I can see that. After all, coal mines are installing solar.

Almost no down time.

It’s likely to be a major cost saver. Work can continue even in nasty weather when it would be hard to access a tower at sea.

Oh, wait, they don’t.

Yes, it is a harsher climate. That will mean building a bit tighter turbine and replacing front bearings and seals more often. That sort of stuff.

But the wind resources are significantly richer so that makes it worth the extra effort and cost.

It’s kind of like with your beloved oil. The good stuff is harder to get to. It’s harder on drill rigs to go deeper and harder on pumps to suck it out.

“… the cost ranges from approximately 6-8 c€/kWh at sites with low average wind speeds to approximately 4-5 c€/kWh at good coastal positions.”

http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/WETF/Facts_Volume_2.pdf

I found this for European offshore…

“This equals Europe’s current offshore wind LCoE of €13 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) dropping to €11ct/kWh by 2016 and €9ct/kWh by 2020 – making offshore wind competitive with all other forms of non-hydro renewable electricity.”

http://theenergycollective.com/silviomarcacci/222221/offshore-wind-industry-130-billion-euro-market-2020

And this for UK offshore…

“‘The current cost of offshore wind is around £150–£169
per MWh [15.0–16.9p per kWh]. This follows unforeseen price increases due mainly to the falling strength of the pound against the euro and commodity prices. … Currency fluctuations were the primary reason for the 26–33% increase in the capital costs of offshore wind during 2008–10. This is mainly due to 80% of the components of offshore wind turbines installed in the UK between 2005 and 2010 being imported into the country. … With the currency impact removed, underlying capital costs would have increased by only 4–7% since 2008’.

‘We should not be particularly surprised that we have arrived at a point in the history of a particular emerging technology when costs have increased … many technologies go through such a period, and still go on to offer cost-effective performance in the long run.’

‘Reducing the cost of offshore wind to £100 per MWh [10p per kWh] by the early 2020s has become a key objective for the DECC, with a task force now in place to achieve this goal. Costs of offshore wind may fall further beyond the early 2020s with future levelised cost projections of £70-80
per MWh [7p–8p per kWh] by 2020–2030 forecast …’ .”

http://www.blewbury.co.uk/energy/offshore_wind.htm

7p is 11 cents US.

I would expect our first wind farms to be expensive. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure to build (plants, docks, ships) and people to train. There will be a lot of inefficiency at first from the supply chain through throwing the switch.

150 GW by 2030 would be a measure of only the nameplate capacity in place by that date. Not what would possible to build. That’s assuming the world continues past 2030, of course.

Nameplate vs. output capacity. It looks like current technology is returning capacity number higher than 40%.

It seems to me that an earlier study found that the UK had massive amounts of offshore wind potential. I’ll try to find it again.

150GW*365.25(days/year)*24(hour/day) = 1,314,900 GWh per year at 100% (I think we can all agree that is a bit high even for off shore wind).
Now even assuming that EU does a lot of efficiency improvements by 2030, the 150GW will not be 4x the demand.

Or maybe it is just badly written, they expect 150GW with current policies, but a boat load if the policies change. Or maybe they are just talking about what isn’t covered by PV and geothermal.