Offshore Wind Power Faces Bottlenecks of Energy Storage and Transmission
A few days ago, at the UK-China Offshore Wind Webinar Series” with the theme of "technology innovation for offshore wind farm energy storage", Prof. Ding Yulong, Director of the Birmingham Center for Energy Storage (BCES), University of Birmingham, said that for a zero-carbon future, renewable energy installation is indispensable, and the construction of a reasonable offshore wind power conversion, storage, transmission and utilization system will effectively solve the technical bottlenecks faced by the further development of offshore renewable energy and promote the development of efficient zero-carbon energy system. However, from a global perspective, there is a problem that energy resource-rich areas are far away from the load center, and there is also a mismatch in the time dimension, which gives rise to the application scenario of renewable energy distribution and storage. Andrew Skocz, CEO of Aqua Power in Scotland, points out that most renewable energy sources are highly intermittent and unpredictable, and the balance between supply and demand is difficult to achieve. He said that globally, there are fewer batch deployments of offshore wind energy storage than onshore wind and photovoltaic fields, and there is a gap in the development of offshore wind energy storage technology. At present, offshore wind power projects in various countries often use HV AC transmission to integrate into the grid, but the investment and maintenance costs of subsea cables are relatively high, and offshore wind power may lack flexibility due to its lack of energy storage functions. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that in most markets of the world, the economic performance of wind power distribution and storage projects is poor, and only a few markets have a viable business model of "wind power + energy storage". If the wind storage project is only used in a single application scenario, the economic benefit will be low. If the project can be used in multiple application scenarios, the economic benefits will be greatly improved.