Post by LancedDendrite on Nov 29, 2012 20:31:30 GMT 9.5
A rather large new wind farm was proposed the other day by Hydro Tasmania - 'TasWind', a 200-turbine wind project that would be built on King Island and connect to Victoria in mainland Australia with a large HVdc cable.
In terms of size, they've announced it as a 2400 GWh/year project with 200 turbines. Assuming a capacity factor similar to the Woolnorth wind farm (roughly 39%), they're looking at a 700 MW peak capacity wind farm with 3.5 MW turbines. This sounds pretty much like the global industry standard in terms of turbine size.
The cable itself is going to have to be Basslink sized as a result and the distance from Anglesea to King Island is about 170km, 58% of the distance Basslink covers (290km underwater).
The concept seems to be that the firm capacity of the wind farm will far exceed that of even the peak load that King Island itself has, so the cable can export power to the mainland virtually all of the time.
Hydro Tasmania balked at the cost of financing Basslink on their own, which ended up costing $0.8 billion. We're talking about a HVdc connection for TasWind on the order of $0.5 Billion alone, let alone the cost of the wind farm. They've budgeted $2 billion for this project in total - $2 billion for a peak output to Victoria of around 500-600MW and a firm capacity of much less.
Still, I admire the audacity of such a project. Thoughts?
In terms of size, they've announced it as a 2400 GWh/year project with 200 turbines. Assuming a capacity factor similar to the Woolnorth wind farm (roughly 39%), they're looking at a 700 MW peak capacity wind farm with 3.5 MW turbines. This sounds pretty much like the global industry standard in terms of turbine size.
The cable itself is going to have to be Basslink sized as a result and the distance from Anglesea to King Island is about 170km, 58% of the distance Basslink covers (290km underwater).
The concept seems to be that the firm capacity of the wind farm will far exceed that of even the peak load that King Island itself has, so the cable can export power to the mainland virtually all of the time.
Hydro Tasmania balked at the cost of financing Basslink on their own, which ended up costing $0.8 billion. We're talking about a HVdc connection for TasWind on the order of $0.5 Billion alone, let alone the cost of the wind farm. They've budgeted $2 billion for this project in total - $2 billion for a peak output to Victoria of around 500-600MW and a firm capacity of much less.
Still, I admire the audacity of such a project. Thoughts?