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by matthiasl 1481 days ago
Do you have some numbers to back your "strong" doubts?

One widely cited source is the 'Lazard' report:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

it puts onshore wind at between $26 and $50 per MW and the cost of offshore wind at an average of $83 per MW. I.e. the opposite of what you think.

Lazard could be wrong, and it would be interesting to hear why, backed by some numbers.

2 comments

> the opposite of what you think.

Well, no, I didn’t make the claim that it was the cheapest. It is competitively priced, however, which is important, and both technically and politically achievable. Anyway the other person claimed that if onshore became even cheaper that onshore would gain favor over offshore. Yet, it’s already apparently significantly cheaper. So why isn’t it more favorable already?

There are motivations beyond purely cost…it’s a lot easier to have larger-scale offshore wind than onshore (are there 15MW+ turbines in the onshore pipeline?) with less nuisance and better wind resource. It’s not really feasible to transport the components for such massive wind turbines onshore. Multi-gigawatt scale onshore wind farms don’t exist (the largest I noticed after a quick search is only 350MW). Offshore can be so much bigger…Dogger Bank, when it’s fully realized, will be almost 14 times larger than the current largest onshore wind farm in the UK.

Offshore is a lot more consistent.