|
|
Moving Forward with Floating Wind Energy
A guess is that you might tolerate the offshore wind farm in your front yard, but secretly wish it wish it wasn’t there. So far there are no offshore wind farms in U.S. waters. (Europe has many.) Stiff resistance from oceanfront land owners has kept them from being built. No matter where wind developers try, someone with an investment in his ocean view has protested. With excellent wind resources along much of the coastline, millions of Americans may be denied a power-packed source of clean energy because of the power of the few. The solution is to keep offshore wind turbines hidden from view, over the horizon. If people can’t see them they can’t complain. Far offshore means really deep waters, and really deep waters means turbines that will have to float, not be planted in the sea bed as sticks in the mud. Floating wind energy is in its infancy. Hywind, a floating wind turbine project of Germany’s Siemens and StatoilHydro of Norway is now being tested in more than 700 feet of water more than 7 miles off the Norwegian coast. Hywind is only a first attempt at designing a wind turbine that can survive the immense power of the high seas. A project in the state of Maine may be the next attempt. With an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, a 38-member consortium led by the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center will develop and deploy three small-scale deep water offshore wind turbines that will float on platforms off the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire. The Center will apply its expertise and build the platforms of composite materials. (Composites are like fiber glass used in boat building.) Two of the turbine models could be in place in a couple of years. The three floating turbines include two 10 kilowatt and one 100 kilowatt models which are a fraction,of course, of the rated power power capacity of megawatt class, utility grade turbines including Hywind. There are options for floating offshore wind turbine design. (From "Deepwater Offshore Wind in Maine." With the grant money, the University of Maine DeepCwind Deepwater Offshore Wind Consortium will design the floating platforms, determine which composites to use, investigate how to manufacture them and figure out how best to deploy the devices. The grant will also help fund a Master of Science Degree in Renewable Energy and the Environment program, with a focus on deep water wind energy as well as a new undergraduate minor in deep water wind energy at UMaine. The eventual goal of the Consortium will be to scale-up the winning design and work toward building a large-scale floating wind farm in the Gulf of Maine. An outline for the Consortium’s plans are included in the document “Deepwater Offshore Wind in Maine: The Plan, the Timeline.” The $8 million may be just the beginning of Federal funding for floating wind. An additional $5 million could be on the way that would go toward establishing a UMaine-based national center for deep water offshore wind research and development. Why Maine? It’s windy off that rocky coast. Up to 130 gigawatts of green power could be generated in water 60 - 900 meters deep (200 - 3000 ft) within 50 nautical miles of the coast. UMaine professor Habib Dagher, director of the Center, has equated the Gulf of Maine’s wind capacity to that of Saudi Arabia for oil production.It would take $20 billion to build a 5-gigawatt floating wind farm, but a project of that size would create more than 15,000 jobs, all of which Maine would be more than happy to supply. Technologically, going far offshore for wind energy may not be very difficult. Oil and gas companies have been coping successfully in harvesting energy on the high seas for what, 60 years? Experience learned by them will be helpful to far-offshore wind farmers. The difficulty may not be in the technology, but whether the technology can make money selling emission-free energy to the onshore grid. Links: UMaine Advanced Structures and Composites Center Deepwater Offshore Wind in Maine: The Plan, the Timeline |
 |
 |
Dig deep into your soul. Tell yourself the truth. If you became wealthy enough (or already are) to own oceanfront property, would it bother you if dozens of wind turbines were planted in your view? Would you mind if the vista that was once nature’s great blue sea was occupied by man’s machines?