AIRTRICITY

Energy made better

Krishna Sowmya .K
Sailaja .s
II EEE
II EEE
08QG1A0221
08QG1A0240
 ABSTRACT

Founded in 1999, Airtricity is a leading renewable energy company

developing and operating wind farms across Europe. In addition to generating
electricity from 14 wind farms in Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and
Scotland, Airtricity also supplies electricity to over 38,000 customers in
Ireland. As a result of a rapid growth in storage requirements and the operational
necessity to build greater resilience into its IT systems, Airtricity wished to move
away from a direct attached storage model to a Storage Area Network (SAN).They
also needed the project to be implemented with minimal down time and impact on
its day to day operations and trading.

The economic aspect is dealt with by understanding the interplay

between the capital costs of wind farm Development in terms of the installation
costs and the cost of transmission of the electricity generated.

The input parameters to the model are the wind resource, capital costs of
wind farm development and capital costs of offshore and onshore grids necessary
to deliver this to different load centres within the E.U.

The conclusion is that it is more economic to develop wind farms in high

wind areas and to transmit the electricity to large load centres in low wind areas.

Airtricity already supplies electricity to over 100,000 customer accounts in

the island of
Ireland’s Single Electricity Market. It also owns and operates 318MW (megawatts)
of wind
farm capacity in the Republic of Ireland and 84MW in Northern Ireland
INTRODUCTION

Climate change is happening. It is a fact that in 2002, the extent of the Arctic
ice cover was 14% below the average of the last 24 years. The effects of climate change
will be irreversible. Action must be taken now, not just by Governments around the world,
but by local communities who can show their support in tackling this global threat.

The electricity generating industry is the biggest single source emitter of CO2
worldwide due to a reliance on fossil fuels (such as coal, oil and gas) for energy. Unless
something is done about this, climate change will not be successfully tackled. Wind farms
are the most economical and technologically advanced means to produce electricity that
is 100% green and does not impact negatively on the environment.

Worldwide electricity consumption continues to increase. Generating electricity

using wind turbines is the fastest growing method of electricity generation. Climate
change, coupled with concerns about the increasing global dependence on fossil fuels, and
the risks associated with these fuels in terms of availability and price volatility, has
created a unique opportunity for a renewable electricity centred approach. The global
electricity market is being re-shaped and the need for a renewable source of electricity
that is clean, secure and economically viable is an important element of government
electricity policies worldwide.

There is no single quick-fix solution to climate change, but if communities support

local wind energy developments, these projects will cumulatively make a real difference in
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating consequences of
doing nothing.
 The images below show the reduction in Arctic Ice cover over a 24 year
period. The image on the left shows the ice cover in January 1979. The image to
the right shows the ice cover in January 2003. Source: NASA.

Airtricity is Ireland’s No.1 supplier of greener energy offering domestic and

commercial customers an electricity supply that is not only low-cost (up to 13%
cheaper, percentage discount based on ESB kilowatt hour rates) but that also
significantly reduces their carbon footprint. Unlike other competitors whose
maximum discounts are only available to less than a third of Irish households,
Airtricity’s up to 13% savings are available to every household in the country,
making Airtricity the better switch for every home in Ireland and the country’s
cheapest standalone electricity supplier. Airtricity now supplies over 100,000
electricity customers in Ireland, making it the third
largest energy supplier in the country.

Green Power
Most of our energy is derived from burning fossil
fuels, either directly in the home or indirectly in power
stations. Energy use can have a detrimental effect on the
environment, For example,

• Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into

the atmosphere leading to global warming

• Acid rain erodes our landscapes and affects our lakes and rivers

• Oil Spills: We are all too familiar with how easily accidents can happen while
oil is being transported by sea. Oil leaks can kill birds and animals and
pollute beaches.

• Wind power, on the other hand, produces no emissions or by-products of any

kind. Wind power is an incredibly useful tool to help combat global warming.

WHY WIND?
It's clean.
Wind power does not produce dangerous waste, nor does it contribute to global
warming.
It's abundant and reliable.
Ireland is one fo the windiest countries in Europe
and this resource is much greater in the colder
months of the year, when energy demand is at its
highest. Wind power, combined with a full range of
renewable energy technologies, such as wave and
solar, could meet all of all electricity needs.
Technology is being developed to store wind
power as hydrogen, which can then be used to
power fuel calls in power stations and in vehicles
It's affordable.
Offshore wind turbines are producing power more
cheaply than the newest nuclear power station.
The UK Government's figures show that all wind
power will be cheaper than nuclear power by 2020.
It works.
Denmark already gets 20% of its electricity from
wind power.
It creates jobs.
The wind could bring thousands of new jobs, many of them using offshore
engineering skills used by the declining oil and gas industries.
It's popular.
Wind energy is one of the most popular energy technologies. Opinion surveys
regularly show that just over eight out of ten people are in favour of wind energy,
and less than one in ten (5%) against it.
It's popular with farmers.
Their land can continue to be used for growing crops or grazing livestovk. Sheep,
cows and horses are not disturbed by wind turbines.
Energy pay back.
The average wind farm will pay back the energy used in its manufacture within
three to five months. This compares favourable with coal power stations, which
take about six months.
One of the safest energy technologies.
No member of the public has ever been injured by wind energy, or wind turbines
anywhere in the world, despite the fact that there are now over 68,000 operational
wind turbines world-wide.
Tourism.
Wind farms attract tourists. The UK's first commercial wind farm received 350,000
visitors in its first ten years of operation.
Community funding.
Wind farm developers usually contribute financially to the local community in
which the wind farm is being built.
wind farms
“In the future the land under wind farms may
become another new habitat protected from
people-pressure and there is no doubt that climate
change will create new habitats just as surely as it
will destroy some old ones

An extract from :
Flora Hibernica
The wild flowers, plants and trees of Ireland
by Jonathan Pilcher and Valerie Hall.

Our objective is to build wind farms, on and offshore over a number of countries as quickly as possible.
This will help solve the problem of global warming and meet international targets, which are
continuously tightened to reduce this growing problem. 1MW of electricity generated by a wind turbine
will supply around 700 households with electricity.

PLANNING & DESIGN

• We aim to minimise impact on the environment – onshore wind farms typically

use only 2%-3% of the land (for roads & turbines etc) on a site, allowing all
other land to be restored to its natural state.
• Turbine layouts are designed to minimise visual impact, taking into account
visually important areas and scenic routes as indicated in local Development
Plans.
• Environmental Impact Appraisals (EIA’s) are completed for proposed wind
farms, this includes:
• Consultation with locals, planners & statutory bodies and an information day.
• Flora & Fauna survey conducted by a qualified ecologist
• Archaeology survey conducted by a qualified archaeologist
• Noise monitoring to ensure the turbines cannot be heard from any occupied
dwellings.
• Assessment of impact of the proposal on the environment
• Detailing of mitigating measures to further reduce the environmental impact.

CONSTRUCTION

• Aim to minimise the impact on the environment

• All relevant Health and Safety regulations adhered to
 • Mitigation measures detailed in the Environment Impact Statement are
implemented, such as:
• Having a qualified archaeologist on site to monitor work
• Re-vegitating disturbed areas, i.e. road sides

OPERATIONAL

• Aim to increase the use of biodegradable oil in turbine gearboxes.

• Aim to increase the use of biodegradable detergent for cleaning wind turbines,
usually done once a year.

Monitoring performance
Airtricity is committed to minimising the harmful
effects of its operations on the environment by means
of a programme of continuous improvement.
Improved environmental performance will only be
achieved if individual businesses and their staff take
the issues seriously, at Airtricity – we do !
Key performance indicators include :

• Annually, the Environmental Team will prepare an Annual Environmental

Report, which outlines a review of the activities and events of the previous
year and provides an overview of up-coming events for the year ahead. The
key highlights and achievements are outlined.
• The employee Environmental Survey results will be used to measure our
performance and develop further actions for the year ahead. This will
 highlight what initiatives employees have taken during the year with
particular focus on employee commitment to the Employee Environmental
Charter.
• The carbon dioxide calculator what improvements are being made to the
amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced year on year.
• The Annual Customer Environmental Competition will measure the level of
interest from companies.
• Financial savings are measured as a result of environmental initiatives
including the savings gained from the initiatives under the Waste
Management Strategy. Measures will include: savings on paper, electricity
etc.

Where Are The Wind Resources?

As a starting point the recent study “Sea Wind Europe” by Greenpeace is
taken [2]. This identifies the magnitude of the offshore resource by country, the
annual yield (GWh), capacity (GW), area occupied (km2) and % of available area
for the periods 2003 to 2010, 2011 to 2015 and 2016 to 2020. A recently published
report by the European Wind Energy Association, “Wind Energy The Facts, An
Analysis of Wind Energy in the EU-25" provides further material and with earlier
studies, give estimates of the land-based potential for wind energy development

Wind patterns over northwest Europe

greener electricity
Airtricity is proud to be the No.1 for Renewable Energy, offering our
customers greener electricity that's up to 13% cheaper.
Least Cost Delivered MWh
The core question is which wind farm locations will produce the least cost
electricity within and on the periphery of Europe. The following input parameters
are all used to examine particular examples of the delivered cost of electricity to
load centres.
• Wind resources
• Capital costs of wind farm development
Costs of offshore and onshore grids necessary to deliver this to different load
centres within the E.U

Capital Costs of Wind farms

For onshore wind farms, the range of costs are taken from fig.2.3 p. 99 in the
EWEA publication [3]. These range from 900 euro to 1,150 euro per kW installed, including
grid connection. For the purposes of this analysis, the figure of 1000 euro is used. For
offshore a cost of 1500 euro per kW installed is used.

Cost Estimates for New Grid Elements

The cost of transmission has been estimated assuming the use of DC technology.
For power levels of 500MW+ and distances of 100km+ this is the only viable technology.
Due to the absence of a synchronous source, is has been assumed that it would be
necessary to use voltage source converters at the wind farm end. Although to date this
technology has not been used at these power levels, there are no obvious technical
reasons why this could not be done [44]. At the load end, conventional converter
technology would be employed with transmission voltages in the region of +/- 450kV.

Benefits to Airtricity

• Significant reduction in storage management costs as all critical storage

requirements now managed from a single point
• Simple to add extra capacity as required and make it quickly available
• Entire storage backed up from a single point to ensure continuous uptime
• Enhanced data resilience provides additional protection to most valuable data

Results
Load-factor
 With all wind capacity installed at one location, the frequency of no wind
production is around 13%. Periods of full load are also quite frequent, occurring
approximately 30% of the time. The distribution of load factors has two peaks; one
at full load and the other at zero load. This is to be expected, considering the
shape of a turbine power curve. This pattern is reflected at all locations in the ‘no
dispersion’ scenario. As capacity is added successively to each location, the
probability of no wind production falls to zero. The distribution of load factors takes
on a more Gaussian shape; with just one peak around 55% load factor. The
majority
of production is clustered around the median value with 2/3 of all load factors
between 30-70% of total capacity.

Variability
As dispersion increases, the probability of large changes in power from
one period to the next falls to zero. This contrasts with the single location case,
where changes of up to 100% of installed capacity can occur. With Europewide
geographic dispersion of wind capacity across the six locations, the majority of
changes in power are less than 10% of installed capacity.

References
• 1 Greenpeace, Sea Wind Europe, Feb. 2004
• 2 Greenpeace, Sea Wind Europe, Feb. 2004
• 3 EWEA, Wind Energy The Facts; An Analysis of Wind Energy in the EU-25, Feb.
2004
• 4 Giebel, G.: On the Benefits of Distributed Generation of Wind Energy in Europe.
PhD thesis from the Carl vonOssietzky Universität Oldenburg. Fortschr.-Ber. VDI
Reihe 6 Nr. 444. Düsseldorf, VDI Verlag 2001. ISBN 3-18-344406-2
• 5 Joensen, A., L. Landberg, and H. Madsen: A new measure-correlate-predict
approach for resource assessment Proceedings of the European Wind Energy
Conference, Nice, France, 1-5 March 1999, pp. 1157-1160, ISBN 1 902916 00 X
• 6 Kaltschmitt, M: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Stromerzeugung aus Windkraft
und Solarstrahlung am Beispiel Baden-Württembergs. Forschungsbericht des
Instituts für Energiewirtschaft und Rationelle Energieanwendung, Stuttgart 1990 (in
German)
• 7 Steinberger-Willms, R.: Untersuchung der Fluktuationen der Leistungsabgabe von
räumlich ausgedehnten Windund Solarenergie-Konvertersystemen in Hinblick auf
deren Einbindung in elektrische Versorgungsnetze. Dissertation an der Universität
Oldenburg. Verlag Shaker, Aachen 1993, ISBN 3-86111-740-1, ISSN 0945-0726 (in
German)
• 8 Landberg, L., M.A. Hansen, K. Vesterager, and W. Bergstrøm: Implementing Wind
Forecasting at a Utility. Risoe National Laboratory, Roskilde, Denmark, March 1997.
Risø-R-929(EN), ISBN 87-5502229-4
• 9 Ernst, B.: Short-Term Power Fluctuations of Wind Turbines from the Ancillary
Services Viewpoint. Diplomarbeit, Institut für Solare Energieversorgungstechnik
e.V., Querschnitts-Projektbereich Windenergie (Mittlerweile: Forschungsbereich
Information und Energiewirtschaft). (1999) Kassel, Germany.
• 10 Landberg, L.: The Availability and Variability of the European Wind Resource. Int
J Solar Energy 18, pp. 313-320 (1997)
• 11 http://reisi.iset.uni-kassel.de/