Renewable energy in the wind

Events:

On Friday (Jan 8th) UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched a £100bn programme to build more offshore wind farms. The map shows that the areas are spread around the coastline from Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland to the Irish Sea.

In total, the successful bidders (including Statkraft and Statoil from Norway) estimate the farms will generate 32 gigawatts of electricity. To put this in perspective, the total amount of energy currently being generated from all offshore wind farms in the world was 1.4 GW by the end of 2008.

32GW at a cost of £100bn (approx 1 000 000 MNOK) should give a price per GW of ca £3bn or 31 MNOK per MW. I have previously read articles that suggest that the price of 1 MW from a windfarm costs 30 MNOK - which is amazingly close to the numbers presented from UK.

Read more about this interesting project on BBCs website.

Comments:
In an earlier blog post I estimated the total energy savings in our house to 30.000 KWh/year. This equals 3 KW as a yearly average - and the price for these energy savings was approximately 60.000 USD. Divide one by the other and you get 0,05W/USD as the price for our JAHUS project.

Just for fun I wanted to compare that to the price of renewable projects as the one mentioned above. There they expect to produce 32GW of clean and renewable energy for the price of £100bn (or approximately 175 150 MUSD). The calcualted price for this energy is: 0,18 W/USD (3 times more efficient than our JAHUS project).

We do not produce electricity, but reduce the demand by 30.000 KWh per year. The savings are, however, not equally distributed - we have more savings during winter (when there is much demand and high prices), and lower/no savings during warm summer months. The wind farms produces electricity when there is wind (and in these areas that means pretty much year around). It is therefore not correct to say that a JAHUS project is 3 times more expensive per KW saved/produced.

Norway has high mountains and is blessed with hydro-electric power (water from the mountains runs through turbines that generate clean and renewable energy). As mentioned in an earlier blog post, Norway is therefore well positioned for a role as the "battery of Europe" - supply of clean energy when there isn't enough wind to generate 32GW from these wind farms.   

Progress:
The aggregate stopped again yesterday - so I had to "pull the plug" and let it rest for a while. Later in the evening it started again and has been running since then. I told the project leader yesterday, but it obviously didn't help - because there wasn't any progress today.