The online fuldainfo.de here reports of mores woes in the German offshore wind industry. It’s turning out that offshore wind power is expensive, and often plagued by technical difficulties.
The offshore Trianel Borkum wind park severely hampered by spiraling costs, lower than expected winds. Photo credit: Trianel
Just days ago I wrote here of another recent technical folly suffered by the North Sea Riffgat wind park, where its power transmission underwater cable worked its way out of the seabed to become exposed and thus at risk of becoming ensnarled with anchors or fishing nets.
“Rosy wind projections”
The fuldainfo.de now writes of “high losses” incurred by aanother nearby wind park: the Trianel Windpark operated by Rhönenergie. This is “not surprising” to FDP Free Democrats Party Chairman Mario Klotzsche:
We brought up our concerns again and again in the committees, and also in public, because the economic precariousness was foreseeable at a very early stage. That’s why the city of Flensburg left the project already in 2014. That’s what we also wish to do so that Rhönenergie can avoid getting saddled with additional burdens.”
Offshore installation costs more than doubled
A major reason for the losses seen by the Trianel Borkum park today, according to Klotzsche, were the “rosy wind projections”, which he reports was also the case for “many other wind projects“. He is quoted in the fuldinfo.de:
Originally 80 turbines with 400 megawatts of capacity should have been installed for 1 billion euros. In the end only 40 turbines and 200 megawatts of capacity were built for 1.1 billion euros.”
Multiple delays
Klotzsche also spoke of “repeated delays” with respect to hook up to the power grid, and even after the park was put into operation.
Moreover, the winds that were projected never materialized. “There was less wind than what was assumed,” according to Klotzsche. “The responsible persons calculated the project using rosy numbers.”
GE is collapsing because of this nonsense. You should do a story on how the Green Economy killed GE.
I would be interested in your future study. I have chaired audit committees.
Rosy numbers is simply a nice way of saying “they lied.” Due diligence seems to have vanished wrt almost every renewable project. Reminds me of what I was taught about the crusades: the reasons were varied, their hopes on returned based on very little fact, their repeated attempts showed they were will to throw massive lives away based on their beliefs. From 1050-1300 or 250 years, Europeans picked up arms and went to the middle east to free it from Muslims/Moslems/Saracens with promise of great reward.
Now I don’t want to argue if these crusades changed the future of the middle east, but I do want to argue that by 1400 NONE of the desired benefits had materialized at great lose of life and money.
Seems we are seeing the second wind crusade in Germany soon come to a slowing crumbling halt.
That’s what greenstas do, lie, lie and lie again.
And the MSM gives these crooks a free pass.
They are blaming the wind, it isn’t running for re-election.
“Originariamente era previsto che sarebbero state installate 80 turbine eoliche con una capacità complessiva di 400 MW e per una spesa di 1 miliardo di euro. Alla fine sono state costruite solo 40 turbine per 200 MW di capacità, ma ad un costo di 1.1 miliardi di euro. Alla fine c’era meno vento di quanto si pensava. Le persone responsabili hanno calcolato il progetto usando numeri “rosei”.”
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Da 1m 30s a 43m 50s
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCLBH2cqKWQ
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““There was less wind than what was assumed,” “
Assumed ???
Really !!!!
They “assumed” there would be a certain amount of wind !!!!
Heads need to roll.. not quite literally, but darn close to it !!
Andy:
Didn’t you see the movie “Build them and they will come”? So they built the turbines and oops! sometimes life isn’t like movies.
When I was 7, I dug a hole in our backyard, and was astounded to discover that there was a lot less gold there than I assumed.
Did you wait for the rainbow to land in your backyard.?
If not, that was your problem.
Don’t they teach 7 years anything nowadays !! 😉
Off-shore windfarms are stunningly costly and give little electricity for all that investment as previously reported https://notrickszone.com/2015/12/26/engineering-fiasco-spiegel-on-offshore-capacity-as-low-as-0-03/.
And the maintenance cost are dire and not likely to improve –https://notrickszone.com/2016/02/02/offshore-offshore-wind-turbine-maintenance-costs-100-times-more-expensive-than-new-turbine-itself/
When is the government (all governments) going to get the message, windfarms especially off-shore windfarms, are a massive cost for very little return, with massive ongoing maintenance cost that the voters have to pay for.
If they were not subsidized it is very doubtful they would ever have been built. Unreliable power is a ‘luxury’ few nations can truly afford.
The very fact that government is involved tells us that such projects – be they wind farms or the Olympics – are examples of malinvestment. Otherwise, chances are somebody would be doing it anyway, if it were economically viable. Even if they got lucky and picked a winner, other things being equal, government can only be a cost overhead.
Quote “There was less wind than what was assumed,”
Unquote
With climate models being so reliable, how is it possible to get less wind than assumed. Why are the engineers “assuming” anything when they can just use the extremely accurate climate model data!
The whole thing sounds like one big ASS-umption. !
It takes 2,328 x 9,5 MW offshore wind turbines to sputter out the same amount of intermittent electricity as the 24/7 electricity delivered by 3,200 MW Hinkley Point C [HPC] – that’s 22,116 MW.
HPC’s cost/MWh is £22.49, but 950 MW Moray East Offshore Windfarm [MEOW] has a cost of £50.38/MWh and their CfD rate is £57.50/MWh for 15 years and £42.00/MWh for 10 years.
22,116 MW of offshore wind, with a capital cost of £41,904 million will, at these same rates, make a ‘profit’ of £3,247.47 million. That’s a compound interest rate of just over 0.1% [one tenth of 1%].
What’s the scam? Are the shareholders going to have to rely on constraint payments to make a bob or two? Will constraint payments still exist when they need them?
http://idiocyofrenewables.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/3200-mw-of-nuclear-power-22116-mw-of.html
As long as Governments want to virtue-signal by subsidising wind “power”, the greenstas and their mates will make money.
As the saying goes “a fool and their money are soon parted”.
Trouble is it is our money that is been robbed by the greenstas.
[…] https://notrickszone.com/2018/01/16/another-german-offshore-wind-park-loses-millions-as-installation-… […]
Next they will find salt water is corrosive, offshore is stormy,insurance for offshore is higher, maintenance is never finished. Welcome to the playground of offshore energy production.