The Development of Windpower

 The Development of Wind Power

Rupert Berryman, a retired Chartered Engineer and Consultant, gave a detailed and interesting talk to members and friends of the Rotary Club of South Foreland at a recent lunchtime meeting.  Rupert has had a busy but rewarding life.

In 1961 he joined the Royal Navy and, after completing Officer Training at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, he gained a degree in Marine Engineering at the Royal Naval Engineering College.  This gave him the grounding which would lead to a successful engineering career after leaving the Navy.

In 1980 Rupert went to the Middle East where one of two major projects he supervised was setting up a canal to deliver sea water to the cooling systems of oil refineries in Saudi Arabia.  At the time this canal was the largest concrete structure in the world and delivered 113 cubic centimetres of water every second.  For this project Rupert recruited five ex-naval Petty Officers to work in his department with a project team of 100.

Back in the UK Rupert joined an underwater engineering company in Aberdeen.  One of their projects concerned the construction of the railway as part of the Channel Tunnel development in the early 1990s. He then became involved in wind farm construction for the rest of his career, and he has kept in touch with developments since his retirement in 2014.

In 1996 he first worked on the construction of wind farms with the building of an onshore wind farm in Dumfries.  This was a state-of-the-art wind farm at the time, as well as being the highest in Europe, with 36 turbines each with a capacity of 600 Kilowatts (a kilowatt is 1000 watts).  However, because the wind doesn’t always blow the output is a third for each turbine.  One turbine powers 394 homes and the 36 supplies power to about 14,000 homes.  When there is no wind the power needs to be supplied by other sources.

By 2006, the Barrow offshore wind farm with 30 turbines, each with a capacity of 3000 kilowatts was providing five times as much power as Dumfries.  As Barrow is offshore there is more wind and therefore a higher capacity of power from each turbine, compared with Dumfries..  This results in enough power for 2,365 homes from one turbine and power for 70, 000 homes from the 30.  A buried cable carries power from the wind farm to Heysham Power Station on land.

The next development, started in 2013, was the London Array, a much larger offshore wind farm well out in the London Estuary with 175 turbines each with a capacity of 3,600 kilowatts, giving an overall capacity of 630 megawatts.  (A megawatt is one million kilowatts).   45.3% of this capacity was achieved, generating electricity for 584,000 homes. Power from London Array feeds into Graveney in North Kent where it joins the National Grid.

At one time Shell had a third share in the project, but a front-end design study completed by Rupert and his fellow consultants revealed the snags and cost of the project, so Shell withdrew and have made no investment in wind power since then.

The construction of London Array was managed from Harwich with a turbine installation vessel, looking lie a large oil rig. This was a self-propelled jack up rig, with all the parts on board to build the turbines.  It weighed 400 tons and had a 1,200 ton hydraulic hammer to embed the turbine legs into the seabed.  It cost £100.000 a day to hire this vessel.

London Array is monitored and operated from the Port of Ramsgate.   When built it was the largest offshore wind farm in the world and paved the way for the current generation of even larger wind farms being built around Britain’s coastline.

One of these is Triton Knoll, twenty miles off the coast of Lincolnshire, which is operated and monitored from Grimsby.  There are 90 large turbines with 164 metre aerodynamic blades.  Installed capacity is 9.5 megawatts per turbine and 857 megawatts overall.  Each turbine can supply power to 9,000 households and the 90 supply around 935,000 households altogether. The achieved capacity is 43%.

The last wind farm mentioned by Rupert was the huge Dogger Bank, 80 to 100 miles out in the North Sea and comprising areas A, B and C.  This is probably the world’s largest wind farm, which when complete will have 277 turbines installed which will deliver power to six million homes annually.  Its installed capacity from the three areas will be 3.6 Gigawatts (Power equal to one billion kilowatts).  It started to provide power to the National Grid in October 2023.  The Voltaire jack up ship being used to construct the turbines has 130 metre long legs to stand on the sea bed and its crane reaches 326 metres into the sky. From top to bottom it is taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Rupert gave an overview of the amazing development that has taken place with wind power from 1996 until the present, in terms of increased production and use of this renewable source.

 It should also be noted that use of wind power decreases the amount of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.  For example, the Dumfries production of wind power saved 50 tons of CO2 a year from entering the atmosphere, while London Array displaces around 900.000 tons of CO2 a year.  When the Dogger Bank wind farm is completed, it will give CO2 savings equivalent to removing 1.5 million cars from our roads.

Not only was Rupert experienced and knowledgeable about wind power, but he gave his views in a forthright but well-argued manner based on this experience and knowledge. While there has been great development in wind power since the 1990s it is not a complete solution to our need for electricity because the wind doesn’t always blow and alternative sources are still needed, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power.  It may be that the Government has given the mistaken impression that wind power will be sufficient to supply our future need for electricity.

Investing in wind power is probably more expensive than the Government admits, and the expense increases as larger wind farms are built.  Then there is the problem of back up sources of electricity when the wind does not blow.  We still have oil and gas, and solar power is being developed.  Back in the late 1990s Rupert and his colleagues tried to argue for nuclear power to be developed but they were not listened to. Tony Blair’s government had planned to build eight new power stations, but only one was ever completed as the abundance of gas in the North Sea was seen to be the answer.  However, it was clear to Rupert that this was not a long term answer.

The present Government in its early days was going to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and all would be electric. It is now clear that if this change was to be made, and to fully nullify the need for fossil fuels, we would need three times the electricity we now have. We would need around 40 more Sizewell type power stations to supply this amount.  This would cost £8million for the first 6 and to set up manufacturing and supply chains.

Governments sometimes seem sceptical about listening to experts, as when approached by Rupert and his colleagues.  It may be partly cost implications, or they think they know best.  There was certainly a degree of frustration with the Government in Rupert’s talk.