| Most of your points about off-shore wind aren't quite right.. > These prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out. This isn't even remotely true... You can measure the number of offshore farms in the dozens, there are something like 1,500 cities with populations of at least 500,000 - and most of these are close enough to the water to make broad use of offshore wind power. For instance, there's 1 operating off-shore farm in the US right now. > New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW Like pointed out elsewhere, this is true if you only look at off-shore costs. On shore wind is more like $1,250/KW. Importantly though, it's only true today. We're rapidly increasing the size of turbines and the height of towers. Most of the existing installations used 4/5/6-MW turbines. Vestas has already shipped a 9.5MW turbine. We'll likely see 20MW turbines within 5-7 years. If you're building a 500MW off-shore farm with 5MW turbines, you'll need 100 foundations, towers, turbines, you'll need 300 blades and maintenance will have to service each one individually. Increasing those to 10MW cuts all of those costs in half (more likely, by 30% or so to account for scale). Doubling the size again has the same magnitude of impact. With 20MW turbines, a 500MW farm would only need 25 turbines and 75 blades. The other benefit from these much larger turbines is that they'd sit much higher. If you increase the hub height from 100M to 150M or 200M, all of the sudden you're looking at sustained annual average winds approaching 20m/s. The wind shapes shift significantly as you increase altitude as well, so you can go from c=12, k=2 to c=20, k=3.5. This should easily move the capacity factors from ~50% to ~70+%. > and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear. Nobody serious expects that wind farms will only last 25 years. They'll last in perpetuity as long as their servicing costs stay below the marginal revenue from production. The initial lifetime expectations of nuclear reactors was 40 years, which has been extended for many plants. The same will happen with wind resources for many of the same reasons (high decommissioning costs, the challenges of siting a new generator, proven financial success at that location, etc.). |