Friday, May 18, 2018

Energy equivalence

I thought it might be useful to have some figures on energy equivalence to hand.

According to https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/barrelofoilequivalent.asp, a typical barrel of oil contains energy content of 1.7 MWh.

In perspective, the Beatrice offshore wind farm, currently in the latter stages of installation, has an installed capacity of 588MW, and might be expected to generate at a typical capacity factor of 45-50%.  This would be equivalent to 588 *24 *50% = 7,350 MWh/day.  This would be the energetic equivalent of an oil well producing 4,300 barrels of oil per day.

In March 2018, the Oil & Gas Authority said that UKCS production amounted to 1.63 million boe/day (https://www.ogauthority.co.uk/media/4647/projections-of-uk-oil-and-gas-production-and-expenditure-march-2018.pdf).  In energy terms, that's 1.63 million * 1.7MWh = 2.8 million MWh/day.

With a typical 8 MW wind turbine generating 8 * 24 * 50% = 96 MWh each day, that suggests that to entirely replace UK oil and gas (from an energy perspective), we'd need 28,000 turbines.

Gosh.

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