Via the U.S. Department of Energy on YouTube, a video on how wind turbines work:
VIDEO: How wind turbines work
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Tag Archives: Offshore Wind
OFFSHORE WIND: Massive offshore wind farm proposed for Rhode Island
Image via mooste on Flickr
Competing interests and litigation kept the Cape Wind Project from being permitted and constructed for almost a decade. Now, fishers are concerned with a proposal by Deepwater Wind to construct a large offshore wind farm in federal waters between Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
While the United States struggles to plan, permit, and construct offshore wind farms, Europe is rapidly developing their infrastructure to capture offshore wind resources by constructing ambitious projects and proposing ever-larger offshore wind projects. More on Deepwater Wind’s proposal via the Providence Journal:
“We understand the value of this thing,” said Chris Brown, president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen’s Association. “But we don’t want to become collateral damage.”
Brown said that Deepwater had reached out to fishing groups and tried to work with them in determining a location for the 1,000-megawatt wind farm, but they couldn’t find a site that wouldn’t affect the fishing industry.
“It’s all critical habitat,” he said. “There’s someone making a living on every square inch.”
Deepwater said it purposely designed the wind farm to accommodate commercial and recreational boaters. The project, called the Deepwater Wind Energy Center, is divided into two main arrays, one of about 50 turbines and another of 150 turbines. The company would space the machines 0.7 miles apart to allow fishing boats to more easily travel through the groupings. Corridors 1.5 miles long would also cut through parts of the project for boat navigation.
But Brown and Lanny Dellinger, president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association, said it may not be Deepwater’s decision whether boats would be allowed to travel into the wind farm. Dellinger said he knows of insurers in Europe who won’t allow it for fear of a vessel hitting a turbine.
“Commercial fishing and wind farms are not compatible,” he said.
State officials, however, said that the two industries can indeed coexist.
“Our goal here is not only to achieve a renewable-energy future for Rhode Island,” said Keith Stokes, executive director of the state Economic Development Corporation. “We’re not going to supplant the fishing and boating industries in Rhode Island. We know how important they are to the state.”
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WIND ENERGY in the news
- Superhighway for wind power proposed for Mid-Atlantic Coast. Via the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Investors on Tuesday proposed to build an underwater electricity superhighway that would carry wind power generated off the Mid-Atlantic Coast to land.
The $5 billion transmission line, announced by backers including Google, would run about 15 to 20 miles offshore.
It would act like a spine, linking the offshore projects to land at four locations – North Jersey, South Jersey near Atlantic City, the coast of Delaware and the coast of Virginia south of Norfolk.
“This is a huge, bold project,” said Robert Mitchell, CEO of Trans-Elect, an independent transmission company operating nationwide, which is leading the project. “It’s going to result in thousands of megawatts of offshore wind being delivered to the East Coast” along with thousands of jobs.
“Instead of multiple connections, this will serve as a superhighway with on-ramps for wind farms,” said Rick Needham, director of green business operations at Google, a major investor.
It also would increase the reliability of wind, they said. By joining the projects together, the variability of wind at any one location is smoothed out, lulls in one place compensated for by gusts elsewhere.
- Google backs ‘superhighway’ for wind power. Via the Washington Post:
Internet search engine giant Google announced Tuesday that it is investing in a mammoth project to build an underwater “superhighway for clean energy” that would be able to funnel power from offshore wind farms to 1.9 million homes without overtaxing the already congested mid-Atlantic power grid.
The project, dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection, calls for spending as much as $5 billion to create a 350-mile network of underwater cables stretching from northern New Jersey to Virginia. It would eliminate the need for offshore wind developers to build transmission lines of their own, easing what can be a barrier for such projects.
Google is partnering with Good Energies, an environmentally focused international investment company based in New York, London and Switzerland, and Tokyo-based Marubeni to finance the project. The project is led by Trans-Elect, an electric transmission company in Chevy Chase.
- Report Identifies Transmission Corridors to Deliver 8,600 MW of New Wind in the Upper Midwest. Via Renewable + Law:
[The Upper Midwest Transmission Development Initiative's] renewable transmission corridors are based on the Midwest ISO’s estimate that about 8,600 MW of new renewable capacity will be needed in the region by 2025 to serve the renewable energy standards and goals of these five states. The group identified twenty “wind zones” where it would be most efficient to develop wind power based on available wind resources, existing wind generation, existing interconnection queue requests, and local geography. The six transmission corridors were chosen as the best general areas for transmission lines to move wind energy from the wind zones to load centers in a cost-effective manner.
- In 2009, 40% of new U.S. electricity generation came from wind. Via EERE News:
The U.S. Department of Energy has distributed the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recently published IEA Wind Energy Annual Report 2009, which is now available for free download. The report presents the latest information on domestic and international wind generation capacity, national incentive programs, progress toward national objectives, benefits to national economies, research and development results, and issues affecting turbines, market growth, and costs of projects. The Executive Summary synthesizes the information presented from IEA’s member countries, cooperative research tasks, the European Commission, and the European Wind Energy Association. Read the Executive Summary
.Wind power is a fast-growing source of clean energy. In the United States 40% of new electricity generation came from wind last year, while in Europe, wind power installations accounted for 39% of new capacity. IEA Wind member countries added more than 20 gigawatts (GW) in 2009, for a total of more than 111 GW of wind generating capacity. Five countries added more than a gigawatt of net capacity: the United States (10 GW), Spain (2.5 GW), Germany (1.9 GW), Italy (1.1 GW), and the United Kingdom (1 GW). Additionally, wind power electrical generation capacity grew more than 32% worldwide in 2009. These and other statistics on wind energy development are highlighted in the report.
The IEA Wind member countries—located in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Pacific Region—contain 70% of worldwide wind generating capacity. These countries share information and research efforts to increase wind energy’s contribution to their electrical generation mix, and they reach out to other countries to join the IEA Wind cooperation.
- Study: Offshore wind could generate all U.S. electricity (with graphics below). Via USA Today:
U.S. offshore winds, abundant off the coasts of 26 states, have the potential to generate four times as much power as the nation’s present electric capacity, a new Department of Energy report says.
Developing this resource would help the United States reduce air pollution, achieve 20% of its electricity (or about 54 gigawatts) from wind by 2030 and create more than 43,000 permanent, well-paid technical jobs, according to the 240-page study by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Images via a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Like this:
RENEWABLE ENERGY: Study: Six east coast states could replace dirty fossil fuels with clean energy derived from offshore wind
Image of the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm by Nuon on Flickr.
As the United States struggles to do the right thing in terms of energy policy, the United Kingdom has just switched on the world’s largest offshore wind farm, which consists of “100 turbines spreading over 35 square kilometers, or 13.5 square miles, with a capacity to power more than 200,000 homes.” Also, Danish energy policy is pushing Denmark to be fossil fuel-free by 2050. China is also surpassing the United States in offshore wind development: “Chinese energy companies are expected to submit bids Friday for four offshore wind power projects with a total installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts, representing a combined investment of $3.06 billion.”
As the world population continues to grow and expand, energy demand and energy prices will continue to rise, as nonrenewable energy sources such as oil and coal are depleted. Rising energy prices helped trigger the economic downturn in the United States, so the United States government must protect its economy by aggressively implementing prudent energy policies, which are working in other countries.
More on the east coast’s renewable energy potential via the International Business Times:
Oceana, compared the costs of offshore wind energy with oil and gas. The study focused primarily on the east coast and concluded an investment into wind energy would create jobs, reduce pollution and in many cases create just as much energy as fossil fuels.
All told, Oceana concluded wind energy could produce 30 percent more electricity than economically recoverable offshore oil and gas on the east coast. The group said the investment it proposed would supply nearly half of the current electricity generation of East Coast states. Oceana used conservative estimates of potential ocean spaces for wind farms.
. . .
In six states: Massachusetts, North Carolina, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia and South Carolina, Oceana said wind energy could completely replace fossil fuels. In the first three states, it would completely reduce the need for any fossil fuels. In the latter three, it at least would replace the energy demand. In some states, energy is exported to other states.
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