US Dept. of Energy Wants Bigger Wind Energy Ideas

coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy wants to kick up the research and development of offshore wind projects as it looks to achieve its goal of producing 20% of the country's electricity from wind farms by 2030. The DOE Wind Program is looking to focus on what it calls specific advanced technology, gigawatt-scale demonstration projects that can be carried out by partnerships with a wide range of eligible organizations and stimulate cost-effective offshore wind energy deployment in coastal and Great Lakes regions of the country. The agency is also looking for more research that can help address market barriers in order to facilitate deployment and reduce technical challenges facing the entire industry, as well as technology that will reduce cost of offshore wind energy through innovation and testing."

Comments

My Opinion, More BFE Buffalo Ridge Projects

[eldavojohn]

There's over two hundred Z-750 windmills (the largest turbines made in the USA when they were put up in the 90s) on farmland in Minnesota along Buffalo Ridge, my father helped pour the foundations for them. As far as I know (and Wikipedia state):

Xcel has contracted an additional three hundred megawatts of wind energy by 2010 and must obtain ten percent of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Xcel is expected to increase its wind power contracts from 302 megawatts to one 1125 megawatts by 2010.

If you're worried about avian species, Wikipedia quotes two studies that found in seven months a death of 1.1 to 1.4 birds killed per windmill. Bats are higher but it's lower than bat deaths related to lighthouses, communication towers, tall buildings, power lines, and fences. So while unfortunate, it could probably be viewed as acceptable.

The advancements in turbine technology and infrastructure will always be needed but to answer the DOE's "Annual installations need to increase more than threefold." Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota? I think you can get away with negotiating the small plot of land they use and service roads through fields while still letting the bulk of the land be used for farming. Farmers already maneuver around sloughs that rise and fall with the water table. I don't know how the rights to offshore wind farms work or what the costs to permits are but it seems like you'd just have a strip of them so why not just do a huge block out in the middle of nowhere instead?

You can see which states really took off with wind power, I don't know why you're highlighting coastal areas and the Great Lakes when Colorado and Texas have demonstrated an equally large potential.

Re:My Opinion, More BFE Buffalo Ridge Projects

[ibpooks]

Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota?

Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project. There are a LOT of transmission line projects on drawing boards across the country all tied up in endless legal disputes and injunctions. There are complaints from environmental groups about lines going through wetlands, forests, and virtually any other habitat. Complaints from pseudoscience scaremongers about lines going through populated areas giving off "toxic radiation". Complaints from towns, villages, homeowners associations about nearby power lines decreasing property values. Endless permits, plans, documents, studies to upgrade the lines on existing right-of-ways. Every inch of the process is an uphill battle for the power companies, and a huge multi-hundred million dollar project can be held up or torpedoed by any judge in any district along the planned path of the line forcing expensive delays or re-designs. The few major lines that have been built in recent history have taken decades from the first plans to in-service and actually cost more money in legal costs than the cost entire planning, engineering and construction combined.

It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.

Time to play that card...

[CaseM]

And who can blame them, right? I wondered when I'd start to see fresh pleas for alternative energy sources. If you've got that card, now is the damned best time to play it with the BP disaster fresh in everyone's minds.

Hydraulic Lifts Pull Them Down Into Water

[eldavojohn]

I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit. I mean, Offshore drilling is an entirely different ballpark, but we've put a lot of research into that and we still mess it up.

I mean, how do these platforms cope with hurricanes? I've always wondered. I have a feeling that since a windmill will have most of its machinery above water level, it'll be more susceptible to high winds (which is the idea I know, but I mean twisting metal high winds)

Might seem counter intuitive but a 2007 article in Wired said:

Hurricanes could be a problem, so they decided to outfit their windmills with hydraulic lifts scavenged from oil-industry machinery; the system would lower the turbines in the event of a squall.

I think under the water is the safest place during a hurricane. Oh, and the timing is too perfect so I cannot omit this paragraph:

But first they needed to secure government approval. Their first stop was the state of Louisiana, but the bayou bureaucrats rejected the proposal. “They saw us as competing with oil and natural gas,” Schoeffler recalls.

Perhaps Schoeffler should ask Louisiana now if it's alright for them to compete with offshore oil?

NIMBY

[reSonans]

I hope the offshore aspect solves the NIMBY mentality I often encounter whenever wind energy comes up.

Here's an example. One of my colleagues bought a lakefront property in rural Ontario. A couple of years later, a farmer on the *other side* of the lake leased land to a wind energy provider. They pay $10k per turbine per year, so ten of them went up. My colleague sold his property shortly thereafter, saying that he couldn't stand the turbines.

Can anyone explain this? I'm genuinely curious to know why some people dislike turbines.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahaha!

Dude, we've been trying to put up a wind farm off the shore of Massachusetts for over ten years now, and they _still_ don't have the permits.

It turns out that their site, six miles offshore, would still be very slightly visible from the Kennedy compound. So suddenly every democrat politician in the state became flamingly anti-wind-power. They've suffered through lawsuits and protests claiming that they'd kill birds, that they'd kill fish that would swim into the bases so hard that they'd die, that they'd cause hearing loss for the poor little rich kids on the shore (six miles away...), that they'd be used by drug smugglers to hide from coast guard radar (all those drug smugglers that sail up the entire atlantic seaboard hoping to sneak ashore in MA), that they'd screw up aircraft radar systems (despite the FAA saying that no, their radar can ignore stationary targets just fine)...

When Obama finally pushed through the first part of the approval earlier this year, they immediately got slapped by a lawsuit by an indian tribe, asserting that this particular piece of the Atlantic Ocean is a sacred space to their tribe, and windmills would disrupt their freedom to practice their religion there. Despite most of the tribe testifying that they've never heard of any sacred patch of ocean, and there being no written records referring to any sacred patch of ocean, one of the tribe's leaders recently recieved upwards of ten million dollars from an anonymous donor to pursue the lawsuit, and regards the suit as his holy duty, much more important than using that money to do silly things like actually help the tribe members stuck in crushing poverty. It's expected to take at least a decade to grind that one through the courts, because with that sort of funding, stall tactics become really easy.

So, no. Offshore isn't going to help with NIMBY folks. Even NIMBY folks named Kennedy and Kerry who like to lecture the rest of the world on how important the environment is, and rake in millions in donations from environmental groups.

A couple years back, the company trying to put up this wind farm decided as a publicity stunt that they'd apply for a permit for a different type of power plant. They decided on an oil fired one of a type known to dump all sorts of carcinogens into the air, to be located in the middle of a city, across the street from an elementary school. It took under 48 hours from when they filed to when they had all the permits to legally begin construction... Compared to the _ten_years_ they've been struggling to get the permits to do wind power.

Washington DC

[Silly Man]

Place the wind farms around the Beltway. There is plenty of hot wind coming from Washington.

Re:Washington DC

[internetcommie]

There would be too much shit hitting the fans!