is feasible rather than a lump sum de-commissioning cost.

Sounds like the PR people got to me, but as an engineer myself, what their engineer's say makes sense to me.

An interesting point is that by having lots of local generating sites, voltage drop/energy loss across the national grid is reduced and grid efficiency is increased by 5% thus needing approx. one less power station.

Gunfleet versus Drax is obviously no comparison, but all the combined wind turbine sites versus non renewable sites is.

Personally I would rather have clean burn coal power stations rather than nuclear, with increased tidal turbine development which despite Strangford Loch site is still about 10 years away from commercial size viability.
Wind turbines are however, a surprisingly (to me) better/ efficient option than I first thought.

The design of offshore turbine blades now differs from onshore turbines which have to achieve 30db so are less efficient. Offshore blades are slightly noisier at 35db but (I think) 15% more efficient.

Check out the official sites in case I have mis-represented the figures /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

downtime on wind turbines is accounted for rather than assuming all will be generating all the time.

At the end of the day we don't want pollution yet we don't want visual pollution. As long as we all use electricity I would rather have the latter and not have to worry about needing lead underpants every time I sail past Bradwell (closed I know, but dangerous for another 5000 years or whatever) or Dungeness/Gravelines or wherever. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

and no, I don't subscribe to this carbon footprint b#ll#cks as I think the climate is quite capable of changing without us.

22m air draft depending on tidal height, but hey who's going to get that close!! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
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<<<<The design of offshore turbine blades now differs from onshore turbines which have to achieve 30db so are less efficient. Offshore blades are slightly noisier at 35db but (I think) 15% more efficient.
>>



Pete, a silent office with no conversation averages 67dB. Are you sure of those figures? (I remember BR wanting me to design onboard fridge sandwich trolleys at 69dB. The average train runs at nearly 90dB in the cabin)

Noise doubles every 3dB, so the difference even between 30dB and 35dB is 150%

We are involved with Wind generation here, and those output figures are not stacking with what I saw last week, but the main guy here is off today. There is a lot of jiggery pokery in the offset carbon credits calculations that no one talks about when using stats.
 
I think you are right Jim, does seem a bit quiet. I think my memory recall chip (brain) was in technical overload!! /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

But the point is designs are different now for onshore and offshore and technology is changing/improving in this field leading to greater output. And I think they will get better/more efficient.
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