By Hitachi ABB Power Grids

Wind power is one of humanity’s biggest hopes for an affordable, carbon-neutral energy future, being one of the preferred technologies – alongside solar – for energy companies to invest in. Although wind power is abundant on land, we must go to the seas and oceans to satisfy our current and future sustainable energy needs. But this is not a task for everyone – it takes courage, expertise, and a pioneering spirit to do it. And not many companies are capable of operating offshore assets, which need to stand up to constant exposure from nature’s harshest elements.

Norway’s Equinor is one of the first oil and gas majors to enter the offshore wind market. The company has decades of experience with building and operating large offshore energy infrastructures, scaling up new technologies, setting standards, and excelling at health and safety.

Since the early days, Hitachi ABB Power Grids has supported wind turbine manufacturers and operators of wind farms with innovative solutions. Together with customers and partners, the wind pioneer is contributing to the transformation of the industry – making wind energy a resilient and reliable power generation technology.

Both companies are planning to take the offshore wind sector to the next level.

(L) Rajnish Sharma is VP of Renewable Projects at Equinor, (C) Adrian Timbus is Chairman of the Executive Committee of European Technology and Innovation Platform Wind, and Head of Portfolio at Hitachi ABB Power Grids, (R) Alfredo Parres is Head of Renewables at Hitachi ABB Power Grids

What will the ‘next level’ look like?

Offshore wind has shown its competitiveness compared with other sustainable energy sources, such as solar and onshore wind, which are easier and cheaper to develop. The segment however needs to use all the available intelligence to further innovate and prove its competitiveness.

“If we look at the development of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of offshore wind power, it has declined a lot in the past five to seven years. There are many factors that have contributed to that, but the key ones are technological development, increased competition, learning rate, scale and volume, and cost of finance. We believe that with further technological innovation we will see even lower LCOE towards 2030 and beyond to 2050,” says Rajnish Sharma, Vice Present of Renewable Projects at Equinor.

Technological development of the wind turbines has been one of the key factors contributing to the reduction of LCOE for offshore wind. Their size grew dramatically in the last years, reaching sizes of 14 MW today. “My personal view is that we will see 20 MW+ turbines by 2030,” continues Rajnish.

Scaling up power levels makes turbines more efficient and harvests more wind energy.

“But to optimize costs across the overall system, one needs to also consider the voltage level at which the equipment operates. For 20 MW+ turbines, our studies show that we can get a higher efficiency and a lower cost of the overall system if we use 132 kV voltage levels,” explains Alfredo Parres, Head of Renewables at Hitachi ABB Power Grids.

And offshore wind continues to go larger, farther, and deeper. Just a few years back, we were developing 600 to 700 MW wind farms. Now 1.2 GW has become the typical size. The addition of 1.5 to 2 GW wind farms that we see ahead creates constraint-related questions for grid connection capacity.  For these wind farms, we need efficient and resilient transmission solutions such as HVDC operating at extra high voltage levels.

“But can we go to 525 kV DC? That’s something we would expect to work on together with technology leaders like Hitachi ABB Power Grids,” says Rajnish.

Equinor’s Hywind Scotland is the world’s first floating offshore wind farm

“With Hywind Scotland, we have shown that the technology works. In the first two years of its operations, it had the highest capacity factor in the UK with an average of 54 percent, while other offshore wind farms in the UK are at 40 percent. In that last 12 months up to March 2021, we even saw an average of 57 percent. Because of its incipient state and undeveloped supply chain, the cost of floating wind is still higher compared with fixed wind. We have proven however that we can considerably bring the costs down through industrialization and scale. Between our Hywind Demo and Hywind Scotland projects, we managed to reduce capex by 70 percent. Between Hywind Scotland and Hywind Tampen, our ambition is to reduce capex by another 40 percent,” he continues.

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By Anthony Allard, Executive Vice President and Head of North America, Hitachi ABB Power Grids

Placing electricity at the heart of the reset

The impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic has presented North America with a golden opportunity to focus growth investments on modernizing its aging energy infrastructure. The North American electricity grid, whose origins are more than a century old, needs to become more resilient and flexible to enable a carbon-neutral future. The grid is under pressure to integrate growing amounts of variable renewable energy, adapt to shifting electricity demand patterns and more electrification (transportation, infrastructure and buildings sectors), and withstand changing environmental patterns (e.g. extreme weather conditions). These challenges need to be addressed in parallel to stimulating the American post-pandemic economy and the time to act is now.

In the US, President Biden is taking very encouraging steps with his proposal to spend $100 billion on grid resilience, underscoring the fact that electricity will be central to the economic reset and to meeting climate targets. I welcome this increased focus on electricity infrastructure spending and call on the wider energy industry to build on this momentum and make its investment commitments.

Economic and financial consultants, The Brattle Group, estimates that this modernization and expansion requires investments of up to $690 billion by 2050. The great news is that the technology to address these challenges is ready and available and the investments will create jobs.

Connecting renewables in bulk

The most pressing shift concerns the integration of renewables as electricity producers are adding gigawatts of green energy. North America, like other regions across the world, has ambitious targets to increase green electricity production. Canada plans to source 90 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2030, and President Biden aims for the US power sector to be carbon-free by 2035, leading to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

This fast-paced growth in renewable energy needed to support the 2030 carbon-free goal poses several new challenges to the North American power system.

Firstly, their variability brings stress to the transmission network, which was built on centralized, baseload electricity generation that was largely predictable. The influx of wind and solar resources, which cannot be produced on demand, also reduces the network’s inertia because, unlike traditional, thermal power plants, they are connected to the grid through power conversion systems based on power electronics and do not have the same kind of large, rotating turbines that produce grid inertia. Changes within the power generation mix which may lead to lower levels of grid inertia may result in a faster decrease in frequency when grid disruptions occur, which significantly reduces the resiliency of the grid.

Hitachi ABB Power Grids has, for example, provided such a technological solution to a wind farm in Mexico, where a static compensator helps maintain high-quality electricity and stabilizes the network.

Hitachi ABB Power Grids provided the first Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) technology in Mexico.

Secondly, high-quality renewable energy resources are often located far away from demand centers, such as mountain ridges in remote areas or offshore. A study by the American Council on Renewable Energy has shown that the 15 US states between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River account for 88 percent of the country’s wind potential but are home to only 30 percent of expected electricity demand in 2050. This geographical mismatch between supply and demand creates a need for building both new intraregional transmission lines as well as expanded connections between the grid interconnections, which are not synchronized and require high-voltage direct current (HVDC) to exchange power.

Deepening grid connections also addresses the third grid challenge posed by growing renewable energy: addressing the timing mismatch between production and demand. For example, peak solar production around the middle of the day does not coincide with the traditional peak of daily power demand in the early evening. Again, it is electrical engineering that is the answer here as HVDC transmission can help transport electricity over long distances with very few efficiency losses and its ability to control load flow, to places where it is needed at the time of production.

Another way of handling excess renewable electricity is to store it. Hydroelectric dams offer one way to do this. Managing reservoir levels, by pumping water into a reservoir and releasing it when electricity is needed, is a traditional method of bridging supply and demand gaps. Pumped hydro storage represents the bulk of electrical storage on the grid today. This method is working well on the north-eastern border between the US and Canada, but North America can apply it even more widely. As well as offering storage capability, the use of hydro and solar and wind power to operate pumps to fill storage reservoirs provides a carbon-neutral alternative that is in line with North America’s various strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

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By Hitachi ABB Power Grids

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory showed the United States produced over 6.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMT CO2 Eq) in 2018. To decrease these emissions, many U.S. states have developed GHG reduction goals. To achieve these goals states will not only have to dramatically increase generation from carbon-free sources, like hydro, wind and solar, but also develop a robust transmission network to get the energy from where it is generated to where it is needed in a reliable and economic way.

Generally, state-level GHG emission goals are to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050, using a 1990 baseline of 6.3 billion MMT CO2 Eq. This means GHG emissions must decrease by over 5 billion MMT CO2 Eq by 2050. Currently, the two largest producers of GHGs in the U.S. are power generation and transportation, with transportation recently passing generation. These two sources account for more than half of the emissions in the U.S.

Reducing emissions from power generation falls on utilities, which need to produce or purchase more carbon-free energy to meet state-level goals. Many utilities have started to implement their own carbon emission reduction goals to meet state reduction deadlines.

Different utilities have different goals, but they are typically one of the following with a timeframe of completion by 2050:

• 100% renewable energy generation
• 100% carbon-free energy generation
• Net carbon zero energy generation

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, carbon-free generation resources such as nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar deliver approximately 40% of generation in the United States today, with the other 60% being coal, natural gas and other fossil fuel-based generation. Based on a 2050 target date scenario, that means utilities have about 30 years to offset fossil fuel emissions and/or retire and replace fossil fuel-based generation resources with carbon-free energy generation.

Reducing transportation emissions is focused on transitioning from internal combustion engines to alternatives, like hydrogen and electric vehicles (EVs). Today in the U.S., EVs only makeup 2% of the total vehicles, but this is forecast to grow significantly based on decreasing battery costs, the shift of vehicle manufacturers to EVs, and demand for GHG emission reductions. However, the electrification of transportation extends well beyond personal light-duty vehicles, to include fleets (trains, buses, delivery vans, trucks, airports, shipping ports, taxis, etc.) which are likely to be converted to EVs sooner than personal transport. The vehicles in these fleets have much higher utilization factors and realize greater emission reductions and operations and maintenance (O&M) savings from lower ‘fuel’ consumption and reduced vehicle maintenance. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has forecasted that the transition to EVs will lead to a 20 to 38% increase in electricity consumption for EV chargers by 2050.

The net impact of these changes is an increased load on the power grid, while simultaneously switching 60% of our energy generation away from fossil fuels. We will need substantial investments in our transmission infrastructure to enable this energy transition.

Investing in transmission

To reduce the nation’s carbon footprint and meet GHG emission goals, we need to implement large-scale carbon-free generation resources and reduce the number of internal combustion engines on our roads. Currently, the largest hurdle for this development is modernizing the transmission grid to accommodate electrification and renewable energy generation. Investing in transmission system technology that expands the capacity to transfer energy from areas with favorable conditions for renewable energy development to major load centers and that bridges regional seams is crucial to meeting these goals.

Despite these challenges and large financial investments, de-carbonizing society will create long-term economic, social, and health benefits for the country. As countries, governments, states, provinces and companies contemplate the benefits of moving forward with a de-carbonization agenda, it cannot be accomplished without responsible planning and timely investment in the transmission backbone that allow that energy to flow to where it is most needed. When combined, the potential for transmission investment coupled with renewable energy development can be a powerful contributor to economic growth, job creation and prosperity.

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