Dutch fall out of love with windmills

[PoliticAverse]

(Reuters) - When the Netherlands built its first sea-based wind turbines in 2006, they were seen as symbols of a greener future.

Towering over the waves of the North Sea like an army of giants, blades whipping through the wind, the turbines were the country's best hope to curb carbon emissions and meet growing demand for electricity.

The 36 turbines -- each one the height of a 30-storey building -- produce enough electricity to meet the needs of more than 100,000 households each year.

But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour -- some 4.5 billion euros last year

Read the rest: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/16/us-dutch-wind-idUSTRE7AF1JM20111116

[gateley]

1. Aw, that's disappointing. :( nt

[kickysnana]

2. Yikes. If the Dutch can't make it work nobody can. n/t

[NickB79]

3. Welcome to the future of austerity

The recession/downfall of the European Union will not be pretty.

[leveymg]

4. They just need to buy some good ol' Made in the USA Clean Coal! Clean Coal, Safe Nukes,

and some lovely Alberta Tar Sand.

[izquierdista]

5. I smell bull-sheiss

One of the austerity proposals will probably be to privatize this, in which rich investors will buy them at pennies on the euro and jack up the rates.

[NBachers]

6. Yup- I think you're onto something - something is rotten etc.

[wtmusic]

8. The turbines are already privatized. Owned by Royal Dutch Shell

and Nuon (utility).

Rich investors don't want them, because now the government won't subsidize them and there isn't a chance in hell they will be profitable.

[kristopher]

10. Perhaps you posted in the wrong place.

Your perspective seems to match those expressed here:
http://junkscience.com/2011/11/16/even-the-dutch-rejecting-wind-power/

[wtmusic]

7. Another country meeting climate change head on by burning coal.

The turbines produce enough electricity for 100,000 households at maximum output (which rarely, if ever, happens for all 36 at the same time).

So now back to coal. Wind would be a joke, if it wasn't such an environmental disaster.

[kristopher]

9. Still trying to deceive people? Holland gets about 20% of its electricity from wind.

And just for grins lets take a look at how wind compares to nuclear in how fast we can address climate change.

What one wind turbine factory factory can accomplish...


In the time it takes to plan and build one nuclear plant, the turbines produced and installed from this one wind turbine factory will have produced 54 reactor-years worth of electricity. Their aggregate annual output will equal that of 10 nuclear reactors.

A plant manufacturing wind turbines just upgraded their manufacturing process and can put out 2.5GWe of wind turbines per year.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/10/automation-speeds-up-turbine-production?cmpid=WindNL-Wednesday-October19-2011

At the end of ten years this single plant should be responsible for manufacturing about 25 GWe of wind turbines.

I estimated the total amount of electricity produced as the turbines come online over time and at the end of that 10 years, operating at 33% capacity, they would have provided a cumulative total of approximately 389.7 TWh.

I selected 10 years because this is the time it would take to build complete one nuclear plant project if it doesn't suffer delays - and they almost always do.

One nuclear plant actually produces about 7 TWh each year.

So devoting approximately the same resources to each technology gives us, at the end of 10 years:
- 10,000 wind turbines producing 72 TWhs of electricity per year plus the 54 years worth of production from the nuclear plant that the wind turbines have already cranked out.
or
- One nuclear plant that might be ready to begin to producing 7TWh per year.

Given the standard 20 year life span for the turbines and assuming the plant continued production of the same product, this factory will max out it's contribution to growth of wind power at 50GWe when it hits the 20 year mark and starts to build replacements for those wearing out.

That 50GW of turbines should actually produce approximately 144 TWh of electricity every year.

50GW faceplate capacity X .33 capacity factor = 16.5GW of production

That 16.5GW equals approximately twenty (20) 1GW nuclear reactors operating at the international average capacity factor of about 80%.

That's one factory making what is now a rather small 2.5MW wind turbine...

[PoliticAverse]

12. Electricity from all renewable sources in the Netherlands in 2010 was about 9% of total consumption

That's electricity generated _in_ the Netherlands. (About 3.5% of electricity consumed in the Netherlands was generated by
wind turbines located in the Netherlands).



http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/industrie-energie/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2011/2011-3321-wm.htm

About 25% of total electricity used in the Netherlands is from renewable sources because they import a lot of
energy from renewable sources.

[kristopher]

13. You're right - and the thing is I knew it when I posted... Mea cupla

I think I had a brain fart and pulled up Denmark in my mind.
Excuse: It was pretty late and I'm not getting any younger...

Mea cupla

[CJvR]

14. Hidden oil.

Waste incineration is frequently a hidden way to burn oil in the form of throw away plastics.

[PoliticAverse]

15. That's a good point. I thought it odd that they included 'waste incineration' as 'renewable'. n/t

[kristopher]

16. No, it is routinely included.

I suppose should qualify that with "IIRC".

[NickB79]

17. Even so, waste incineration has remained steady over the years, according to the chart

All the growth in renewables has been from wind, solar and biomass, which is a step in the right direction.

[PoliticAverse]

11. Some statistics on wind in the Netherlands from the Central Bureau of Statistics...

http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/industrie-energie/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2011/2011-3497-wm.htm

Complete report (through 2010):
http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/macro-economie/publicaties/publicaties/archief/2011/2011-milieurekeningen-2010.htm
Direct download (.pdf): http://www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/A3AF6855-3FF1-4344-8699-7C181A293979/0/2010c174pub.pdf

[AtheistCrusader]

18. Why not build them on-shore, but near the shoreline?

Wouldn't they be a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain that way?

[kristopher]

19. It is cost vs production

The 50km offshore wind speeds are significantly higher than onshore - and that is more important that you would intuitively think. It results in an average increase in productivity (for the same turbine sited ashore) of 30-40%.

To give you an idea this is from an old spreadsheet. The left column is wind speed in meters/sec the right column is output of a GE 3.6MW turbine.

05.80------233.72
07.61------743.45
09.42-----1454.40
10.96-----2163.87
12.00-----2662.00
13.67-----3471.01


The real problem is a recent right tilt towards "maximal individual freedom and a free-market economy, with low taxation" in the government. As the article in the OP notes, when externalities are accounted for wind simply isn't expensive relative to other sources of generation.

Not exactly Dutch courage
The new government unveils its uninspiring vision for the country

Oct 7th 2010 | THE HAGUE | from the print edition

MEET the Netherlands. A small, affluent, densely populated northern European country, economically timid, with the potential for ethnic strife simmering just under its quiet surface. That is the picture painted by the agreement underlying the new Dutch centre-right minority government, consisting of the liberal VVD and the Christian Democrats. With the backbench support of the far-right Freedom Party and its leader, Geert Wilders (see Charlemagne), the new government will have a majority of just one in the 150-seat parliament.

Mr Wilders has extracted a range of policy goodies in return for his support. The new government will ban the face-covering Islamic veil, and forbid police and workers in judicial institutions from wearing the headscarf. Immigration via marriage will be curbed. State subsidies for newcomers’ language courses will be turned into loans, and a failure to pass the subsequent tests could become grounds for a refusal to grant residence permits.

The agreement is long on heavy-handed police tactics as a response to crime-ridden ethnically mixed neighbourhoods, but has nothing to say about poor infrastructure, school drop-out rates, skills shortages and low social mobility among both immigrants and natives in such areas.

More surprisingly, the government has shunned any serious attempts at structural economic reform. Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD and prime minister-in-waiting, campaigned on a pledge to revitalise the Dutch economy. But no substantial effort will be made to reform either the labour market or the inflated government-subsidised housing market. The generous pension system will remain, and the pension age will creep up by just a year, from 65 to 66, and then not until 2020. “This must be the most conservative and anti-reform economic programme we have had in the past 40 years,” says Sweder van Wijnbergen, professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam.

And despite the professed radical liberalism of both the VVD and Mr Wilders...

http://www.economist.com/node/17204823



See this for a description of the slant of the various parties.
http://www.expatica.com/nl/essentials_moving_to/country_facts/Whats-liberal-politics-in-the-Netherlands_16192.html

[AtheistCrusader]

20. If the gain is 30-40%, if I had a choice

not knowing the numbers and just guessing, I would opt to build double the wind turbines on solid ground if necessary, where you can pull up a service truck in all but the highest, nastiest wind conditions. Just maintaining BUOYS can be an enormous pain in the ass.

Where can I find maintenence cost comparisons between on-shore and off-shore turbines?

[kristopher]

21. That is only part of it, there are two more things to consider.

If you look at a population density map you'll see that population tends to be most dense in coastal regions. If you compare the population map with a wind resource map you'll see that the terrestrial wind resources in densely populated areas tends to be poor. That is why, during the 90's, large scale development of wind was considered to be encumbered by the need for massive transmission infrastructure, and even then large areas of population were thought to be difficult to serve with wind.

The recognition of the potential of offshore wind changed that calculus completely. Offshore wind is abundant and high quality, it is near some of the heaviest load centers on the planet, and it has few competing uses for the space. It is well worth developing just on that basis alone.

However there is another factor that you should recognize - the size of terrestrial wind turbines is limited to about 2MW by our land transportation infrastructure. These things are massive and those larger than 2MW are practically only able to be deployed on a large scale if we build them at ports and use ocean transport.

The ones being tested right now range from 5MW-10MW.

I don't know where you might lay hands on mx cost figures. It is probably rather difficult as that is usually a service provided by the company that contracts to operate the wind farms and would therefore be treated as proprietary information. While higher than terrestrial installations, I've not heard that mx is a particularly significant additional cost issue. The major problem with cost for offshore wind right now is the creation of a basic transmission infrastructure and the upstream infrastructure that is required such as specialized ships to place the turbines.

Again, the OP doesn't really reflect on offshore wind so much as it speaks to the political climate in Holland.