It was great to be part of the launch of Go West! a project I helped kick off with Regen in Spring. The final report highlights the value of a geographically diverse hashtag#offshorewind fleet. It shows the importance of spreading wind capacity around our whole coastline. Delivering that diversity will mean focusing specifically on how we support projects to deliver in areas like north and west Scotland (such as projects with existing hashtag#scotwind leases) and in the hashtag#CelticSea.
Full report available here: https://lnkd.in/eW2hzYXD
The project modelled an illustrative 70 GW offshore wind fleet with 20 years worth of data. Moving from a ‘Stay East’ scenario (almost all capacity spread across the North Sea) to a ‘Go West!’ scenario (an equal spread between east and west) resulted in:
– Reduction in the number of hours when the output of the offshore wind fleet was less than 10% of its installed capacity – from 227 hour to 64 hours per year
– Reduction in ramp rates from offshore wind, making system balancing easier to manage – peak annual ramp rates drop from 13.1 GW / hr to 7.4 GW / hr and average ramp rates from 1.3 GW / hr to 1.0 GW / hr
– Reduced residual carbon intensity for the grid. Modelling showed a 24% reduction as the need to dispatch residual unabated fossil fuel generation, particularly highly carbon intensive peaking plant was reduced.
To be clear this doesn’t suggest that east coast wind isn’t important, but that integrating it with north, south and west coast wind gives us better outcomes for the same capacity. Its also worth saying that this is only part of the picture – fully understanding questions like ramp rates and low load factors need us to think about onshore wind and solar as well as offshore wind.
Underlying wind speed and wind power data for this project came from Renewables Ninja at: https://lnkd.in/eRUupF4G
Great work from the project team: Jack Adkins, Rebecca Fowell, Jonathan Lamont, Johnny Gowdy and the project was supported by Magnora Offshore Wind, Morwind Ltd, Northland Power Inc. and Simply Blue Group.