Shetland windfarm - Viking Energy

[paulb]

im sure they will come up with a final cost. its early days yet. what did the one in scotland cost.

 

this should give an idea of a big farm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8058608.stm

[paulb]

Whitelee Wind Farm

The project comprises the design and construction of the civil and electrical infrastructure works at Whitelee Wind Farm at an altitude of approximately 300m. On completion, Whitelee will be the largest single onshore wind farm in Europe and will generate 322MW. Morrison Construction was initially appointed under a consultancy agreement to carry out Early Contractor Involvement services to assist in discharging all planning conditions prior to commencement and an enabling works contract was carried out in preparation for the main works.

 

The works included a large area of forest clearance, 90 km of unsurfaced access roads (70 per cent floating) and 140 turbine bases and hardstandings, together with 400km of power, fibre optic and earthing cables. Furthermore, a substation was built at the Ardoch Rig section of the contract and a control building was built at Loch Goin.

 

During construction, six working borrow pits were used to generate the road and hardstanding materials (1,800,000 m cu), and an onsite concrete batching plant was employed. Electrical works were undertaken by our Joint Venture partner, Balfour Kilpatrick. Responsibilities included the role of principal contractor throughout (including turbine erection).

 

The site covered an area of approximately 6,000 hectares and spans three local authority areas, namely East Renfrewshire, East Ayrshire and North Lanarkshire.

 

In addition, approximately a third of the site is built within a Scottish Water reservoir catchment area and a number of turbines were built as close as 150 m from the reservoir which necessitated strict environmental controls. A significant depth of peat existed at a number of the turbine foundations (in some locations greater than 9 m) which necessitated the design of piled turbine foundations and special measures to construct crane hardstandings in liquid peat conditions.

 

seems to have cost 300 million

[trowie246]

Anyone who has read John Robertson's report on page 6 of this weeks Shetland Times will realise that the final cost of the Viking Energy project is probably severely underestimated due to what is stated in the second paragraph....

 

" The scenario has emeged because Viking Energy is not confident about so-called floating roads over deep peat in the hills which it would build on top of a plastic membrane instead of digging down to the hard rock".

 

Although they are talking about the length of time of time it would pay back the carbon pollution in this article how much is it going to cost to build 53 miles of road on the hard?

[Carlos]

They should be able to make some floating, some would have to be dug to the hard, depending on the depth of peat and the slope of the ground.

I suppose it's the proportions of each that they are not sure about - I've not been through the submission yet to see if they are being too optimistic on any of those kinds of assumptions?

 

53 miles of road is quite a lot, but we do have 650 miles in place already.....

[PJ of Hildisvik]

Paulb.. the Whitelee windfarm and this one are really quite different when it comes to cost,

There turbines are only 2.3mw, compared to 3.6mw for VE's,

We would also need a 330 KM subsea cable between Weisdale and Portgordon.

plus 17km of cable from Portgordon to Blackhillock, also 7km of cable up the Kergord Valley.

Plus the two converter stations both here and in Blackhillock.

 

Put the bill for that, on top of the windfarm and you are dealing in serious money indeed.

And nobody please, say they are seperate projects, cos you won't have one without the other.

 

As regards the roads, there is a total of 73 miles of them.(this could change if they run into problems )

53.5 miles of floating, and 20miles of roads of a solid nature.

[PJ of Hildisvik]

As far as i know the cable has to be pieced together on board the ship , then laid, and it takes at least a year at sea to lay the cable.

Whats the Carbon footprint of that i wonder?!

[ArabiaTerra]

Paulb.. the Whitelee windfarm and this one are really quite different when it comes to cost,

They're not that different, 50% bigger turbines is all, but you're quite right about the added cost of the interconnector. That's why its costing £800 million instead of £450million. But the more than 50% greater efficiency should cancel that out and then some.

 

This is an interesting article on how the cost of de-carbonising the UK economy has been severely under-estimated. It concludes that electricity bills could rise by as much as 50% over the next 20 years. Bad news for customers, but for anyone already selling green electricity, it's a bonanza.

 

The thing is, no matter what the windfarm costs to build, once it is built, the only costs are maintenance and running costs. The fuel is free. If this report is anything close to the truth then the potential profits from the windfarm could be significantly higher than what is being quoted now.

[tarotangel]

I'm not sure about all this at all. I don't trust who is going to be running it for starters

 

I'm still pondering that on the national news not even six months ago they were saying it costs anyone to put power onto the grid if they are not in a certain radius and it will cost us the most apparently. If someone could explain that one to me and who is going to pay for it putting power onto the grid thanks in advance.

 

I went through bits of the docment not had time to go through it all as usual with these type of things lots of padding with jargon in it until you get to the bit that you want to read that only takes less than half of the document up.

[ArabiaTerra]

I'm still pondering that on the national news not even six months ago they were saying it costs anyone to put power onto the grid if they are not in a certain radius and it will cost us the most apparently. If someone could explain that one to me and who is going to pay for it putting power onto the grid thanks in advance.

There is a charge for connecting to the grid and it does increase the further away you are. This has been taken into account in the economic forecasts relating to the windfarm.

 

As far as I know, this is a policy thing rather than reflecting any actual practical costs, presumably brought in to prevent power companies from building all their ugly power stations in the boondocks instead of near the cities they supply. It's an old policy, brought in long before anyone was worrying about climate change or looking to develop renewable energy production and I believe there are moves afoot to get it changed. But as I said above, this has already been factored in to the VE costings.

[paulb]

While reading up on the farm near Glasgow a quote that was interesting was that they have to spread them over a wide an area as possible so they don't get big peaks and then nothing. So the turbines in shetland would fit into this very well. They coped with bogs and nearly the same distance of roads. they also dealt with 9m of peat. So it will be interesting to see how fast they cover their carbon footprint.

[RileyBKing]

Talking carbon footprint, a few numbers re the construction of the bases for the turbines. The quoted average for each is 700 cubic metres of concrete; at an average 2400kg/m3 density, thats 1,680 tonnes for EACH of 150, total weight of concrete a quarter of a million tonnes! bearing in mind the enormous amounts of CO2 generated in the production of cement, that's quite a handicap in the environmental stakes.

 

Those figures also do not include concrete required for the rest of the infrastructure, which will be very substantial - not least roads. And none of this will be taken away at the end of the project life, it will effectively be there for ever. Concrete from roman times remains to this day.

[sheepshagger]

The new bit of road in trondra when work started was going to cost £200,000 when finished it cost 6 or 7 times that and it is not much more than a quarter of a mile long with no peat.

Mareel costs have gone up considerably without a brick being laid.

 

It doesn't bode to well for us with this one either.

[PJ of Hildisvik]

Take a close look.

 

Shetland Flag or Saltire?

Mind Games??

 

www.vikingenergy.co.uk.

[paulb]

luckily its not going to be built by a council. I would imagine that they have a main contractor to do the planning etc. I don't know about the concrete but if they use the same system as London Olympics. they use green transport to get it there, reclaimed aggregate and are looking at reducing there footprint by 35% by next year in the production of the cement.

 

The turbines have a 25 year life. is this just the motors or the entire structure..

[PJ of Hildisvik]

Just come in and checked my post, oh hello heres the SNP campaign leaflet for Europe.

The picture of the Saltire on the front of the leaflet, just happens to be identical to the Viking Energy homepage.

Leaving party politics out of this, i find this Bl***y insulting.

I want to know who's idea this is