http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2016/04/statoil-to-experiment-with-energy-storage-for-offshore-wind.html
[links in on-line article]
Statoil to Pair Wind, Energy Storage for Offshore Rigs
April 20, 2016
By Jessica Shankleman, Bloomberg
The highest carbon tax in an oil producing nation has persuaded Norway’s
state-owned driller to experiment with energy storage and wind turbines
as an alternative for supplying electricity to offshore rigs.
Statoil ASA is planning to park its floating Hywind turbines next to
rigs, using lithium-ion batteries to store energy for times when the
wind isn’t blowing, said Stephen Bull, a senior vice president
overseeing the work. If it succeeds, the technology may spread to the
fish-farming industry, which also has big offshore electricity needs.
The project dubbed “Batwind” is an example of innovation that
governments are hoping to encourage by putting a price on the pollution
that causes global warming. Norway charges as much as 436 krone ($53)
per metric ton of carbon emitted for fossil fuels extracted on its
continental shelf, 10 times the price of certificates in the European
Union’s offset market.
It’s the “financial upside” that’s making the project more attractive
financially, Bull said, whose company wants to be the world’s greenest
fossil-fuel producer. “When you look at the platforms and you look at
the exposure we have for power and carbon dioxide, it’s considerable.”
Norway’s carbon tax is the fourth-highest in the world behind Sweden,
Finland and Switzerland, none of which produce significant quantities of
fossil fuels. The next highest at about $25 a ton is the U.K., according
to the World Bank’s annual report on the market.
Norway was one of the first countries to adopt a carbon tax in 1991, and
the fee now covers about 55 percent of the nation’s CO2 emissions,
according to the World Bank. Emissions not covered by a carbon tax are
included in the country’s ETS, which was linked to the European ETS in 2008.
Statoil has already committed $214 million to the Hywind offshore wind
plant, which will supply 30 MW when it’s complete in Scotland in 2017.
That in itself is unique, since only about 8 MW of floating offshore
wind is working worldwide to date, according to Bloomberg New Energy
Finance. By 2018, Statoil will add a 1 megawatt-hour of batteries to the
Hywind project at a cost BNEF estimates at $1.2 million more.
Batwind is important because it’s one of a handful of large-scale
examples where companies are using storage devices to balance the
variable power flows coming from a renewable energy generator. If
perfected and economical, the technologies used together may spread,
challenging diesel generators and maybe even coal plants, whose main
selling point is reliability.
“It is expensive, there’s no doubt about it,” said Bull, who declined to
provide cost estimates. “The key part for us is being able to offer
predictability on power and that has a much higher value than the
variability.”
Battery Wind
The lithium-ion battery elements in the battery-wind project, or
“Batwind” for short, will come online in 2018. Together, they’ll be
attached to Statoil’s floating wind farm in Scotland as part of a
demonstration project.
“Statoil is well on the way to competitive costs, having already shown a
price per megawatt drop of 77 percent from its from first demo turbine
in 2009 to its latest array,” said Tom Harries, an analyst at BNEF.
While it may take another decade or more to make floating wind turbines
as cheap as ones anchored to the ocean floor, Statoil’s project may
prove that marrying the two technologies can help generate clean
electricity more economically. It’s also being helped by the falling
cost of lithium batteries, which are being pushed down by a boom in
hybrid-electric vehicles. Battery storage could fall by as much as 52
percent, to $182 per kilowatt hour, by 2025, according BNEF.
Batteries increase the appeal of the project by ensuring a steady supply
of electricity will flow, making Batwind as reliable as more polluting
incumbents for small-scale backup power. Bull said fish farmers in
Norway already have approached Statoil about tapping its electricity.
“Many of them come to us, saying ‘we’re burning a lot of diesel, it’s
costing us a lot of money,”’ Bull said. Norway is the world’s biggest
salmon market, exporting a record 48 billion Norwegian krone ($6
billion) of trout and salmon in 2015.
Statoil may even seek to sell its Batwind energy-storage solutions
abroad. It has bought domain names in key markets including the U.K.,
Japan and U.S.
“It’s a must-have skill set for us,” Bull said. “We’re going to have to
get our head around storage technology -- particularly if we’re going to
make floating a valued proposition in other countries beyond Europe.”
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