By Bruno De Wachter / Published on Tue, 2009-04-21 12:47
Potential production capacity far overrated
The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) headquartered in Rotterdam and headed up by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, has developed a master plan for large-scale wind energy production in the North Sea. The operative adjective here is large-scale. The plan projects a potential annual production of 13,400 TWh by 2050.
The principal idea is to develop a huge ring of wind farms on offshore marine sites in the Exclusive Economic Zones of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK and to connect them by a power cable super ring. Such a ring would enable fewer connections with the coast, avoiding the necessity of connecting every wind farm with the grid separately.
The plan sounds good and looks brilliant. The trouble is that it appallingly neglects some basic technical aspects of wind energy. A quick verification of the annual production figure leads one to suspect that OMA simply "forgot" to take a capacity factor into account...
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By Bruno De Wachter / Published on Thu, 2008-06-12 05:30
Global average around 20%
The success of wind power is usually measured by the growth in installed capacity. This capacity, however, is peak power: the maximum power at optimum wind speed. The average output of a wind turbine is always lower.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine expresses the ratio of average power output to peak power. Many national and European targets assume a capacity factor of around 30%, while the world’s average capacity factor in 2005 was only 19.6%.
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