Not sure how accurate this is, but says $400 million to manufacture and install one of these.
That's a lot of dough. Utilities will need a source of long term low-cost lending to make the switch to offshore wind a reality.
Wind power is one of most attractive sources of renewable energy and General Electric Renewable Energy is one of the leading companies in the renewable energy sector, providing wind, solar, and hydro power generation services. GE Renewable Energy recently announced the launch of what it claims...
mfgtalkradio.com
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$400M each seems a bit high.
Found some numbers for the existing offshore wind in the UK:
In this important contribution to our series on post-Brexit Britain Professor Gordon Hughes and Dr John Constable take on the entire green energy movement in arguing that the widespread view about the falling costs of renewable energy is wrong. They view official government projections of energy...
briefingsforbritain.co.uk
This is a skeptical report BTW that says offshore costs are increasing, and maintenance is a big problem.
Sounds like install costs for existing projects are (if I converted correctly) $5.50 per Watt capacity. For the 13 MW GE machine, that comes out $71 M per turbine, installed. Of course, this is spitballed relative to the existing installed machines.
But if the GE machine were 6X more expensive ($400M) than what they already have in the field, I doubt they would've gotten the contract.
If that cost seems high, keep in mind that the capacity factor is >60%, or three times the energy harvest per watt per year of a comparable solar unit in a good site. So it would compete with roughly $2/W installed solar.
Same report says that operating costs are $0.25/W in year one, and climb to $0.50/W over the 25 year life of the project. On 67 Million kWh's annual production, that $0.50/W.yr operating expense is a theoretical $0.09/kWh in year 25.
Overall, I estimate that if it cost $71M to install, and $113M over 25 years to operate, then the simple payback (0% interest) cost would be: $0.11/kWh. That is, the $184M lifetime cost, divided by the 1.675 billion kWh it would produce.
And again, those are conservative numbers and projections from the actual costs of the current UK offshore fleet. Presumably, the bigger GE machine will do better than that.