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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.
Yeah, we all know the Kennedy clan is just full of Republicans. FYI: It was blocked by members of the Kennedy clan. But, I think the clan leader who protested the most died; so maybe they stopped blocking it. Tim S.
Headline is misleading. It is not the turbines, but the link to the national grid that is making power cheaper for the island.
Until now, they depended on small local diesel generators.
You can bet that the 30MW wind plant is a lot more expensive than the diesel generators were.
I'd be interested to know the economics of the plant, but supplying cheaper power to the island will be an utterly trivial component.
Turbine bird deaths are a red herring. An estimated 10000-40000 birds die each year from turbines. But, they kill the least birds of many manmade structures. About ~150 million birds each year die from powerlines. An estimated ~500 million die from hitting glass windows. Cats kill several hundred million. Pesticides: ~70 million. Cars: another ~70 million. Radio towers: 45 million. I don't see anyone calling for any of those things to be scaled back because of bird deaths. So why single out wind turbines?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm
And hold your breath for that cut in power prices. It totally will be passed on to consumers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Not so hard to reduce prices 40% when you are up against a local monopoly that has been gouging it's customers by ridiculous amounts.
Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, ... That is nonsense, also you forget the 60% 80% 100% and 200% etc. do you know what that means for the grid ? it does not mean anything for the grid. ... 500000 washing machines finishing their washing, around the same time: have the exact same effect.
500000 washing machines switched on around the same time
2million toasters, coffee machines, ovens etc. jumping on in the morning around the same time, and dropping off from the grid an hoir later: have exact the same effect.
I don't get why people who have no clue always write nonsense like this.
Again: but that is the last time for today, widn plants don't need energy storage to scale. You only need to distribute the plants like e.g. Denmark, Portugal and Germany are doing it.
The grid already has enough pumped storage to compensate for _ANY_ power source. People want storage (that means certain plant owners or grid operators) because they can not stand (mentally, emotionally) all the excess power the plants are generationg, and desperately want to store it somewhere. For the raw functionallity of the grid the storage is not needed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I've love the sight of an eco-friendly windmill on my horizon, don't understand why people complain so much about it.
The sound would be unacceptable though, if that's still a problem.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Yeah, 5% of the whole mix is trivial. Scale that up to 1/3 overall, with some regions above 50%, and see what happens. Above all it is too expensive.
Perhaps you should learn a thing or too about reactive charges.
Your talk about software shows you have no technical expertise in the area. I'm a computer infrastructure expert, and I know a thing or too about solar,wind,nuclear and the electrical grid. The problem isn't a software to switch wind off and something else on, the real problem is doing extremely agile load following. That's easy to do with hydro or fossil fuels. But most countries don't have large untapped hydro sources. And we need to get off fossil fuels.
I'm not interested in a grid that will depend from fossil fuels forever.
We must get rid of all coal usage for electricity and heating.
We must radically reduce natural gas usage too.
Can't do that with solar+wind.
Need lots of nuclear. Some countries like China and Brazil still have tens of GW worth of untapped hydro, but most countries don't. Brazil was at the verge of a collapse in the past few months with very little rain leading to your hydro reservoirs close to that critical point where hydro plants must shutdown ! No wonder we have one large nuclear reactor in construction and plans for another half a dozen.
At the same time we are deploying wind and solar. But we have lots of hydro to load follow solar and wind. The USA, UK, France don't.
You are forgetting the free insurance provided by the government. It's priceless, in the literal sense. No commercial insurer will cover the liability, you can't buy it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC