Subject: Viridian Note 00036: Offshore Wind Power Key concepts: offshore wind power, Denmark Attention Conservation Notice: It's German news coverage about Danish renewable energy hardware. Suspiciously upbeat and cheery. Tres Europeanische. Links: our proudly Danish website: http://www.bespoke.org/viridian Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest: http://members.aol.com/stjude/ http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/ http://www.wenet.net/~scoville/Viridian/viridiantext.html Source: Der Spiegel newsmagazine July 20, 1998; World Press Review January 1999, pages 28-29 (((Comments in parentheses by bruces@well.com))) "A New Era of Sea Power?" "Svend Auken shouts his vision of the future into the wind." (((Great narrative hook!))) "In his country, the Danish minister of the environment and of energy said in June aboard the trawler *MV Greenpeace,* all of the electricity will soon be environmentally correct. Within 30 years, the national grid will be entirely dependent on solar, wind, hydro and biomass power, all renewable resources." (((What a fabulous sight that Danish press conference must have been. I want to see a *French* government minister on the deck of a ship called "Greenpeace." I mean, a French minister who isn't wearing aqualungs and toting a limpet mine.))) "After the turn of the century, there will be hundreds of giant windmills standing in the North and Baltic seas, far from coastlines. They will replace fossil-fuel power plants. The Danes want to install wind turbines with a combined capacity of 5,500 megawatts (equivalent to five nuclear-power plants), 4,000 of that in the sea. They would furnish half of Denmark's electricity needs. The rest would come from Norwegian hydroelectric plants. The wind parks would mean that 14 million tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, would not go into the atmosphere every year. 'That,' says Auken, 'is our gift to the world.'" (((Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr. Minister, and don't think those 14 million tons aren't appreciated (even if they're mostly Danish hot air right now). I never heard of Svend Auken before I read this article. I am intensely interested in Mr. Auken now. I want to know everything about this politician. With any kind of luck, he looks really good on TV.))) "Other countries are also looking for opportunities to exploit wind energy. The Netherlands has installed two wind farms in the extremely shallow waters of the Ijsselmeer; Sweden is trying the idea south of the island of Gotland." (((Swell! Do they have government ministers saying loud appreciative things about it?))) "The trend underlines what many wind-energy proponents have been saying for a long time: if there is a real future for this way of generating power, it will be in shallow waters along coastlines. In the long run, land-based wind farms == huge, unsightly, and incurably noisy == will remain also-rans." (((Wow, it really is dead easy! You just build windmills *on the shoreline* and the Greenhouse sea boils out of its bed and covers them up for you!))) "At sea, the supply of wind is practically unlimited. Future turbines in the megawatt class could be build in shipyards and then floated out to locations aboard giant pontoons. Theoretically, Europe can produce far more electricity from wind than it consumes, according to a study by the European Union commission on energy." (((One has to love any technology that requires the use of the delightful term 'giant pontoons.'))) "The foremost factor pushing wind energy is the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In May, the EU commission agreed that by 2010 the proportion of power coming from solar, wind, and hydro sources should double to 12 percent. This goal can be achieved only by a massive increase in wind energy, and in densely populated regions, the only feasible place to put more turbines is at sea. But no one believes that the 'offshore revolution' will simply take off and fly. "'We face enormous challenges,' says Andreas Eichler of Vestas, the Danish wind-energy firm. (...) (((Where's the Vestas website? I want their T- shirt! I'll pay good money, look! ))) "Wind speeds are higher at sea (...) Since winds are constant and usually free of turbulence, turbines last longer. And no money will have to be spent on noise control, because there are no neighbors at sea. "But for now, the disadvantages are far more significant. Strong foundations will be needed to protect the turbines from storms, waves, and ice. Connecting the turbines to the power grid by undersea cables will be costly. And turbines must be protected from salt and corrosion and designed for maintenance and monitoring by remote control." (((Other notable downsides of windmill power, besides the awful noise: the flying blades have been known to whack migratory birds, and, when rotating at just the right speed, their giant moving lights and shadows can provoke epileptic fits. Doubtless there are many other drawbacks.))) "All the planning studies carried out agree on one thing. Future wind farms at sea will be competitive only if they use turbines of a size never before imagined." (((This sounds intimidating, but these devices shouldn't properly be compared to backyard windmills. They are more properly seen in the context of hydro dams or nuclear plants. We already build big to get big energy; there's nothing unusual about that requirement.))) "Only scale can bring costs down, and the larger a wind farm is, the more economical it will be. That means skyscraper-size units. None of the planners foresee farms producing less than 100 megawatts. Given such installations, the Danish wind-energy manufacturers' association predicts costs of 4.2 to 5.4 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced offshore, in water between 16 and 49 feet deep. If true, this would mean such projects would be 'very close to competitive' even without factoring in the environmental benefits." (((Would $80 billion in weather damage help your budget calculations?))) "But the need for expansion could be the Achilles' heel of offshore wind technology. Projects of this size are well beyond the capabilities of the many medium-size firms now providing wind technology. Making a business of generating wind power is comparable to constructing the giant gas drilling platforms used by the oil and gas industry." (((Absolutely. That is *exactly* what it is comparable to. We're talking wind-power Rockefellers here, with giant industrial installations that can supply entire nations with clean power. I don't think we need ask that they be very different at all from modern oil company executives. They can have the same mirrorglass HQs, the same quarterly reports, the same limos even == the basic and vital difference is that their product isn't a world-wrecking poison.))) "Fans of the giant turbines may see help from unlikely allies. Shell Oil has announced plans to move into renewable energy and joined the European Wind Energy Association. Jeroen van der Verr, of Shell's international board of directors, confirms: 'We are now considering when, where, and how it may be possible to get into the offshore wind business.' This would begin the era of multinational wind energy." (((Among the Seven Sisters of global oil (now Six or possible Five since their orgies of sororital cannibalism), Shell is the Viridian darling. A seashell is a great logo for "Shell Wind," a 21-C Euro multinat standing knee-deep and proud in the North Sea. If only Shell had hauled Brent Spar across the lake, covered it with secondhand propellers and renamed it "Greenpeace." They'd be the world's Greenhouse PR champions right now == and it's by no means too late to try, either.))) Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)