Big Wind | Fully Charged

I am welcome to fully child now this week we're looking at wind turbines not little tiny wind turbines really rather big wind turbines in fact the only way to describe it is massive wind so Charles to start with thank you very much for ranging all this is fantastic opportunity to to be able to come and see these I think beautiful machine has really fabulous so we're in it we're on a wind farm near Kettering but this is a working farm so they're still farming here we're on a recently cut stubble field these are these are yours yeah your special one is a General Electric 1.6 100 wind turbines that have been up here since 2014 so do you now I mean I don't want to do too many figures but you know the kind of total capacity of what you can potentially generate a couple of different ways of measuring it but the total the the maximum output powers 14.4 megawatts right and there's nine turbines on the site but what's more interesting the amount of energy it can produce so this turbine should be producing somewhere about 48 gigawatt hours of power every year and that's enough to power just under 13,000 homes right typical English yeah and he doesn't need any fuel I just want to underline that no yeah so yeah it needs a lot of other it needs maintenance and looking after but well so the fuel they'll be here for 20 years and you know hopefully if the climate doesn't change too much they'll be producing power for 20 years without any need for any other fuels apart from the service technicians obviously come here and look after the turbines customer the big push in this country certainly seems to be offshore with yes and offshore wind everyone's fine about it because you can't see it and it's offshore yes but I would imagine the installation costs of putting a wind turbine out at sea in compassionately putting one in a field in Northamptonshire is quite different yeah I mean offshore and onshore exactly the same philosophy concept it's just a cost question it's how much you want to pay for your energy so onshore wind is significantly cheaper and you know not just installation the installations easier and quicker but imagine the servicing you know both olicity to come out and service the turbines here we have the technicians that can just drive up in a van go into the turbines you know get them back online very very quickly winter by going down it can take a significant amount of time in a vessel to get out there and then even worse if something really breaks it's it can be very expensive to fix it yes so it's really a cost questions how much do you want to pay to not see the turbines yes when you see them like this they just do what they do no one's doing anything it just yes things turning that presumably the stresses and forces on them are fairly substantial they're phenomenal yes the way the industry has been moving over the years is that over time what really what's been enabling the turbines to grow and get cheaper and cheaper is that you can grow so this turbine 1.6 megawatt one when we first launched that turbine type it had a rotor probably around 60 meters these wants a total diameter of the writer was about 60 meters 50 60 meters on the on the first unit these now have 100 meter rotor and that's you know the doubling and you can imagine what that does to weight and everything else and the only way we able to do that and instead launches through the controls so the controls are got smarter and smarter to allow the turbines to very intelligently control the loads from the wind so when the wind gusts the turbine knows what's happening and can adjust and it allows us to reduce the loads and then not put whacking great bits of metal further up the tower which is expensive yes so we keep the cost down and we must capture more energy is I mean that's one of the things today is that you know they're turning at a very constant regular speed and yet where we're staying I'm and I can actually feel moving air just a balance I mean it's very it's not like a windy day it is a calm day very low wind speed day today and actually these turbines in particular they're 1.6 megawatt version are low wind speed turbine so this site was very carefully we call it micro sited and lay down we picked the optimum turbines for the wind to be to get the best cost out of it because we're not in the Highlands of Scotland where you'd have very extreme winds this is a relatively low wind speed although saying that what we consider lowest wind speed in England and in the UK is actually quite a good wind speed in the rest of the world one of the figures that I heard many years ago that I loved with it the you know that British Isles has 40 percent of Europe's wind our absolute does if if you look at the wind resources where absolutely dominating in natural resources of wind Missouri it makes sense that we should maybe have more of them in my opinion we should definitely be putting more because and right now the cost of onshore wind is is is falling so quickly and it's very cost competitive one of the things that we struggle with here in the UK is that with there's a lot of limitations put on the wind farms mainly from a visual perspective I would say and as a result that's actually capping how low the cost can drop where the turbines were building and most of the other countries around the world are significantly bigger I say they are they are larger turbines for on land oh absolutely yeah where we've just installed a prototype in the Netherlands with a hundred and thirty meter rotor diameter so another 30 metres of size and competitors i'm with the tower that that's on be taller and yeah five meters higher towers not matter although that being said we're looking at projects now in other countries so the towers you see in the background here about 18 meters of height and these are actually some of the biggest wind turbines in england the tip height is about 130 metres high we're installing turbines around the world and you know we're looking at Finland Germany Tyler and other places where you have more than 200 metre tip height so when when the blades at the high point is more than 200 metres those are phenomenal structures you know the towers 160 metres up in the air it's very large rotors can you explain the reason why wind turbines work better when they're high up so very simple it's all about energy capture you want to capture as much of the wind and the resources you can and capture most energy so there's two key things that we look for you want to have a large area of capture which is goes by the square of the rotor so it's an area so the bigger the area the more wind you're capturing the more energy you get so that goes by the rotors squared but even more important is the wind speed the the energy capture goes by the cube of the wind speed so how'd you make the wind faster well you put the turbines in good locations or you go higher up so the ground has a dragging effect on the winds as it passes over the ground and you have this thing called the wind shear and as you go up in height the wind speed increases so not only so if you go up in height not only do you get higher wind speeds which in krisily energy significantly but also you can put bigger rotors on it cuz they won't hit the ground yes there's also a limitation you get one the rotors you got 50 metre long blades and only on a 40 metre high tower I've gone lawmaking through with the wrappings okay so it goes hand in hand they get bigger they capture more energy and the great thing is that they go pilot capture energy and they do so a low-cost so every kilowatt hour of energy produced reduces in cost so it's a win-win all around really I mean I've read two reports recently that say currently in the UK the cheapest way of generating electricity is land-based wind yes is that I'm yeah it's so hard to compare all different technologies but I believe that that's true although we are limited by the permitting here if we can really deploy our latest technology here on the best towers if we really optimize the size doesn't necessarily mean going to 200 meters but it means optimizing the science the best technology I would say that's definitely true in other countries around the world where our company is building installing and delivering energy at prices significantly lower than our wholesale energy price here so that shows you it's already happening today in America Latin America Morocco so you know it's happening all over the place we just don't do it here in terms of turning a generator that spins to generate electricity that's not going very far no it's gearing its debt the gearbox gears that speed up exactly so just it just it just optimizes the the generator rotational speed who's that one over there isn't turning so that's because that's often I've been asked this many times yes yeah they don't work because I've seen them and they're just not even turning it's just the you know all that stuff but they're not turning because you've turned it off but yeah well in this particular case we turned it off because I don't if you can see those axes there was a person standing on top oh my god because it's not really when you see a human being on it you go you get the scale you get used to it that you see oh he was this big on this yeah it's pretty scary being up there it's quite some high yeah they they don't run for number different reasons there's a cut in wind speed and the cut out wind speed they can be down for planned maintenance that's what's going on the background we have to maintain the turbines every six months to twelve months we have to turn up technicians go up they look after the grease and oil all of the mechanical components look after it you can have an unplanned downtime something kids you know there could be a trip we have a lot of safety trips sometimes they actually shut down because after unwind because there's a cable going up the middle of it and if they keep turning in one direction that's you have to stop and unwind oh wait a minute hang on oh that's something I didn't know so because they can tech they can steer they steer themselves into the wind I have a salute here but then if they kind of go around and then they go around again exactly so is it booze that's all part of the control method so the number of different reasons why even might be stopped just temporarily because it might be unwinding or it might be doing some sort of calibration checks and the control systems think so but in general they're extraordinarily reliable so we measure things on availability as what we call it our entire fleet works well above 97% availability so it means more than 97% of the time the turbines are available to reduce power and and this wind farms running closer to a ninety eight percent of variability so ninety seven ninety eight percent and if you compare that to a lot of other technologies nuclear and coal and things it's actually much better right because they tend to have bigger outages which take months whereas we can get them back up and running within days watching the debate about this and I mean it's way above my pay grade but they the base load you know that could we could be running 100% renewables do we need a base load all those I mean is that I mean I'm assuming that's something that's discussed in your circles about absolutely it's discussed all the time and it's a very interesting one I'd say ten years ago people there was people saying that you couldn't in some 110 percent of wind because the grid become unstable and all the light to go out and we've since found that that's completely untrue and the same for all renewable solos in that any any kind of non dispatchable energy generation it's basically being proven less true and as we go on and more renewables get installed the UK is very far away from that from having any limit because I think we were close to about 12% of our power generator through renewables some other countries are generating closer to 80 90 percent and the technology is coming along so it's all about technology these were the wind turbines I say the capacity factor so the amount of time during the year the turbines producing power is going up so as the turbines get bigger as I said the controls get bigger in this case we've got these massive rotors on these small 1.6 megawatt generators the capacity factor this wind approaching 40% so that means 40% of the year it's running all that were forward vallarte yes so the capacity kept facts coming up and the grid is adapting so the grid is getting smarter and being able to dispatch more intelligently they're able to control the grid better using various technologies and then you've got storage which is coming online and there's a lot of storage either hydro pump storage batteries you know imagine the future with all the electric cars acting as a reservoir for all the wind farms and that is technologies not so far away the renewables industry in general is entering a new phase in its history at the moment with the absolute complete removal of all subsidies is that correct is it yes in this country in this guy no in this out right now yes I'm only talking about so I'm lucky our work internationally so I cover our projects across all of Europe and Asia and Africa and everywhere so the renewables industry is progressing very well would you take globally and it's growing but I mean last year the the there was far more investment into renewables globally than that any other form of energy generation so very significant it's growing all over the world the UK is is we is in a period of uncertainty so the subsidies have been removed and we don't have any clear market mechanism for onshore wind the government removed all that and right now the industry is in a state of kind of hold trying to see what's next right because it's confusing I think if you're outside the energy industry to understand why do you need subsidies if you can produce electricity cheaper than anyone else why can't you just sell that yeah well as I mentioned here one of the reasons that we can't get to those very low energy prices is because of the restrictions on the wind farms because of the size of the turbines not allowed to deploy latest technology so if you could put in them yeah and also the size of the wind farms in the UK tend to be smaller compared to places in the earth stands get much bigger wind farms a lot more economies of scale but the point is that the price is coming down one of the issues that we have is if we build a wind farm without a subsidy if we just say went on the market do does all the power get bought or how does that work do you get priority dispatch there's no rules and mechanisms around that at the moment so it's not quite clear how the economics work and unfortunately financing the economics really drives an industry so until we have Clara - yeah when a holding period because that's what's so heartbreaking is that we're getting left behind when the rest of the world you know presumably because it's the same as electric vehicles as renewable energy there and the cost is we're all at the front I mean it's so heavily weight at the front whereas in other very particularly for renewables yeah yeah absolutely and I like that the technology and cost of getting there I have a very sincere kind of positive outlook on on the wind industry because it just makes sense yeah I mean I I hope that when something just makes sense on a fundamental level that it will happen now how long it takes for that to you know start up again and for us to realize that we can get homegrown secure energy mining are when the resources yeah and delivering you know clean power to people at prices which are very very competitive and much better than a lot of the other things that we're seeing a moment which are being subsidized there are subsidies I think for every other form of energy generation right now so the one issue that we have in renewables is that it's a very direct visible subsidy it's a black and white this is a subsidy for you producing power from renewables a lot of the other forms of energy get subsidies indirectly yeah or they get subsidies for things like capacity markets which is like having the ability to produce power so they're kind of indirect if that's the things you can get paid even if they're not actually producing an area yeah because they're running it's a bad cupcake and yes Charles thank you so much for your time today that is a poignant bit it's been a great pleasure to meet you and you've explained a lot of things to a good half half brain numpty like me I think they're going slower they are a bit [Music] thanks very much for watching I really hope you enjoyed that please do if you have a feel of a mind subscribe to the fully-charged channel we'd love to have more subscribers as always also have a look at the little patreon link that's just below this video have a look at the patreon page it's very easy to use even I can do it and the patreon support that we've had for this series has been amazing it's what made it possible to do but you know we're always sure of a few quid you know what I mean anyway if you have been thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 170,014

Rating: 4.9456148 out of 5

Keywords: wind turbines, off shore, onshore, wind power, clean tech, renewable energy, electricity, General Electric, big wind, Robert Llewellyn, Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge

Id: 1Rd55DuJPx4

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2016