The revenue outlook for offshore-wind projects. The days of stable and relatively high revenues are ending for Europe’s offshore-wind developers, owners, and operators.
Making money on tomorrow’s low-price projects will require a new degree of discipline. Offshore wind power cheaper than new nuclear. Image copyright Getty Images Energy from offshore wind in the UK will be cheaper than electricity from new nuclear power for the first time.
The cost of subsidies for new offshore wind farms has halved since the last 2015 auction for clean energy projects Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23. This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour. Britain now generates twice as much electricity from wind as coal, and that's a big deal. Just six years ago, more than 40% of Britain’s electricity was generated by burning coal.
Today, that figure is just 7%. Yet if the story of 2016 was the dramatic demise of coal and its replacement by natural gas, then 2017 was most definitely about the growth of wind power. Wind provided 15% of electricity in Britain last year (Northern Ireland shares an electricity system with the Republic and is calculated separately), up from 10% in 2016.
This increase, a result of both more wind farms coming online and a windier year, helped further reduce coal use and also put a stop to the rise in natural gas generation. In October 2017, the combination of wind, solar and hydro generated a quarter of Britain’s electricity over the entire month, a new record helped by ex-hurricane Ophelia and storm Brian. Since that record month, large new offshore wind farms have started to come online. Inhabitat - Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building. While scaled-up renewable energy plants can generate a great deal of energy, there’s a huge demand for smaller devices in off-grid, remote, or harsh locations.
Designer Nils Ferber created a Micro Wind Turbine that works as well on a blustery mountaintop as it does in a backyard garden, and can charge smartphones via a USB port on the turbine. Weighing around two pounds, the Micro Wind Turbine folds up like an umbrella and can be easily transported. Wind Energy Has Officially Become Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels. Wind turbines are already huge, but they’re about to get way, way bigger. Wind turbines lining the Altamont Pass near Livermore, Calif., generate electricity on in May 2013.
(AP Photo, file/Noah Berger) In the United States, the boom in wind energy has been dramatic. Last year wind generation grew more than all other sources of energy in the United States — and supplied almost five percent of total demand for electricity. China can harness wind of change - Climate News NetworkClimate News Network.
Strategically siting wind turbines where their energy can most easily be fed into the national grid could help meet over a quarter of China’s massive electricity demand.
LONDON, 28 June, 2016 – Windpower alone could deliver 26% of China’s projected electricity demand by 2030, according to new research. And the nation with more turbines than any other country could make an even more efficient switch to renewable energy, not by putting the turbines where the wind is strongest, but where they would best suit the needs of the nation’s grid. 'Wind trees' could replace controversial giant turbines in race for sustainable energy. An artificial 'wind tree' has been created to generate electricity from even the slightest flow of air.
Jérôme Michaud-Larivière, founder of the Paris-based start-up NewWind, has created Tree Wind and plans to market the invention next year. The eight-metre high (25ft) tree consists of a steel trunk, from which extend branches holding 100 plastic 'leaves', AFP reports. "The idea came to me in a square where I saw the leaves tremble when there was not a breath of air. " Michaud-Lariviere said he realised that energy had to come from somewhere, and that it must be able to be transferred into watts.
Forbes Welcome. Kites: The future of wind energy? The mobility of the Kitenergy system is another key advantage, according to its team.
"A mobile generator is capable to reach different locations, also over complex terrain," Gianmauro Maneia, an engineer at Kitenergy, said. "This allows (you) to have energy in locations where there is huge need for energy but little chance to have it. " For Maneia, cost – as well as mobility – is important. Windfarm commissioner appointed with strong credentials in renewables. The Turnbull government has appointed an academic and company director with strong ties to climate and renewables research as its new “wind commissioner”, in a move the clean energy industry says should help return the wind energy debate to “sensible”.
Andrew Dyer serves on the boards of Climateworks Australia and the Monash University sustainability unit. The government says his primary role will be to “refer complaints about windfarms to relevant state authorities” – which are already responsible for dealing with them. The wind commissioner was promised by the former prime minister Tony Abbott in response to a Coalition and crossbench-dominated Senate committee report into the alleged health effects of windfarms. RWE scraps British wind farm amid political energy row. LONDON (Reuters) - Germany's RWE has scrapped plans to build the world's largest offshore wind farm in British waters only a month after warning that political wrangling over green energy was endangering billions of pounds of investment.
RWE's nPower said that the Atlantic Array project off southwest England, which would have featured up to 240 wind turbines and powered as many as 900,000 British homes, no longer made economic sense in current market conditions. The cost of the project has been estimated at as much as 4 billion pounds. The decision to abandon the Atlantic Array follows Prime Minister David Cameron's promise to cut some green levies, stoking speculation that the world's sixth-largest economy may change how it funds renewable energy and prompting environmental groups to question Britain's green credentials.
World's smallest windmills to power cell phones. While commercial wind turbines have been trending toward larger sizes, from 300 kW capacity in 1990 to 7.5 MW in 2011, sometimes it is worth bucking the trend. Professor J.C. Chiao and his postdoc Dr. Smitha Rao of the University of Texas at Arlington have taken this contrarian philosophy to the extreme. Renewable energy outstrips coal for first time in UK electricity mix. Renewable energy has for the first time surpassed coal in supplying the UK’s electricity for a whole quarter, according to government statistics released on Thursday.
The revelation of the surge in wind, solar and bioenergy to a record 25% comes in a week when the government has been heavily criticised by business leaders and Al Gore for cutting support for clean energy. The high performance of renewable electricity between April and June, the latest period data is available for, was due to both more wind and sun and more turbines and solar panels having been installed, compared to the same period the year before, when renewables contributed 16.4% of electricity. Gas-fired power stations provided the most electricity - 30% - with renewables second.
Nuclear power was third with 21.5% and coal - the most polluting fuel - fell back to fourth, with 20.5%. Ageing coal and nuclear plants have been closing in recent years, while renewable energy has been rapidly rolling out. Renewables growth. Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Nike, Goldman Sachs take on 100% renewable energy pledge. How renewable energy in South Africa is quietly stealing a march on coal. The howling wind drives the turbines, their blades bent back from the force as they spin in the evening light and send electricity to local villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
High up on the top of the turbine, local resident Lungela Vongu, dressed in a safety harness and hard hat leans far out over the 100 meter drop to check that the wind speed detector is working properly. “This wind farm is bringing a lot more jobs into this community for the people, without it there is no future here,” he says. The Cookhouse wind farm is the biggest wind system built in Africa, with 66 turbines generating 138MW of clean power. It started feeding the grid at the end of 2014 and it is far from unique.
Although still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, South Africa has been quietly creating one of the world’s most progressive alternative energy plans. “It is set to completely transform these deep rural communities in terms of healthcare, education, job creation and a raft of other interventions. Virtually silent, fully enclosed, bladeless wind turbines on the way. A wind turbine that uses boundary layers instead of blades to generate power has been patented by Solar Aero, a New Hampshire based not-for-profit scientific research organization. Modeled on the 1913 Tesla steam turbine, the Fuller turbine is virtually silent and completely enclosed, which avoids many of the drawbacks of bladed turbines such as noise, radar interference, visual pollution and wildlife injuries.
Wind power is cheapest energy, EU analysis finds. Onshore wind is cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear energy when the costs of ‘external’ factors like air quality, human toxicity and climate change are taken into account, according to an EU analysis. The report says that for every megawatt hour (MW/h) of electricity generated, onshore wind costs roughly €105 (£83) per MW/h, compared to gas and coal which can cost up to around €164 and €233 per MW/h, respectively. Germany more than doubled its wind power capacity in 2014. U.K. Approves World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm, Farthest Ever From The Coast. By Ari Phillips Posted on Share this: "U.K.
This wind turbine has no blades — and that’s why it’s better. Magnesium diboride superconductors can lower the cost of wind turbine generator coils by over fifteen times. In January 2001, it was announced that MgB2 (magnesium diboride), a compound that was well known to chemists, was superconducting up to 39 Kelvin. Building on this discovery, Hyper Tech was formed in 2001 to use the compound to create a high-performing, low cost superconducting wire.
Hyper Tech developed and patented a continuous tube forming and filling (CTFF) process for the manufacturing of a powder metallurgy-based MgB2 superconductor wire. Hyper Tech is the world leader in manufacturing and R and D of magnesium diboride and niobium tin superconducting wire and integrated products. Hyper Tech’s innovative, patented wire drawing process enabled the company to be the first to manufacture viable long-length MgB2 wire.