Germany’s ambitious offshore wind energy project is increasingly threatening to become an expensive green energy folly.
Originally the flagship North Sea wind energy project was scheduled to be delivering clean energy by August 2013. However technical failures beleaguered the project and delayed the opening 7 months: until March 2014.
BARD I offshore windpark shut-down extends 9 months. Builders have been unable to resolve technical faults plaguing the project from the start. Text added to photo by NTZ. Original photo: BARD.
But March came and passed, and again the technical problems persisisted and engineers were forced to delay the opening until August 2014, background here.
But that deadline too has now passed and the Austrian Der Standard here reports that the 400 MW BARD I offshore wind park shut-down will be extended at least another month as engineers struggle to get the park online by the end of September.
Engineers remain baffled
According to Der Standard: “Problems with over-voltages in the cable network plagued and ultimately led to a switch-off. The troubleshooting was supposed to be completed in August, however no exact analysis has yet to be produced.”
Hope to repair problems this month
A consortium of companies have been feverishly searching for the root cause of the network problems, but Der Standard writes that the reas0n for the faults is still unclear and that fluctuations in the grid “overloaded a filter” at the Tennet-operated Borwin 1 transformer station. “The repairs should be finished by the end of September.”
Here we are assuming they mean the year 2014. BARD 1 has not issued any press releases or provided comment on the new delays.
Delay costs up to 2 million euros a day!
The Bard 1 North Sea wind park consists of 80 units 5 MW turbines and is located offshore 100 km from the north German coast. The extended shut down will mean a further financial blow to the project, with cost overruns reported to be already well in the double digit millions of euros. Alarmist site klimaretter here writes of the shutdown.
The estimated costs run between one and two million euros per day.”
But in the end, everyone knows who is going to end up footing the bill. Germany already has among the highest electricity costs in the world. Germans will have to prepare to pay even more, and soon!
So they say ‘fluctuations in the grid’. Don’t just blame ‘the grid’ … it is their turbines that are one of the causes of the fluctuations.
It is clear from the article (at least for readers with technical knowledge) that they mean the local AC grid of the windpark. They do explain that the local AC is turned into DC before being transmitted onshore.
We have talked about the 6.5 cents/kWh surcharge for paying for wind and solar electricity.
There is another 1 cent surcharge, introduced 2013 or 2014, that goes into a slush fund for compensation for the risks of the untested offshore windparks.
That’s what will pay for it. That’s about 3.5 billion a year.
Here is an article describing alternate designs of wind power.
http://machinedesign.com/news/better-alternatives-wind-power
The photo is stunning in that the 50′ or so boat next to the unit closest to us shows just how big these horrible things are…
The article states, “Delay costs up to 2 million euros a day!” Would it not be more correct to state that any delay will save almost that much every day in subsidies?
And when they do manage to get electricity flowing to land, they then have to find customers for it.
There is an excess supply up north. Poland and the Czech Republic are both annoyed about sudden surges from existing wind farms, and are building phase shifting transformers to isolate their grids. That leaves the Norwegian and Swedish hydro schemes to absorb the excess into pumped storage. Surprise! the Norwegians are now demanding payment to take the electricity (but they will still charge real money if you want it back).
And for some reason many Germans are opposed to having their backyards and nearby forests dug up and replaced by giant steel towers. So getting the power down to southern Germany is going to be very difficult.
I wonder how much thought went into the original decision to site wind farms out there?
“I wonder how much thought went into the original decision to site wind farms out there?”
I’d say none, very little at best.
“So getting the power down to southern Germany is going to be very difficult.”
Hey they can’t use it anyway. Factories are built with the expectation of uninterrupted steady electricity. Even a few milliseconds outage kills the assembly flow. They’d rather install their own generators. VW operates several of their own power plants, for instance.
What is the problem?
You are Germans and rich and can afford it!
Keep paying until you are level with the Ethiopians, which is afterall, the objective of this crazy plan.
[…] So far things hardly could have gotten any worse technically, and now financially and legally. For Germany, a highly admired nation when it comes to science, engineering, and technical prowess, the large scale energy project threatens to morph into an embarrassment of monumental dimensions. See more background here and here. […]
The German energy policy is based on the kneejerk reaction of an East German woman of indeterminate techniocal understanding who within hours of reading only the headlines about the Fukishima incident decided to close Germany’s nuclear power plants. How and why did the german peole and the millions of competent scientists and engineers let her get away with it. Is their still something in their psyche that means follow the leader however daft they are??. We heading inexorably towards another iceage of inderterminate severity and these momsters will alm ost certainly be destroyed by the weather extremes arising. Only nuclear(prefeably thorium)and undersae/ground transmission system will operate when snowfalls of 100s of feet are likely …… at 74 I am unlikely to be around to say I told you so but our children will!