February 25 (Renewables Now) – The average offshore wind load factors during the month of January were at their highest since 2015, with older parks, built before 2016, reaching 52% and newer ones going even higher to 55%.
This was unveiled by research and analysis provider Cornwall Insight, which attributes the higher load factors at newer sites to their use of larger turbines. The consultancy says its research has even shown that some of the newest sites, both offshore and onshore, achieved monthly average load factors close to, or above, 70%. On certain days they even approached 100%.
When it comes to just onshore wind farms, load factors averaged 42% for the month.
Lucy Dolton, analyst at Cornwall Insight, said that the consultancy expects these wind output records to be broken more frequently in the future, given that an additional 1.1 GW of new offshore wind farms are seen to become operational by April 2020. At the same time, the government is targeting an increase in offshore wind capacity to 40 GW by 2030 from 10.8 GW at present.
“Although decarbonisation of the electricity mix is wholly positive, ever-higher levels of wind output are not without its impacts. During periods of high wind output, the subsequent lower wholesale prices put some sites at risk of cannibalising their revenues and can even lead to negative prices, as seen in December,” Dolton added.
Have they factored in the higher maintenance/upgrade cost to deal with the later discovery of excessive pitting (due to high speed particulate impact) on the leading edges of the blades? That sounded…problematic.
Enquiring minds want to know!
Not sure if this is bad or just normal info:
“This level of degradation reduces a wind farm’s output by 12% over a twenty year lifetime, increasing the levelised cost of electricity by 9%.”
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0960148113005727?token=A0E2B5EC994D8654F05BD4BC136D66269EB0DAF2214DE803D38D1CDC758B4F4AF61F2A7189B76E16A350B57253F7C2A8
Its a paper “How does wind farm performance decline with age?” from the UK from 2013.
It doesn’t exactly address your question, but pitting must be one components that would be part of the performance decline looked into by the research.
That paper is using data that, by the time of publication, is more than 10 years old now.
Do you have a more recent reference? I know material, use, and maintenance has improved since then, so their numbers should be worse than for more recent turbines.
Would you like to cite your source?
This wasn’t the article where I first learned of the issue, but it shows current research:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273129972_Leading_edge_erosion_of_coated_wind_turbine_blades_Review_of_coating_life_models
The last paragraph highlights a problem to be addressed. Germany and California already suffer from periods of negative pricing. This will increase dramatically as renewable outputs increase, discouraging investment somewhat. Killing it in fact under present forms of energy economics. As stated, problem in search of a solution.
Not a problem except in the for-profit system. Which why RE should be publicly-owned.
Yep. That was the form of energy economics was thinking of. Power was state owned here and it has Not improved since it was sold.
If we were to develop a hydrogen infrastructure for things that are hard to electrify (medium-to-long-distance air travel for example) we could simply electrolyze water with the spare power. Electrolysis would be the “demand backstop” for matching demand with supply.
This a podcast called “The Interchange” and the episode is “Could Green Hydrogen become the new Oil?”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-interchange/id1221460035?i=1000463391296
Sorry, I do not know how to give a better link to that podcast.
Which is why storage needs to be introduced. Such storage could be adiabatic/isothermal compressed air (CAES), liquid air (LAES), kinetic, Li battery, molten metal batteries or even hydrogen