Moray East is the first of the (allegedly) supercheap offshore wind farms. When it was awarded its Contract for Difference in 2017, the price agreed, £57.50 per megawatt hour, was said, somewhat naively, to herald a revolution in wind farm costs.
Last year, however, we were able to see how its build costs turned out. At £2.3m per megawatt of capacity, they were on the low side, if not revolutionary, although the site is only 22 km from land, which tends to keep costs down. [emphasis, links added]
That said, it is also in quite deep water, which tends to push them up. It, therefore, looks as though the developers have kept a pretty tight rein on spending.
Moray East is one of the first offshore wind farms to deploy 10-megawatt turbines, so it’s interesting to see how these have performed.
Today, I noticed that the wind farm’s generation data for 2022-23, the first full year of operation, are now available, so we can finally check things out.
At first sight, it seems to have been a disaster. Moray East has generated just 2.5 terawatt hours of electricity, which equates to a capacity factor of just 30%.
At this level of output, the levelized cost will be in the eyewatering range of £125-200 [$156-249] per megawatt hour.
However, this is not the full story, because the wind farm has also spent an astonishing amount of time switched off.
According to Renewable Energy Foundation data, its constrained hours were 0.7 terawatt hours. In other words, more than a quarter of the wind farm’s potential output is not being delivered to the grid.
We know that CfD contracts ensure wind farms are fully compensated for all this “lost” output, while the grid rules allow them to sell the power anyway if they can divert it to a battery or a flywheel, thus allowing them to be paid twice for the same electricity.
For wind farms, being switched off is more profitable than producing power.
If we put the constrained output back into the levelized cost model, then the cost is in the range of £86–131 [$107-163], which makes it a rather low-cost wind farm.
The problem is that the consumer isn’t paying for power on this basis, but instead on the disastrously expensive “unconstrained only” basis (and even that understates the bill to be paid because of the double-payment issue).
Whatever basis the levelized cost is calculated on, it may still be understated. I’ve previously noted that larger wind turbines are wearing out faster than smaller ones.
Because we have very little data on turbines above 6 megawatts, it’s hard to know how fast the output of Moray East’s 10-megawatt beasts will decline.
I’m currently assuming, conservatively, that it will be as fast, but no faster, than 5-6 megawatt ones. But all the evidence suggests that we should expect more wear and tear. In which case the costs will be higher still.
Read more at NZW
Time to shut down and tear down the Wind Turbines which never should have been built in the first place
Was/is corruption or ignorance the main basis for their introduction?
The ongoing windmill installations, by when all must have known their killer drawbacks seems likely to have corruption as its basis.
Politicians of all Parties, who must know about the windmills’dire drawbacks, have allowed and encouraged their continued installation.
They are a quintessential of the decarbonisation scam.
I get two ‘headlines’ emails daily from the Sydney Morning Herald. From about six hours ago:
“Russian spy ships are mapping wind farms off Britain’s coast as part of plans to sabotage critical infrastructure.”
Marvelous…..