Norway faces windy road to offshore wind
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Norway faces windy road to offshore wind By Angela Saini Feature Editor John Olav Giæver Tande
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here is little that the world can teach Norway about renewable energy. Around 96% of its electricity already comes from hydropower, and it is so cheap that some is exported to its neighbors, including Germany and Denmark. But there is limited capacity to building more hydropower in Norway, according to Jon Samseth, adjunct professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. With a long windy coast facing the Norwegian Sea, offshore wind power could therefore be an alternative source of renewable energy in the future. Indeed, Norway has considerable expertise in the wind industry. Promising though this could be, however, it comes with challenges. The infrastructure needed to harness offshore wind power is considerable. It includes bottom-fixed or floating substructures with large wind turbines generating electricity; substations and submarine cables for collecting and transporting the electricity to shore; and systems for operation, control, and maintenance of the installations. Land-based and offshore wind turbines are similar in design, usually built
according to the classical horizontal-axis wind turbine concept, and up to seven megawatts, with rotor diameters approaching 160 meters (even larger units are in development). Wind farms may range from a few tens of megawatts onshore, but can be gigawatts offshore. Despite being an enormous potential source of power, the main challenge for offshore wind, said John Olav Giæver Tande, Director of Norway’s Research Centre for Offshore Wind Technology (NOWITECH), is cost. Offshore wind farms need to operate under some of the toughest environmental conditions on the planet, over time scales of 20 years or more. “It is one of the big engineering challenges of the century. This calls for accelerated research and innovation for value creation, and reducing risks and costs,” he noted. As far as materials research goes, this demands a better understanding of materials degradation in the harsh offshore conditions. While land-based wind turbines are a common sight across Europe—covering around 10% of the EU’s electricity consumption in a typical wind year, according to the European Wind Energy Association—offshore wind is far more rare. As of February 2015, there were 128.8 gigawatts of installed wind energy capacity in Europe, of which 120.6 GW were onshore and just over 8 GW were offshore. Europe dominates offshore wind development; only 0.7 GW of offshore wind is installed outside Europe, though the United States, Japan, and other countries have ambitious plans to develop more offshore wind farms in the future. Jason Jonkman, a senior engineer at the National Wind Technology Center in the United States, noted that although Denmark, Germany, the UK, and The Netherlands are the biggest investors in offshore wind, Norway has been strong in funding offshore wind research and development through NOWITECH and the N
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