Orsted: Taiwan's wind power revolution -- leading the way in Asia-Pacific

[Caribbeans]

With the Asia-Pacific region accounting for over half of emissions worldwide, Taiwan is demonstrating what a successful transition to renewable energy looks like

The Guardian | 10 AUG 2022

When Lai Wen-Hsiang noticed the type of work his company, Century, had been doing for decades was drying up, he began brainstorming ways to pivot. For years, the company had made steel structures for real estate and public works projects in Taiwan – but these jobs were becoming harder to find. One trend piqued his interest: the boom in offshore wind initiatives rolling out across Europe.

In particular, Lai took note of the behemoth steel structures that support offshore wind turbines. Many of these apparatuses weigh more than a thousand tons and stretch 240 feet high. This type of product, he realized, was the perfect opportunity to evolve the company at which he serves as chairman, now called Century Wind Power (CWP).

Across the entire Asia-Pacific (APAC) region – a part of the world once notoriously dependent upon fossil fuels – interest and investment in renewable energy has skyrocketed over the last few years. Part of the motivation is that the effects of climate change are already hitting close to home. The UN Environment Programme categorizes APAC as one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change in the world. The region also accounts for more than half of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

In Taiwan, the government is making moves to transition to a cleaner, greener future while meeting mounting energy demands. “Our ‘Pathway to Net-Zero Emissions in 2050’ will transform Taiwan into the green energy hub of Asia,” explains Dr. Tze-Luen Lin, Deputy Executive Director of Office of Energy and Carbon Reduction, Executive Yuan (Premier’s Office), Taiwan. “Taiwan plans to promote technology R&D and innovation in key areas, guide the green transition of industry and drive a new wave of economic growth.”... more
https://www.theguardian.com/power-of-green/2022/aug/10/taiwan-wind-power-renewable-energy-transition

Ørsted: Shaping a new industry in Taiwan

RELATED:

Ørsted Official Press | 07.04.2022

Ørsted and ESVAGT sign agreement on the world’s first green fuel vessel for offshore wind operations

The agreement between Ørsted and ESVAGT is a display of commitment from both companies to the decarbonisation of the maritime industry and will help reduce emissions from offshore operations.

Renewable energy offers a clear path to reach the Paris Climate Agreement’s target of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 °C. However, some sectors – like the maritime sector –face a steeper road towards the target. The maritime sector will need new renewable fuels to reach climate neutrality, and it will need industry leaders to lean into new innovative solutions.

As part of a new pioneering agreement, Ørsted, the world leader in offshore wind, and ESVAGT, a market leader in service and support for offshore wind, have decided to invest in the world’s first service operation vessel (SOV) that can operate on green fuels. The SOV will be powered by batteries and dual fuel engines, capable of sailing on renewable e-methanol, produced from wind energy and biogenic carbon, which will lead to a yearly emission reduction of approx. 4,500 tonnes of CO2...more
https://orsted.com/en/media/newsroom/news/2022/04/13648631

[NNadir]

1. The line in bold is nonsense.

Experiment overrules hype.

So called "renewable energy" has never been, is not now, and never will be about fighting climate change.

We spent trillions of dollars on these wind toys in the this century, with the result that the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste on this planet is accelerating, not decelerating.

The turbines pictured in the OP will be landfill in 20 to 25 years.

The planet is on fire. Decade after decade after decade of wind energy bullshit has done nothing, zero, to prevent it.

It's lipstick on the gas and coal pig, a trivial form of energy that produces more complacency and wishful thinking than energy.

[Finishline42]

2. Windmills pay for themselves in a couple of years.

How long does it take for a $20B nuclear reactor to pay for itself? considering it will go thru 20 tons of fuel rods every 18 months. What will be the cost of uranium in 20 years?

[NNadir]

3. Right now in California, the energy demand is 48,947 MW. The useless wind industry...

...is producing 1,351 MW, this on over 1500 square miles of destroyed wilderness.

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant is producing 2,245 MW on a foot print 12 acres of land, in two small buildings.

The data is right here.

I have noted that anti-nukes want to talk endlessly about money, or read comic books, or both or pretend that what they learn by reading tarot cards, Ouija boards, or crystal balls or whatever the fuck it is they do to practice soothsaying.

What they don't do is give a shit is about is the environment.

Wind heavy California is now dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste at the rate of 16,066 kg/hr,

The energy density of plutonium is 80 trillion joules per kg. Nobody who understands anything at all about nuclear materials has any concern about the availability of actinides. I've calculated many times that the uranium and thorium already mined could shut every fucking oil rig, every coal mine, every gas fracking field, and restore all the land squandered on industrial wind parks for centuries.

Now recently an anti-nuke announced to me here - and it's really, really, really, really, really unsurprising - that he or she would rather focus on some bullshit quote allegedly from Thomas Edison than listen to people who read science "screeds" all day and all night.

I just calculated elsewhere, citing two science "screeds" of the type that anti-nukes hold in contempt, that the cost of cleaning up - the entropy cost and not the cost of containing this shit for infinite times - 5 years worth of Dutch dangerous natural gas waste would be $63 billion dollars. Of course, the Netherlands has averaged only 8 GW of dangerous natural gas over the last 5 years, whereas California is right now burning dangerous gas to power 26 GW of gas power.

Two papers on direct air capture of CO2 and the energy cost of overcoming the entropy of mixing.

It's not the money that matters, whatever the fuck the clueless bourgeoise think. It's that the crime against all future generations was committed at all.

Selective attention is inattention.

Now, there are people here who worship the Powerwalls made by the racist slave driving (literally) asshole Elon Musk. I'm not among them. I would not be able to face sons, or any member of a subsequent generation if I did.

It's called ethics.

The bourgeois types who want to talk about the cost of wind turbines when the wind is blowing, while ignoring the cost of the death and destruction caused by these highly subsidized - at great cost to the poor - unreliable systems when the wind isn't blowing, as it isn't in California right now, this with extreme temperatures being experienced, have nothing to say to me that I could possibly value, either intellectually or more importantly, ethically..

Their excuses and prevarications and denial from this set are disgusting. The planet is burning, and fifty years of this bullshit has done nothing, zero, zilch, nada, to prevent it. It's made things worse. It's killing.

Have a pleasant week.

[Finishline42]

4. They were simple questions and go to the crux of the matter...

Nuclear is about the most expensive electricity on the market.

How do you purpose we go about building 100 new nuclear plants? Who's going to pay for them? Where are you going to find the companies that can complete the construction? Who's going to operate them?

Who's going to allow them in their back yard?

[NNadir]

5. Um, right now Germany has seen prices of 1000 Euros...

...per MWh. That is the most expensive electricity in the world.

Geeze, open a fucking newspaper.

The crux of the matter is that people don't want to power the future, that they are abysmally selfish and lack a sense of decency and are perfectly willing to leave a destroyed planet behind littered with rotting carcasses of wind turbines and piles of electrical waste consisting of spent solar cells and atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations 50-100 ppm higher than the dangerous levels we're already seeing.


As for who will build reactors. - thousands, not hundreds around the world will be built in an almost asembly line fashion - my son is a first year graduate student and already he's getting recruited by scores of companies. Competition for trained nuclear professionals is rather high. Fine well educated engineers will build them.

Serious people will build reactors, in spite of bourgeois penny pinching uneducated whiners who spend hours in which they might actually learning something, peering into crystal balls instead to announce solar energy will save the day.

I don't agree that the future of this planet should be turned over to chanting mystics.

The problem with that is that 50 years of chanting the same dumb fuck mantra has left the planet in flames.

In the solipsistic world of antinukes, they think that because the ae uneducated about risk, the rest of the world must be also.

The United States once built 105 nuclear reactors in about 25 years while providing the cheapest electricity inthe OECD. We can and will do better than that, once the rhetoric fools is recognized for what it is. Thousand of wind turbines sitting still doing nothing in California during an episode of extreme heat is clarifying the reality that overrides all the fucking head up the ass types who have never opened a scientific "screed" in their waste centered lives.

I'm sorry, but there are engineers and scientists who care about the world, who do the difficult work of understanding issues like thermodyamics, heat transfer, materials science and oh yes, who read scientific "screeds" rather than mouth nonsense.

You know there's that old platitude about how people who say a thing can't be done should bother those who are doing it

[Finishline42]

6. Well if you are going to bring the war into the discussion...

Care to comment on what going on at Europe's largest nuclear power plant?

Moscow, Kyiv accuse each other of shelling Ukraine nuclear plant ahead of U.N. report

https://www.reuters.com/world/shelling-ukrainian-nuclear-plant-highlights-danger-ahead-un-report-2022-09-06/

What's the chances that Russia blows it up if they get run out of Ukraine?

[NNadir]

7. I have previously commented on this issue in a long post...

..noting that antinukes as is their won't are spectacularly disinterested in the people killed from causes other than radiation while they focus mindlessly with abject terror that someone somewhere might be exposed to a fatal does of radiation.

This is like Fukushima where antinukes prattle on about the reactors with a nearly undetectable death toll from radiation without giving a shit about the 20,000 people killed by seawater.

The ethics were appalling.

I wrote about the potential risks of the shelling of the nuclear plants at length, but regrettably it refers to science so it may not be of value to antinukes.

It's in my journal here, a few months back.

[Finishline42]

8. Just because I can id the challenges that nuclear energy faces

doesn't make me anti-nuke. It would be like calling me anti solar because I acknowledge that the sun doesn't shine all day.

By the way, with your reference to Diablo Canyon...

Link to tweet

?s=20&t=vT1NVRUSKQ9Z3Ll38BOYRQ

And they are adding more battery storage every day... And Tesla isn't the only manufacturer of said batteries.

[NNadir]

9. Again, I reserve the right to categorize people, based on what they say...

...as opposed to how they wish to define themselves.

Trump says he's a very stable genius, but obviously because every word out of his mouth is insipid few people if any, take him at his word.

I wouldn't call raising completely specious nonsense as raising "a challenge."

For example, someone who complains about the price of uranium is not raising "a challenge" but rather is displaying abject ignorance.

I kg of plutonium contains 80 trillion Joules. A gallon of gasoline contains about 130,000,000 Joules. Thus a kg of plutonium is equivalent to about 615,000 gallons of gasoline.

Were plutonium to cost $1000/kg., it would be the equivalent of gasoline at 2 tenths of a cent per gallon.

I would characterize antinukes as such as well based on what they ignore. Yesterday, while watching the extreme temperature event in California, during the tens of thousands of wind turbines were producing a tiny fraction of what Diablo Canyon was producing, the state of California was charging batteries by burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste into the planetary atmosphere.

This was obscene, at least to anyone who respects physical science.

Those batteries were put there because the State of California subsidized unreliable energy at the expense of reliable energy. The battery band aid for this dubious scheme didn't adress the fact that without power, human lives at risk from extreme heat.

Everywhere on this planet, unreliable and unsustainable energy is being subsidized at the expense of the only reliable system of energy that is both sustainable and clean, nuclear energy. Valuable infrastructure has been destroyed at the behest of loud screaming idiots. All the little insipid picayune nitpicking "whatabouts" will not change this reality no matter how many of them dishonest people throw at the last best hope of humanity, nuclear energy.

The tragedy underway in California is 100% the consequence of antinuke rhetoric whether or not those who have done this malign nitpicking shouting are honest about who and what they are or not.

[Finishline42]

10. Speaking of Trump

He always acts as if he's the only one that sees the solution, kind of reminds me of someone...

Why is it no one follows your lead? Are you the only one that sees the facts as you do?

I only know that we aren't building 100 new reactors to double our output from nuclear. We aren't building 50, hell we aren't building 10...

2 are in the process of coming online. 2 others were stopped half way thru by the utility because nobody wants to pay for them...

Facts are facts!