In some countries, wind turbines have already replaced more traditional energy sources. What are we waiting for?
Wind turbines in Russia
Windmills all over the world now generate more electricity than the entire power industry in Russia - and at a price their generation has already reached the level of thermal power plants. And this is despite the fact that ten years ago Russian power engineers and officials considered the possibilities for their development exhausted, and the wind farms themselves were too expensive. Now everything has turned upside down: the Russian state corporation is investing tens of billions to catch up with the West in the field of wind turbines. Why did the past forecasts of Russian experts not come true, which we did not take into account? And are there any prospects for Rosatom's attempts to waste money?
Wind of history
When people first thought about using wind, it's a tricky question. There is indirect evidence that Homo erectus or Neanderthals could have sailed. Modern attempts to overcome the strait between Crete and the mainland - and 130 thousand years ago, stone tools suddenly appeared on this island - have shown that it is unrealistic to do this on oars - the current in this strait is too strong. The rock carvings, which accurately confirm the use of sails, are several thousand years old.
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The first mechanical machines, driven by the force of the wind, were invented by Heron of Alexandria, in the 1st century BC (he also created the first sample of a turbine that rotates during fuel combustion). True, his windmill did not solve a practical problem, but an entertaining one. It was a kind of musical instrument, acting with the rotation of the wheel by the oncoming wind.
Around 400 AD, windmills with a vertical axis of rotation - prayer machines - appear in Buddhist temples in India. It is easy to notice their cardinal difference from Heron's scheme - the Buddhist version of the windmill is "laid on its side."
A practical application of wind machines was found in the 9th century in Iran (descriptions of Abu Ishaq al-Istakhri). However, they had nothing to do with the ones we are used to. These were towers, around the perimeter of which there were mesh structures covered with fabric. The wind rotated them, and a special mechanism converted the rotation of the vertical axis into the movement of millstones or the operation of a water-lifting device.
From Iran, the novelty reached India and China, but not Europe, which then borrowed very little technical innovations.
In 1185, the first windmill was mentioned in Yorkshire (England), and this first western windmill was already of the familiar type - with a horizontal axis of rotation, on which vertically rotating blades are mounted. As we can see, already from the 12th century, the western and eastern approaches to wind turbines were opposite.
The advantages of the eastern scheme over the western one are obvious. A vertical-axis wind turbine works no matter the direction of the wind, so the Chinese and Iranians could leave it unattended and go to do more important things. In addition, in the eastern version, with equal power, the windage of the structure is much higher, which is why it begins to work even with a weak wind.
On the other hand, the horizontal-axis western wind turbine has its own strengths. Yes, it must be "held downwind", but its blades are always affected by the wind from only one side, which increases their energy output. The eastern one, at each revolution, experiences a moment when the blades turn and the wind "hits" them from the other side. There is enough inertia for the structure to rotate further, but the mast is shaking violently, and part of the rotation energy goes to compensate for the "impact". Because of these variable loads, the mast or tower must be made stronger and more massive. The results are obvious: the western wind turbine is more difficult to operate, but more efficient and cheaper.
Windmills were extremely widespread in Europe up to steam engines and electricity. They almost did not require personnel, power lines (which is important in rural areas), and were less noisy. Well, the version of a windmill that lifts water from a well is still extremely popular in the third world, where electrification has still not affected more than a billion people.
Attempts to make friends with wind and electricity were made very early. The first wind turbine to produce electricity was built in Denmark in 1890. In the West, their dimensions at the beginning of the 20th century reached 25 meters in height, and the blade span was 23 meters. Alas, everything was ruined by the problem of changeable wind. Electricity was needed even when it was not blowing, and diesel generators and power lines were quite cheap. So the windmills were pushed into distant fields, where they worked for irrigation. But only for a while!
The wind of change in the USSR
When the Western world began to get rid of wind turbines due to electrification, our country took a completely different path - "downwind." Compensating for the shortage of thermal power plants, the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute in the 1920s created a series of small wind turbines with a capacity of up to 30 kilowatts, supplying them with a hydraulic accumulator. With an excess of generation, the wind turbine raised the water to the height of the mast, and when there was no wind, it drained the water back, it turned the water turbine, which gave current. They were used in Buryatia and other places without power lines. The scheme, by the way, is extremely reasonable - this year a whole power plant was built in Germany according to the same concept, only much more powerful.
In the USSR, before the discovery of Siberian oil and gas fields, alternative energy sources were actively developed for strategic reasons. 90 percent of Soviet oil was produced in the Caucasus, and it was obvious that in any war the enemy would try to strike there. This is what the French aviation planned to do in 1940. Only the destruction of the Third Republic by Hitler prevented this from happening. Hitler himself wanted to do this, but he also did not succeed. To protect themselves, the Soviet government encouraged a variety of alternatives - from one and a half on wood-fired gas generators to … wind turbines with flywheels-storage.
Yes, just such a miracle was launched in Kursk in 1931. With a capacity of only 35 kilowatts, it was equipped with a "storage disk" (a third of a ton) rotating in a container from which air was evacuated to reduce friction. The wind power plant of the inventor Ufimtsev illuminated his house and fed the workshop even when there was no wind. However, he died in 1936, and since then the station (it still stands) has never been launched.
However, even without storage devices, Soviet wind turbines were among the leaders. In 1931, near Balaklava, the world's most powerful wind generator with 100 kilowatts (blade span - 30 meters) was built. It is interesting that the Germans, who are now at the forefront of the development of wind energy, then treated wind farms rather rudely. In 1941, their shelling put the largest windmill on the planet out of action. Perhaps it was a matter of envy - their own wind turbines then gave no more than 70 kilowatts and were much less. In 1950-1955, the USSR produced 9,000 wind turbines a year - with a capacity of up to hundreds of kilowatts. Well, how else could the virgin lands and the north be supplied with energy before diesel generators?
Wind of independence
Soviet wind power was killed by the post-war boom in cheap liquid fuels, while the western one was revived by the oil crisis of the 1970s. Then the idea of energy independence from the nervous and prone to a monopoly conspiracy of the eastern supplying peoples at the expense of wind energy matured there.
At first glance, we are faced with a clear regression. Why switch from stable energy sources to those that literally depend on the breeze? Moreover, a few years ago, Russian officials told us that wind turbines in Europe produce expensive energy. Let's try to figure it out.
Today's horizontal-axis windmill, in fact, is not so dependent on the slightest fluctuations in wind speed. Vestas V164 is 220 meters high (one and a half pyramids of Cheops) and blades with a swing of 164 meters (more than 50-storey building). The total weight of its fiberglass blades is 100 tons. In fact, such a design has its own storage disk, only its mass is 300 times greater than that of Ufimtsev.
At the same time, a further increase in the height of the wind turbines and the span of their blades is expected, which means that they are even less threatened by small stops. It is believed that it makes sense to increase the dimensions at least to heights of 300-400 meters and a blade span of up to 300 meters.
Starting with Siemens' Enercon E-126, there is already a method for creating such colossal blades - they are made up of two sections that are inserted into each other. A number of manufacturers are planning to increase their number even to three.
The power of the same Vestas V164 has already gone beyond 9 megawatts, and a doubling of the span of its blades will bring an increase in the power of the wind turbine to 40 megawatts. More importantly, with every hundred meters of altitude, the average annual wind speed increases markedly. With really large structures, it makes sense to build wind farms even in wooded areas where the wind speed is usually quite low near the ground.
Due to the continuous growth of the size of wind turbines, the cost of their energy is falling all the time. Judge for yourself: people know how to build inexpensively even 828-meter buildings, and with the growth of their height, the costs grow linearly. But the output of the windmill with each doubling of the height grows already squared. The economies of scale are very noticeable in wind energy.
Indeed, even five years ago, in 2012, wind turbines in the West produced electricity more than 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. However, today this figure, as noted by the US Department of Energy, has dropped to 4-5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Even new offshore wind turbines, which are usually more expensive than land ones, provide energy for 6-7 cents per kilowatt-hour, and this price is dropping even faster than on land. The reason is that at sea you can carry blades at least 200 meters long, since there is a lot of space on the sea "roads" and there is no crowding.
Okay, you say. But what about periods of calm, when there is no strong wind for weeks? Well, that's why they build offshore wind turbines in Europe. There are “passages” over the sea, where there is practically no calm. Fortunately for Europeans, they are close to them and often in shallow waters. For example, the entire North Sea is quite shallow, as is, by the way, most of the waters off the east coast of the United States. In addition, the world's first floating wind power plant with tens of megawatts was commissioned this year. Its windmills are anchored, and the working depths for them are up to 800 meters. The total area of the seas of such depth is such that from them it is possible to provide the whole world with energy many times over. Losses in high-voltage DC transmission lines have now fallen below 3 percent per thousand kilometers - that is, "marine" wind energy will reach even inland.
At the same time, the sustainability of wind farms should not be idealized. Yes, they can provide energy all year round, and in winter the same offshore windmills will give more energy than in summer - winter storms will help. However, they cannot cope with the morning and evening consumption peaks either - the wind blows about the same at 19:00 pm and at 03:00 am. Therefore, in the West, it is believed that several percent of the total annual output will continue to be provided by “peak” gas thermal power plants. At the same time, they will consume much less fuel than today, when the arrays of offshore wind turbines have not yet been built. But it is worth recalling that this will hardly have to wait long.
Today, wind energy produces more than a trillion kilowatt-hours a year - more than the entire energy sector in Russia. And if electricity generation in our country has not grown since 1990 (due to approximately the same volume of industrial production), then this cannot be said about wind turbines. Just 10 years ago, they did not give even one tenth of the current output. We can confidently say that in ten years the WECs of the planet will give much more than they do now. Moreover, most of all wind turbines are currently being built by China, and there they know how to deploy really mass production.
gone With the Wind
Russia can boast of the most unexpected pirouette on the path of mankind to wind energy. When WPPs were unpopular in the West, they were on the rise in our country. When they began to be actively developed in the world, crowds of experts from the energy industry appeared in the country, who pointed out: "The place for wind turbines in Europe is over." True, since we began to say this, the capacity of wind power plants among the Europeans has grown tenfold and continues to grow. Apparently, the opinion of our experts was not conveyed to them.
Well, in 2016, we suddenly changed our minds again, so to speak, we returned to the Dorezhnev USSR. Rosatom was the first to say its weighty word at the state level. Its deputy general director Vyacheslav Pershukov honestly noted: after fulfilling existing orders for the construction of new nuclear power plants abroad, Rosatom may be left without foreign construction projects, since this market is rapidly shrinking. Nuclear generation outside of Russia is indeed in decline, and no prospects for a way out of it are in sight.
The main reason is simple: Western-built nuclear power is expensive. The energy of Russian-built nuclear power plants is cheaper, but still not as much as that of new western wind turbines. Yes, to compensate for their inconsistency, you need a few gas-fired thermal power plants, but nuclear power plants also need them. After all, the reactor always gives the same output, and people consume much more during the day than at night. With an equal price and equal problems, the Western buyer, who is always under pressure from the “greens”, will never choose nuclear generation.
Here Pershukov also states: the possibilities of building new large nuclear power plants abroad are practically exhausted. “We should not make money on the nuclear technology market. All. Otherwise it doesn’t work,”he correctly notes.
Of course, if you first abandon some business for a decade, and then take on it when competitors already have technologies that have been worked out for years, then you should not count on leadership positions right away. Therefore, Rosatom followed the path already beaten by Peter I and began to learn a new (or rather, an old one, well forgotten in our country) from the Dutch. Through a subsidiary, he formed a partnership with Lagerwey. Until 2020, the state corporation plans to build 26 small wind farms with 610 megawatts - starting in the Ulyanovsk region in 2018. Yes, this is less than one hundredth of the annual global input, but Rosatom learns from these crumbs. In addition, in 2020, it is planned to localize the production of wind turbines in Russia by 65 percent.
It will be more difficult later, when you have to go on a large scale. It is impossible to produce wind turbines with a total capacity of only hundreds of megawatts per year with a profit. This is a big business, without mass production, there will be no low price in it. Therefore, it is necessary to expand both the construction of wind turbines in our country and enter the world market. However, it will be very difficult to compete here.
Giants like Vestas have spent decades perfecting their technologies and built completely unique facilities. For example, a plant for the production of titanic blades of tens of tons, located on the island specifically in order to make it easier to export such a difficult cargo for land roads. Where Rosatom will build this, and whether it will be able to keep up with the constantly improving wind turbine market is a question, and not an easy one.
In a comment to KP, Rosatom representative Andrei Ivanov noted that NovaWind, the Rosatom division responsible for projects in the "new energy", had agreed to establish a joint venture with Lagerwey - Red Wind BV. It will deal with the localization of wind turbine production in Russia, and more specifically - in Volgodonsk, near the existing facilities of Rosatom. Wind turbines with 2.5 and 4.5 megawatts will be built in our country. In total, Red Wind will supply 388 such wind turbines by 2022, of which the first 60 will only be assembled in Russia - from Lagerwey components - and only then there will be “local” wind turbines of such impressive dimensions.
With the nuclear power plant, it was much easier for him. After all, they were not only created in the USSR, but they did not stop building and improving in our country. Being the first in what you are a pioneer in is much easier than where you have to learn from others. Let's hope that the state giant will succeed, especially since it has good engineering personnel.
Wind of the future
Let's face it: wind turbines are unlikely to become the main source of energy for humanity in the coming decades. Yes, in Denmark they already supply the bulk of electricity, and in the USA they provide more than hydroelectric power plants. But in countries where there are still many clear days, solar energy is now developing much faster than wind. The prices for electricity obtained with its help are falling even faster than those of wind farms. Already in the early 2020s, it will overtake wind turbines in production and become the main ram that destroys coal and hydrocarbon energy.
But for countries with northern territories, the wind can play a different role - the main generator. This is unlikely to happen in Russia, and not only because south of Samara we have a lot of sun. More importantly, we cannot leave either nuclear or gas energy because of the huge infrastructure that was built for them. And nevertheless, by 2030 wind turbines will become frequent elements in Russian landscapes - as they are now in Germany or Great Britain.
