Earlier today, The LEGO Group has announced that they have reached their 100% renewable energy target three years ahead of schedule. After spending about a DKK 6 billion/£700m investment over four years into offshore wind farms, the output from these projects have exceeded the energy use from the LEGO factories, offices, and stores globally. Their latest investment in the Burbo Bank Extension wind farm will provide power for more than 230,000 British households. You can read more about this milestone in the link above.
Facts about Burbo Bank Extension
The Burbo Bank Extension wind farm is a joint venture between DONG Energy (50%) and its partners PKA (25%) and KIRKBI A/S (25%), parent company of the LEGO Group.
The wind farm is located 7 kilometres off the coast of Liverpool and has a capacity of 258 megawatts, enough to supply renewable energy to 230,000 British households.
The wind farm consists of 32 MHI Vestas V164-8.0 MW wind turbines.
KIRKBI A/S invested approximately DKK 3.3 billion (GBP 375 million) in the construction of the wind farm, bringing the total amount invested in building offshore wind power to over DKK 6 billion (GBP 680 million).
Facts about the LEGO Group’s 100% renewable energy milestone
Since 2012, KIRKBI A/S has invested approximately DKK 6 billion in renewable energy on behalf of the LEGO Group, equivalent to 162 megawatts.
In addition to Burbo Bank Extension, KIRKBI A/S owns 31.5% of the Borkum Riffgrund 1 offshore wind farm in Germany, which can produce 312 megawatts and provide clean energy for 320,000 households.
20,000 solar panels will be installed on the roof of the LEGO® factory in Jiaxing, China. The panels will produce almost six gigawatts of energy per year. This is equivalent to the electricity use of more than 6,000 Chinese households.
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But what do they do when it’s not windy or sunny?
As far as the turbines go, the same thing they often do when it is windy: nothing at all. Wind turbines tend to have a lot of down time, only some of which can be directly attributed to intermittent wind. Some of the systems that are being developed to keep them from slaughtering birds cause the turbines to shut down while birds are known to be flying in the area. A tremendous amount of stress is also placed on the parts in the hub, and they tend to break down a lot more often than advertised.
Well, if they’re offshore, that should at least eliminate the piles of rotting bird carcasses, since they’ll either sink or float away.
http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds
What people don’t realize is that wind turbine farms in the US are required to run their own studies on how many birds are killed annually by their turbines…but they get to decide whether they think an individual bird falls into the “killed by turbine” column, or the “killed by anything else, so long as we don’t get blamed” column. And it’s not some sparrows being knocked out of the sky that should be causing concern, but the rather large number of migratory raptors that help keep many of the smaller bird species from overpopulating.
You know, with how incredibly inept birds are at handling human technology, it’s remarkable that they’ve survived, well, anything at all. A bird sat there tapping and ramming into the window of the hospital for the entire 3 hour class I was at.
In any case, I wonder what comparative studies looking at the death of birds from different sources of power is. I doubt nuclear or dams kill many birds.
Dams radically change the landscape, and by extension the eco-systems they inhabit. To some degree, that can be helpful. In other senses, it’s not. PBS ran an episode of Nature on beavers, and in an environment that’s allowed to operate naturally, it’s actually shocking how often and radically the landscape can change under beavers’ control, just by the creation and abandonment of beaver dams. That’s sort of the same effect we have with power dams, but on a permanent basis. See, when beavers do it, they build a dam, form a pond, strip the vicinity of trees, and eventually abandon that location to form a new dam in another location. As a result of this, the river basin is constantly being forced to grow new foliage, and sections of the basin are flooded for a few years at a time which allows lots of nutrient-rich sediment to settle out, allowing new growth to flourish when the beavers move on.
With a power dam, all that sediment just settles out behind a dam that might be older than the people it provides power for. The water never drains away, so nothing ever really gets to use all the rich soil that would be left behind.
Nuclear power _can_ be good, but only if you do it the right way. Japan learned that outdated nuclear plants aren’t always worth keeping online (Fukishima was due to be decommissioned a month before the tsunami, and the then-current generation of reactor would have safely shut itself down under the exact same circumstances), and in the US we have laws preventing the re-enrichment of spent nuclear fuel. Instead, we have to bury it somewhere. The problem is, the whole idea was that we’d pay off the storage of this year’s nuclear fuel for the next thousand years. So when do we pay off the storage of next year’s fuel? France re-enriches their spent fuel, and the waste that they produce is safe to hold in your hand.
Geothermal taps are another option, but still not entirely risk-free. The tap brings up toxic chemicals (some of which could potentially be harvested maybe?), and one solution to that is pumping them back in…but that causes the same seismic events as fracking.
Solar seems nice, but I live in Michigan, which spends much of the year overcast (imagine trying to run solar in London or Seattle). It also takes up a lot more space than pretty much any other source of power. It takes up so much space that there are people trying to develop solar panels that would be able to double as road surfaces (again, I live in Michigan, which sees a lot of snow…and snowplows)
Unlike coal dust and petrol fumes that never killed anything … oh, except the entire planet. I’m sure there are downsides to every technology, and we should seriously look into limiting the ecological impact of wind farms. The question is are you a witting or unwitting shill for the fossil fuel industry. Belching carbon into the atmosphere by default is no longer an option by finding excuses for inaction, despite what your revolting excuse for a President says. Sorry to get political, but I applaud Lego for finding constructive ways of making the world a little better.