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Floating Wind Turbine Platform
Sterling D. Allan writes "Inventor Tom Lee is nearly ready to strike a deal to install a flotilla of offshore wind turbines, combined with hydrogen-generating capability and battery storage, which he says will enable them to have the consistency needed to be a primary grid energy provider, and not just supplemental to the gird. The floating platform enables them to take the turbines to where the wind blows and birds are few, and people even fewer. His objective in commencing this project 12 years ago was to come up with a power solution for developing nations."
The electricity->hydrogen->electricity cycle is only about 50% efficient using utility-scale 100MW plants (slightly lower for 1MW or so sized plants, and much lower for lab-sized plants). Right now there is so little wind power installed that the grid can easily handle large amounts of extra wind power. When 20% of electricity is coming from wind, then they'll start to be substantial benefits to power storage (though I see hydroelectric storage as a more practical form of storage than hydrogen, and that's good until renewables cover 100% of electricity demand and we're at the stage of needing liquid fuel for airplanes and vehicles).
Second, I believe that using a floating platform with very tall (~400 feet or so) structures is asking for trouble. Something floating is far more vulnerable to storms than a securely grounded pile. There must be a good reason it's not being done now.
Thirdly, why have the things so far from shore. Transmission losses (if undersea cables are employed) are large over such distances, and it does take quite a bit of aluminum to make such long wires. If a ship must come to load the hydrogen every once in a while, then you just added a large operating expense (and one of the nice things about wind and solar is very low operating expenses).
So why not stick to tried and true near-shore and land based wind turbines?
Have you ever seen how big oil platforms are? BP's Thunder Horse is 112m wide, 136m long, and 130m high. It weighs 60,000 tons. GE's biggest turbines are 75m tall at the hub and weigh 300 tons. You could easily place one of these turbines at each of the four corners of Thunder Horse.
All the technology to build large and tall platforms, anchor them to the ocean floor, connect them under the sea to the land, disconnect them when a storm is coming so they can be moved out of the way, reconnect them, maintain them, etc. already exists in the oil platform industry.
These things probably are not as tall as oil platforms. They connect to land through cable which is relatively cheap to manufacture and install compared to pipelines which have to be carefully laid on the ocean floor and have to be designed not to leak oil all over the place. Living quarters would be drastically simpler because turbine maintenance takes many fewer workers than oil drilling (Thunder Horse has facilities for 229 workers to be stationed there semi-permanently). They don't need the same level of safety as oil rigs since they are not pumping and storing an environmentally sensitive substance. They don't need all the drilling and pumping equipment that oil rigs do (wind turbines are vastly less costly/complicated than oil rig equipment).
Can't comment on cost/return. Clearly if there's no return they won't get built, but the technology all exists and these things would be much, much cheaper than oil platforms.