One day soon, a platform 50 times as large may float in the deep waters of the North Sea, buoying up a massive wind turbine to harvest the steady, strong breezes there. About an hour’s ride up the coast, full-scale 3,000-tonne behemoths already float in Aberdeen Bay, capturing enough wind energy to electrify nearly 35,000 Scottish households. The prototype at the FloWave facility—one of 10 new floating wind-power designs tested here—is progressing fast, says Tom Davey, who oversees testing. “Everything you see here has been manufactured and put in the water in the last couple months.” There’s good reasons for this hustle: The United Kingdom wants to add 34 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, en route to decarbonizing its grid by 2035. But the shallow waters east of London are already packed with wind turbines. Scotland’s deeper waters are therefore the U.K.’s next frontier. Auctions have set aside parcels for 27 floating wind farms, with a combined capacity exceeding 24 GW.  The steadiest, strongest wind blows over deep water—well beyond the 60- to 70-meter limit for the fixed foundations that anchor traditional wind turbines to the ocean floor. And in many places, such as North America’s deep Pacific coast, the strongest and steadiest wind blows in the evening, which would perfectly complement solar energy’s daytime peaks. Hence the push for wind platforms that float. The Biden administration has called for 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity in the United States by 2035, and recent research suggests that the U.S. Pacific coast could support 100 GW more by midcentury. Ireland, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the other countries with bold floating wind ambitions. The question is how to scale up the technology to gigawatt scale. This global debate is pitting innovation against risk. In the innovation end are people like Davey and the FloWave team, who’ve already advanced several floating wind devices to sea trials. One FloWave-tested platform, engineered by Copenhagen-based Stiesdal Offshore, was recently selected for a 100-megawatt wind farm to be built off Scotland’s northern tip in 2025. To fully understand what developers are up against, it helps to know how hard it is to deploy any kind of wind power at sea. The 15-MW turbines being ordered today for tomorrow’s offshore wind farms weigh roughly 1,000 tonnes. The foundations of traditional offshore wind turbines are also massive steel or concrete structures that have to be embedded in the ocean floor.You can do without vessels to move all of this out to deep water by using a floating platform. The equipment can be fully assembled on shore and then towed to the site. But having a platform that floats compounds the challenge of supporting the towering turbine. Beyond the technological advantages of using a tried-and-true approach, there’s a financial upside, Smith says. Floating wind developers must convince risk-averse bankers and insurers to back their projects, and it helps to be able to point to your project’s use of established technology. In years past, offshore wind investors who backed innovative but flawed designs suffered huge losses,.Meanwhile, floating wind’s mold-breakers are offering an ever-expanding diversity of technology options. At least 80 designs for platforms or integrated platform-turbines now vie for the floating wind market.......and much more                    https://spectrum.ieee.org/floating-offshore-wind-turbine

The energy technology revolution • Renewable costs are falling on learning curves • Renewable sales are growing exponentially • Capital is shifting to renewables • Fossil fuel demand has already peaked • Most incumbent modelers have missed the transition so far.  Exponential energy change is all around us....Wind Solar EV's and Batteries.  Change is happening across the world.  Adoption of superior technology is not confined to the Global North.  Price falls have unlocked superior renewable solutions.  Renewables are local, cheap, and clean. They provide more local jobs and enable a circular economy.  Capital is shifting into renewables.  Capital flows are therefore flooding into clean energy solutions. In 2023 they will be over 60% of the total. • While capital flows into the fossil fuel system are stagnant, and mainly directed at maintenance. • Half of fossil fuel cash flows are now being repaid, suggesting the sector is approaching rundown. • Nearly 90% of capital flows in the electricity sector in 2023 will be into renewables. • The solar industry is investing over $1B a day and has overtaken oil caps.  Many fossil fuel demand peaks are clearly behind us.  Global fossil fuel demand has peaked around 500 EJ.  The growth of these new energy technologies has been fast enough to mean that we already hit a peak in fossil fuel demand in 2019. • Fossil fuel demand is now bouncing along a plateau; with a couple of small bumps. • The chart illustrates fossil fuel demand forecasts from BNEF in their two core scenarios — in neither case does fossil fuel demand break out of the plateau. • We see a similar framing by the IEA, Rystad, BP, Shell, and McKinsey. At heart this is simple math: Any fast-growing new technology will drive peak incumbent demand early in a transition. • The plateau will end around 2025. And then fossil fuel demand will go into terminal decline......an excellent article and great graphics!      https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/06/rmi_renewable_revolution.pdf

The Energy Transition in Five Charts and Not Too Many Numbers. RMI experts Sam Butler-Sloss and Kingsmill Bond distill the energy transition down to five crucial concepts.May 3, 2023 By  Sam Butler-Sloss,  Kingsmill Bond. The energy transition is driven by the exponential growth of renewables, and the key changes will happen by 2030. 1.The energy transition is a technology revolution. At the heart of the energy transition lies the fact that renewable technologies are far superior to fossil fuels.  2. The renewables revolution is exponential, not linear. When it comes to the renewables revolution, linear is the default perception, but exponential is the default reality. The growth of the key new energy technologies is exponential. It has been in the past, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Companies and countries need to be quick to act, for it is hard to catch an exponential curve from behind. 3. The renewables revolution is led by China. Across manufacturing, deployment, and costs, China is far ahead of the rest of the world. 4.This is the decade of change. The 2020s are the disruption decade, where renewable technology sales race up the S-curve. If the energy transition were a novel, this decade would be its climax. 5. By 2030 the debate will be very different. By 2030, renewables will dominate the sales of energy-producing and consuming technologies. The green prize will be evident. Cheap renewables will be even cheaper. Fossil fuel demand will be off the current plateau and in clear decline. The negative externalities of fossil fuels will be increasingly weaponized.                   https://rmi.org/the-energy-transition-in-five-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/

Canada - Alberta Workers See Their Future. Denial Blocks the View. The province’s workers have a plan for the global energy transition. Premier Smith offers only fear and spin. 3 Sep 2023The Tyee Gil McGowan is the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, representing 175,000 unionized Alberta workers from both the public and private sectors. Is it Premier Danielle Smith, who suggests that anyone who questions the future of oil and gas in the province is essentially betraying workers?Or is it people like me, the president of Alberta’s largest worker advocacy group, who say workers in our province would be better served if we  prepare ourselves for change instead of burying our heads in the sand? This became a public question last week when Premier Smith decided to release a letter that I had written to her, along with her four-page reply. My letter added the voices of the 175,000 unionized Alberta workers I represent to the growing chorus of individuals and groups calling on her United Conservative Party government to rescind their ill-advised six-month moratorium on renewable energy projects. In my letter, I argued that the moratorium is “undermining a thriving home-grown industry, killing jobs and turning our province into an investment pariah.” It’s basically the same point that’s being made forcefully by many of my fellow Albertans — including academics, media pundits, labour and municipal leaders, businesspeople and ordinary citizens. In fact, one think tank has suggested that the moratorium is jeopardizing 118 projects worth $33 billion — projects which could create as many as 24,000 jobs for Albertans. In her reply to my letter, Smith professed to being shocked that I was “cheerleading the demise of Alberta’s oil and gas industry.” Of course, I did nothing of the sort. I simply pointed out that many credible forecasting agencies foresee a time in the not-so-distant future when global demand for oil will plateau and start to decline. In particular, I shared a link to a recent study prepared by the Calgary-based Canada Energy Regulator (hardly a radical environmental group) which concludes that demand for oil produced in Alberta could collapse in coming years as the world scrambles to address climate change. Given that the oil and gas industry has been one of the main engines for economic activity and jobs creation in Alberta for decades, I argued that “our governments, and political leaders at all levels, owe a duty to the workers of this province to think deeply about the change that is rapidly unfolding around us and plan for it.” I then challenged her to answer the following question: “in an oil and gas producing jurisdiction like ours, where will our future jobs and prosperity come from as the world accelerates the process of moving away from fossil fuels?” Smith’s reply was telling: “Alberta has no intention of moving away from the energy industry.”.....read on    https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/09/03/Alberta-Workers-Future-Denial-Blocks-View/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=040923