Forging ahead
March 18, 2010
Finally Sheffield’s Forgemasters has got the government assistance that it has been looking for to build a 15,000 tonne press needed to manufacture the largest nuclear reactor components. I say finally because the project finance team has been working for 2 years to finalise the deal, before that the forge was conceived and designed, so my guess is that at least 5 years of work has gone into this and without it UK plc would seriously loose out in any new nuclear build.
The help is in the form of an £80m loan so we tax payers aren’t going to get stung for the full £80m unless Forgemasters goes bust immediately. We are effectively paying just over half the interest on the total loan by standing 57% of the total £140m required to build the kit. So, rough guess on a 5 year loan at 10% pa, the tax payer is taking £40m off the total bill that Forgemasters will have to pay. Its an opportunity cost to us, rather than an expenditure. Westinghouse, Lloyds and the European Bank are actually putting up most of the money. If you want a comparison the new windturbine blade test facility in Blythe is receiving over £25m worth of grants and supporting infrastructure, but then that’s a brand new capacity for the country and it deserves help too. I don’t know about you but I’d rather my money went into manufacturing than banking, maybe that’s just me 
I have to say I don’t think that’s a bad deal with the nuclear industry going the way that it is and it is a big piece of the supply chain for the UK’s own new nuclear generating capacity. So whether you regard £40m as a speculation against later export revenue, an investment in reducing import expenditure, a way to retain some real, world-leading manufacturing expertise, or simply a way to create several hundred skilled jobs for the next couple of decades it can’t be bad news.
Right now 15kt presses are not exactly common with only Japan, China and Russia reported as having capacity on this scale, with South Korea and India both wanting to enter the field.
Other people’s comments;
The Dark Lord lays out the argument in this article from last year.
This article from the Institute of Engineers has a similar flavour.
The WNA’s view of developments.
Even the Guardian seems to accept the logic of the loan
There is a second interesting point within the funding announcement (its near the bottom) was that Forgemasters would be ‘overseeing’ development of Indian forging capacity in a £30m deal. That is a technology transfer deal, effectively to show the Indians how to forge the smaller components of nuclear power systems. So we gain access to their market at the expense of some of our older technology. Swings and roundabouts. The big money is in the big kit, but a £3m per year revenue stream from tech transfer is enough to pay quite a chunk of the loan interest without tying up too many resources.
Of course you could take the other view, that nuclear power is bad/unnecessary/expensive/foolish/dangerous whatever form it comes in and we shouldn’t help its development through taxpayer assistance, whatever form it comes in. Personally I can’t justify that opinion ethically or economically as long at we in the UK use medical isotopes and invest in other less proven energy sources, such as coal with CCS or solar PV. I can see the arguments, but I think that they are emotionally driven rather than empirically based. The argument against spreading nuclear power technology to countries that currently don’t use it is much stronger, but even there its not black and white.
So I think the Forgemasters deal is great for Sheff and good for the UK. Let’s stop fannying about and start building big kit. Don’t care if its 300m tall 10MW offshore wind turbines, giant steel sea snakes or nuclear pressure vessels, the sooner we start the better, then we can stop hand-wringing and get back to helping the last billion out of crushing poverty.
Superconductors – Part Four A New Hope
January 11, 2010
Superconductors have been around in the labs for decades now. They have been a mainstay of high-end scientific research and niche medical applications for decades, but on the industrial scale they have always been a bit to expensive to run in mass market applications, like the energy sector. Theirs has been a story of potential energy efficiency boosts, power savings, zero transmission losses and all the first order energy system changes that no-one is against. Its time to take a look at them a little closer since I dismissed them so off-handedly in my previous post regarding the North Sea super grid.
Crash course
Superconductivity was discovered 99 years ago.
Different materials become superconductors at different temperatures.
HTS (High Temperature Super-Conductors) are defined as having a transition temperature above 30K (-243C), and the highest temp superconductors have a validated operating temperature around 135K. The boiling point of liquid nitrogen is 77K, so this has made HTS much more accessible and practical as nitrogen is commonly used as a liquified gas.
However, recently an HTS material that operates at 254K (-19C) has been claimed. This would clearly be a massive leap forward as standard compression-cycle refrigeration techniques could be used rather than immersion in liquified gas. Obviously these are lab findings and there is no guarantee that production of these materials could be scaled up to industrial quantities (they use some relatively commonplace elements, so there shouldn’t be any resource availability problems for once). The standard 10 years+ from first publication warning applies here i.e. no field application will arise from a lab discovery within 10 years of first publication.
So industrially we are looking at the 135K materials, which is still OK, but not the massive jump that we’d all like to see.
Energy Applications
Cabling – Zero transmission losses over long distances, or high capacity transmission without the current massive infrastructure (overhead pylons) are the main lures.
Power:Weight improvements – instead of copper conductors, using HTS in motors greatly increases their power:weight ratio. The applications in electric vehicles are obvious, so I won’t labour that point, but also consider all those static motors in air-conditioning units, factory assembly lines, and my personal favorite the conveyor belt. The infrastructure to hold these in place could be smaller and lighter, their maintenance quicker and safer as well as their operating costs lower.
For ‘motors’ also read ‘generators’ and you see the application for wind turbines and other renewable generating technologies. Smaller lighter nacelles means smaller lighter towers, means cheaper generating capacity and lower maintenance costs.
Renewable Energy Focus has done this two parter (Part One & Part Two) which covers all these much better than I ever could. You’ll need to subscribe for free to access the full articles, but its worth it.
The take home from these two articles is that super conductors should be on the shopping list of industry. I was too quick to dismiss them for the North Sea grid. With 150 times the carrying capacity per unit weight and 1/3 of the transmission losses superconducting cabling should be the first option for mega projects, not the last.
When/if those properly room temperature super-conductors reach the supermarket shelves a revolution will take hold.
Big Wind Movements
January 9, 2010
Round three of the UK offshore wind tender process totaled 32.2 GW of nameplate generating capacity. That’s a lorra lorra windmills and well above the expected 25GW power output. Lets be middle of the road and say for the sake of convenience that 3.22 MW turbines exist, that’d be 10,000 turbines located between 22km and 190km from the nearest landfall.
The London Array has started to hand out contracts. Nexans, the submarine cable specialist, has won the power export (windfarm to shore) cable contract. It is 100M Euro for 4x 53km long 150kV capacity copper cables to carry up to 1GW of power from 175 turbines.
If we do a quick bit of maths on that for 32 times the power, roughly twice the distance and 57 times the number of turbines, if the Round Three windfarms use the same technology as the London Array, the export cables alone should cost in the order of 6.5bn Euros (not including inflation or commodity risk). Using my previous estimation of the intensity of copper use in wind power, 10,000 offshore turbines and their associated cabling will use around 310,000 tonnes of conductor grade copper. Copper’s current price is around US$7,200 per tonne giving an embodied copper cost today of US$2.23bn. By the time these windmills get built, that figure looks cheap to me.
Perhaps that’s why the North Sea Supergrid got a bunk up the probability ladder by the nations next to the water. For an estimated one-off cost of 30bn Euro you get a ‘local’ connection, cutting the need for those expensive connections to shore and you get the ability to load balance using Norway’s hydro power excess.
If I had an extra billion or two I’d be looking at building a submarine cabling capacity right now. Not just the cable factory but the cable laying vessel and some upstream capacity in copper recycling. It’d be nice to think that we’d be at super conducting cables for this job, but at 6,000km total length and multi-GW capacity I’m not sure that the tech will be with us in time. Looks like HVDC instead, shame.
Supply Chains Blowin’ in the Wind
September 18, 2009
This will be a very UK-centric post, but there are things that you could take away to apply to other countries if you wanted to. Be aware though that the data that I present here is not peer-reviewed and it is only semi-quantitative. I’m not an industrial electrician and I have had no access to detailed designs of wind farms. I asked several wind farm developers but had no success. For these reasons I’m going to call this an order of magnitude, or pathfinder study to be used to identify areas for further research rather than providing definitive ‘answers’.
It has deficiencies. I know what those deficiencies are. Don’t moan at me.
I’ve rounded everything in this post to nice figures. The nasty ones stay with me unless someone makes a specific request, but please remember, this is order of magnitude stuff. I think that I’m in the right ball park, but those with the hard data don’t want to pitch in (to stretch the baseball analogy).
I have tried to come up with a figure on the total amount of copper needed to satisfy the current UK policies on wind power, and while I’m sure that my findings are not news in the wind farm development community they may be interesting to others.
The UK’s wind energy strategy is to install around 37GW of new wind powered generating capacity over the next 10 years to 2020, and about another 10GW in the following 10 years. But we’ll deal with the first 10 years only because the degree of technology learning will be quite substantial and there are several disruptive technologies at the pre-commercial stage right now, especially in the field of high temperature super-conductors.
If we assume that the average size of conventional wind turbines installed through the next 10 years is 5MW, we’re looking at 7,400 new turbines. Some will be bigger, some smaller, but 5MW seems like a good place to start since there are several prototypes that size already working in Europe.
25GW (5,000) will be installed offshore, 12GW (2,400) onshore. This is the rough estimate put forward in the UK’s Low Carbon Strategy, but obviously subject to commercial realities.
Yes, I know that those onshore are likely to be restricted in size due to the planning regime and that bigger turbines may be developed offshore, but this is an order of magnitude study remember. It doesn’t actually matter that much how many turbines there, minimum safe copper usage is broadly proportional to the power that it is being used to generate and conduct (though for commercial, safety and regulatory reasons the actual engineering may break that proportionality, but again no-one was willing to tell me by how much).
So first things first.
How much copper is there in a wind turbine ?
Quick answer, just under 2 tonnes per MW of nameplate generating capacity.
I’ve used 4 peer-reviewed papers to get this answer, which I realise is quite a low number of data points and I’d like to get more data on the copper consumption of large modern turbines, but there are only a few peer-reviewed papers on this and some of them don’t have the data in a form that is usable. The largest turbine that was included here was 2MW, which is an other issue.
That means that just in the tower and nacelle each and every one of our 5MW wind turbines will contain around 10 tonnes of copper.
Sounds a lot ? A typical 5MW nacelle (with rotor, generator, gearbox and transformer) will weigh 150+ tonnes in total, so its really not that much in context.
We have our first estimate – 74,000 tonnes of copper embodied in the turbines. Easy.
Of course technology is moving fast within the mechanical portion of turbine development, with gearbox-less models, generators with super-conducting coils, generators with dynamic numbers of coils, etc, etc. So we can reasonably expect that figure to drop somewhat, even over just 10 years.
However, a wind turbine siting on its own is no use to man nor beast. What it needs is a connection to the grid. Cabling is a less dynamic technology. In fact cables haven’t really changed much in the last 50 years, despite that massive electrification of the industrialised nations during that time. Hell, there are probably cables in my street that are almost that old ! Don’t get me wrong cable performance has increased, but not really in terms of the amount of copper used, more in the engineering surrounding the conductors in terms of resistance to damage or corrosion, or lightness. In this field aluminium conductors don’t really get a look in.
In my workings I used the ‘off-the-shelf’ wind farm cable of choice, the Nexans 33kV (submarine version) for connecting both onshore & offshore turbines. Since what I’m interested in is the mass of copper conductor not the engineering around the cable, the actual version is not very important and Nexans provided the most complete datasheet.
At this point I will say that my methodology breaks down in large onshore wind farms with complex cabling topologies. Since no-one will show me their designs or costings, I have had to assume a ‘least distance’ method. In other words I’ve optimised for cable length, not wind farm cost. What my results show is that this is a reasonable assumption for onshore wind farms of about 30 turbines or less. Above that the cost of system elements, such as the sub-station, and the installation costs appear to start to exert a significant influence and I believe that my model over-estimates the amount of cabling used. The line of best fit to my data is logarithmic, so I’m guessing that my over-estimation gets worse the larger the wind farm is.
However, the number of onshore wind farms that have 30 or more turbines is low in the UK. I found 3 in this study of 30. Outside Scotland this is likely to remain the case due to constraints on space, and wind farms of 5 to 10 turbines currently typical in England and Wales.
Total copper use (without grid connection, because that is site specific) for onshore wind farms in the UK is 5.6 t/MW according to my model, with its warning attached for over estimation. A ‘safe’ estimate would be about 4 t/MW.
The methodology is more robust for offshore wind farms because the industry-standard cable topology seems to be single runs connecting rows of turbines with the single runs being gathered at the sub-station for conditioning and voltage step-up before transmission via the inter-connector.
Once you get to the inter-connector you are looking at a very serious piece of kit and a critical point of failure. You could loose one cable connecting a whole row a turbines and retain two thirds of output in a typical topology of a 3 row 30 turbine farm. Loose the inter-connector and you loose all output. Each inter-connector is a custom design. Fortunately, enough design detail is usually publicly available to make a good guess at the copper content (you need the total number of cables, number of turbines and their rated power output, and the transmission voltage to make an order of magnitude calculation). I only worked with 3-phase AC, since I could only find enough detail on one planned wind farm with HVDC.
So, to cut a long story short, my back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that offshore wind farms use copper at a rate of 9.6 t/MW by the time you connect them to the grid, with roughly one third of all copper being used in these installations contained in the inter-connector.
Not surprisingly the intensity of copper use goes up with length of inter-connector. My rough estimate is an additional 80kg of copper per MW per km of inter-connector. My R-squared is 0.31 on this, so there is a decent correlation, but its not brilliant. Note; distance to shore is not the same as inter-connector length. There may be a loose correlation between the two, but to give a couple of examples; one particular installation in German waters plans a 115km long inter-connector with 40km of that onshore, while another in the UK is 12km from shore but has a 43km cable route to the best available grid connection point.
To summarise;
Large wind turbines require around 2 tonnes of copper per MW of nameplate generating capacity.
Onshore they require a roughly similar amount in cabling infrastructure before you attach them to the grid, but my model overestimates the amount in large wind farms and this skews the result by a significant but undetermined amount. I estimate that my model doubles the cabling requirement in large onshore wind farms only, but I don’t have the hard data to back that up. A ‘safe’ estimate for total copper is therefore 4 t/MW onshore.
Offshore wind farms require more than double the copper per MW of installed capacity of their onshore cousins, but that includes the connection to the grid.
We will use 10 t/MW offshore and 4 t/MW onshore.
So this gives up our next estimate.
25GW offshore equals 250,000 tonnes of copper offshore
12GW onshore equals 48,000 tonnes of copper onshore
For a total of about 300,000 tonnes of new copper required just by UK wind power up to 2020.
Put that into context, in 2007 the UK exported 373,795 tonnes of copper and copper scrap (according to the BGS European Mineral Statistics)
Import trends from the same statistics show that copper will, effectively, no longer be imported into the UK as a raw material by 2011.
So even spread over 10 years at 30,000 tpa, this is a significant shift in raw material requirements for a country with virtually no manufacturing capacity left.
I’ll leave it there and discuss the potential implications in another post.
One Hundred and One Nights
August 28, 2009
With just over three months to go until the Copenhagen session of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and less than a year left in office Ed Miliband his folks at DECC are working overtime.
The latest consultation is on improving grid access. Now I don’t pretend to understand all the details of how the process works right now or how the Security and Quality of Supply Standard (GB SQSS) and BETTA interact, but given that less than four years after BG SQSS’s introduction its proposed that it be completely re-written I’d surmise that its not been an un-alloyed success.
The fact of the matter is that there are literally dozens of electricity generating projects waiting in a queue to be connected to the grid. DECC estimates that projects totaling around 60GW of capacity is waiting for a date that they, and their investors, can work to. That’s a lot of advanced projects sitting on the shelf, waiting for a market into which they can sell their product. Not all of them will get all the way to production, but still that is a very slow queue when, lets face it, we could do with the work and the UK’s grid could do with some action on replacing the big coal plants that have to be phased out under the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive.
On a lighter note with COP15 just around the corner the government appears to be starting to flap. Malcolm Wicks wants a tripling of nuclear power while Ed Miliband was again vilified by some in the UK over coal plans after a speech to the South African Centre for CCS , while £1 billion of loans are guarenteed for offshore wind and £10m of grants to its even offer shore floating cousin (I’ll say some more on offshore wind at a later date).
Its all starting to look a bit desperate. You can make your own mind up as to why, but I have to ask who are we trying to impress here ? Most commentators agree that there is little point trying to appeal to UK voters, except maybe on a ‘look what we achieved last time we were in government’ ticket in 2014/15. The US is busy trying to convince itself that we kill our grannies as a matter of health policy. The Russians hate us. The Chinese couldn’t give a damn. So is it the Commonwealth that we are playing to ? A wider alliance of minor nations that will buy our climate friendly products after we defend their honour at COP15 ? Who is it ?
The answer may come in 101 nights time.
