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Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

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Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#31

Post by throwaway5752 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #29
tda wrote: post #15

By far the most wind turbines have been built on land and for good reason: it's much cheaper. As long as there is space/not too many people complaining it makes more sense to build on land. Not sure exactly but on land installed wind is probably ~10x the installed capacity offshore. However on land turbines are pretty much maxed out at about 7,5MW, due to logistical difficulties of getting larger blades, towers and n…

It was my impression that the main reason for building offshore is because the winds are much more steady there. The definition of trade wind is a "permanent prevailing wind"; building someplace with "permanent" winds sounds like a good idea to me.

Yes. Land based ones are often on plains or ridges. Steady and unimpeded wind is why aerial and offshore have better EROI.

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#32

Post by xoa »

hirundo wrote: post #22

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?

>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors?

As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too.

Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#34

Post by tlb »

jtokoph wrote: post #18
mac01021 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does, then? Isn't the "value" of an industry normally taken to be the sum of the market caps of all the companies in the industry?

Much of the time it will refer to revenue generated on an annual basis. For example, all wind energy companies might spend $1T this year as an investment, but only bring in $10B in revenue. That would be a $10B market.

But manufacturing and installing wind turbines would be $1T/year revenue, since that's where their investment goes.

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#35

Post by Consultant32452 »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #26
hirundo wrote: post #22

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?

I don't mean to insult your comment, but this is the first time I've heard someone say "think of the birds!" How many birds are the turbines killing and what kind of impact is it having on ecosystems?

https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe...

Hundreds of thousands, apparently

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#36

Post by namirez »

Probably the answer is a combination of wind, solar, and nuclear, but if we want to invest in wind, it has to be offshore.

The power output of a wind turbine is proportional to wind speed cubed and offshore wind is typically much stronger and more consistent than onshore wind. Probably we can take advantage of the expertise of oil and gas industry with offshore drilling to build offshore wind farms. Also it's safer for wild life.

The downside of offshore wind is the higher wear and tear of turbines. Last time I checked, composite delamination of turbine blades was still a problem. Also, it can be hard to recycle composites. Sometimes the only option is to literally burn them or use them as fillers in other products.

source: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste...

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#37

Post by roywiggins »

hirundo wrote: post #22

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?

Because we know how to build them, and have already built them. If you want to build more low-carbon power tomorrow, you can pour more money into turbines and get more turbines approximately immediately.

Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry.

Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately.

Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#38

Post by tlb »

peteradio wrote: post #7

How easy to maintain are these? Have they gotten better in the last decade? I see these things failing all the time around me but perhaps they are just shitty and better manufacturing saves the day?

You see a lot of dead ones around the Bay Area, because of an experiment by Lawrence Livermore Labs (1990s?) where they installed windmills of many different designs all over the East Bay. Many of the designs were unreliable.

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#39

Post by apcragg »

tda wrote: post #27

So disappointing journalists never understand the difference between power and energy. The opening sentences make me cringe so much I don't even want to read the rest of the article > Last month the American wind industry hit a major milestone — 100 gigawatts of total installed capacity. That's enough electricity to power the state of California and New Jersey combined for one year.

What is wrong with that sentence? As of 2018 there was ~98k MW of installed wind capacity [1]. Reaching 100 GW of installed capacity in 2019 make perfect sense. It seems like it's you that doesn't understand the difference between power (watts) vs. energy (watt-hours / joules) yet are confident enough to call a journalist out even though they are correct.

[1](https://gwec.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/GWEC-Global-Wind...) Page 29

Re: Offshore wind will be a $1T industry by 2040, but it's needed now

#40

Post by Consultant32452 »

xoa wrote: post #32
hirundo wrote: post #22

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?

> How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and…

Solar and wind won't be the solution for the foreseeable future. The price of energy creation is good, but storage just isn't there. Consider a city like New York. How much solar power are you going to get in the winter when a big blizzard rolls through. Or how about Miami when a slow moving tropical storm comes through. You need to be able to store a more than a week's worth of energy for these huge cities. Nuclear is the only option.
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