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The US's First Offshore Wind Farm Will Cut Local Power Prices By 40%
merbs writes: The U.S. is finally getting its first offshore wind farm. Deepwater Wind has announced that its Block Island project has been fully financed, passed the permitting process, and will begin putting "steel in water" this summer. For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates. The company has secured $290 million in financing, with funding from the likes of Key Bank and France's Société Générale, in part on the strength of its long-term power purchase agreement with US utility National Grid. Block Island has thus surpassed the much-publicized Cape Wind project, long touted as "the nation's first offshore wind farm," but that has been stalled out for over a decade in Massachusetts, held up by a tangle of clean power foes, regulatory and financing woes, and Cape Cod homeowners afraid it'd ruin the view.
On Block Island, it’s the Block Island Power Company, whose on-island generators run on diesel fuel, which must be shipped to the island by boat.
A 2010 Providence Journal story on the island’s power system noted that diesel fuel regularly costs $1 more per gallon on the island than on the mainland.
In fiscal 2011, according to a report by the town’s Electric Utility Task Group on the fiscal costs and benefits of the wind-farm project, the average cost of electricity on the island was 47 cents per kilowatt hour. In the rest of Rhode Island it was 14.8 cents.
Once the cable is laid and the wind farm project is on line, in 2014 or 2015, Block Island Power will be able to purchase electricity from the New England power network at much lower costs.
The task group estimated that electric rates on the island -- based on a 20-year agreement between Deepwater Wind and National Grid -- would fall to 30.7 cents per kilowatt hour, a 35.4-percent decrease from 2011 rates.
(The island’s rates would still be substantially higher than those on the mainland because its customers would be paying for a portion of the costs for installing the cable and for maintenance of the island’s power system.)
The task group’s analysis noted that current power costs on Block Island have risen to 54 cents per kilowatt hour because of the increasing diesel costs. Based on that figure, the decrease would be a 42-percent drop -- about what Deepwater said in its Tweet.
The other article doesn't mention anything about how much power and at what price the wind farm will be generating it. It sounds like the public relations department is doing all the talking.
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Other opponents have included Senator Ted Kennedy,[57] Sen. John Kerry, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and businessman Bill Koch,[58] who has donated $1.5 million to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10...
Lying by omission is still lying. Just saying.
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Read the article a bit closer, they're talking about a 40% electricity drop for the 1800 or so residents of "Block Island", who are currently serviced by diesel generators(mostly). Additionally, part of the project would be running a power line to the mainland, that could transmit power not only from the wind farm to the mainland, but bring energy back when needed.
Between the two, I can easily see a 40% drop. Diesel for electricity is expensive.
I don't read AC A human right
Block island has a population of 1051 people and has to ship in diesel for power generation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
So currently they using just about the worst system for commercial generation, paying high fuel and operating at a scale that is barely viable to begin with. The article also doesn't mention just what they are doing for energy storage or backup.
Either way if that is what is needed to make wind viable I wouldn't hold my breath.
Dunald Trump has been trying to prevent Scotland from building an offshore wind farm because he says they would ruin the view from a golf course he's building on a protected area of sand dunes. Trump also thinks that wind farms cause something called Wind Turbine Syndrome.
Except the summary is compeltely misleading on the 40% price cut, let's rephrase it slightly:
Electricity rates for a small island that is not connected to the national grid and relies on diesel generatiors for power will drop by 40% once it is connected to the grid via the new wind farm.
It's not the wind farm that's dropping the prices, it's dropping the reliance on diesel generators where all the fuel has to be transported over from the mainland.
Wow, way to not link to a study, but rather a Smithsonian blog talking about a Wordpress blog talking about a study. You clearly love your primary sources!
FYI, the study is just one of many. The study itself cites others, including:
20,000 birds/yr (Sovacool, 2012)
10,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2001 and Manville, 2005)
20,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2005)
440,000 (Manville, 2009)
573,000 (Smallwood, 2013).
The latter two include lattice towers, which are largely being decommissioned as unsafe to birds.
But hey, having varied numbers clearly means that if you can find a blog linking to another blog linking to a study that shows high numbers (among many different studies), then clearly the GP is "plain wrong", right?
And yes, even if we go with your choice study's mean of 234,012 annual bird deaths, that's still orders of magnitude less than many other types of human activities.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
You're wrong. Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources, but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly.
You're just embarrasing yourself.
I have a lot of relatives and friends who work/worked in the electricity utility business. And I have some engineering background, which you don't seem to have.
When Germany electricity prices get close to France's, then we can talk about if energiewende has succeeded or not.
IAAEE. Since sea water is a very good conductor, you would be hard pressed to put "30MW of into the sea." Assuming these are generating at 13.8 kV, and they somehow had their lineside terminals dunked in sea water, you would get a lot of noise and steam followed by the generator protection relays kicking in in like a cycle and a half. Call it 25 ms. The excitation to the generators would be shut off and the voltage would quickly dwindle. You'd have a bunch of fucked up equipment, and anybody in the immediate area might be exposed to electrocution and arc flash hazards, but there wouldn't be noticeable impact to the rest of the ocean. Hell, the generator itself would probably be OK.
Short circuit calculations are something that any power generation place deals with all the time. When you are shorted, you get a lot of current, but not a lot of volts, so your power will go down substantially. Just like when you accidentally drop a screwdriver across a battery. You get a spark, damage the battery, maybe take out some ESD sensitive components, but by and large the rest of the components on the board are OK. There's just no way for the energy to get out to the rest of the world.
In order to get 30MW of electricity actually into the sea water, well... I'm not exactly sure how you could do it. This sounds like a job for Randall Munroe, honestly. You'd probably have to only dunk one phase in the drink. Then you could at least get a little time before the ground fault and unbalanced load relays kick in. You could run the sea water through very long PVC pipes, essentially turning the water into a 30MW heater, and that would raise the temperature of the water. But that's not exactly what you have in mind. Besides, that's sort of like what other power plants do with their waste heat. They dump it into a cooling water body, although not quite at that level you're talking about.