Windy hope

The Guardian ran a piece on Friday about a report (reference 1, open access) published by the International Energy Authority (reference 2) about using offshore windmills to generate electricity. The story seems to be that there is an awful lot of usable coastline and an awful lot of electricity waiting to be generated - at a reasonable price too. A chunk of solution to the global warming problem which is accessible to engineers now - unlike fusion which is still some way off commercial action. On which some old news is to be found at reference 4.

The report has now been downloaded to Epsom and I have started to turn the pages.

Good for all the countries and islands making up the British Isles as they all have lots of coastline to the square mile. And in the round, it seems to be northern Europe and China who are presently in the lead.

However, Table 1 suggests that while the UK may be big in terms of installed capacity, it does not seem to be big in terms of engineering and construction, which is mainly driven from elsewhere. We might get off the Saudi hook, just to get onto someone else's!

Then, while it is our wind in something like the same way that it is the Saudis' oil, I imagine that it costs a lot less to get their oil out of the ground than it costs to get our wind into the wire. That is to say, the capital costs of wind are quite high, tipping the balance towards he who extracts, away from he who owns the land - or the sea in this case. All very complicated.

A more speculative use for all this power is the manufacture of hydrogen from seawater, a clean alternative to natural gas.

Transmission - moving all this electricity from the windmills to the users - will present challenges.

Offshore oil technology is relevant.

Roughly speaking, it seems the bigger the better. Which favours the big battalions.

In sum, it all looks good so far. We just need governments, business and industry to pull together!

PS: but I have not yet got to the bit where they say that someone has done all the sums and taking all this energy out of the system is not going to disturb the climate in some other, unpleasant way...

Reference 1: Offshore Wind Outlook 2019 - International Energy Authority - 2019.

Reference 2: https://www.iea.org/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor. A technical term which appears quite a lot in the executive summary. It seems to be about the proportion of nominal capacity actually achieved over time; a measure affected by engineering, weather and economics. Base load nuclear good at around 90%, wind about average at 50%.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/big-doughnuts.html.