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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.
Deepwater Wind, eh? That name should be great, because we all have fond memories of something whose name previously began with Deepwater.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To "preserve the view", I vote we erect the turbines, but make them look like giant penises sticking out of the ocean.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
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.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
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.
So much more efficient, in every sense of the word!
Any information on if this project is subsidized or not? I checked the articles briefly but I didn't see anything either way. If this project is being built without subsidies, that's great, it means that technology is catching up and this kind of energy is finally becoming economically viable on a large scale.
Love sees no species.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Lying by omission is still lying. Just saying.
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
As is, it seems about 50-50.
I don't read AC A human right
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
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
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.
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.
My problem with wind turbines isn't the dead birds.
Coal kills 13000 humans in the USA alone every year, 200k yearly worldwide.
I'd rather kill 20000 birds than kill 10000 humans.
I hope they make this endeavour happen. Offshore wind farms are the only type of wind farms that produce electricity with some real consistency. Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, do you know what that means for the grid ?
Without economical, large scale energy storage, wind can't scale. Right now that means pumped hydro, which is very limited depending on geography.
In the meantime, wind+solar helps take the focus away from the real problem, which is ending coal burning in the world without increasing natural gas consumption. Only nuclear can do that right now.
If you really are concerned about climate change, you should be demading solar+wind+nuclear+biomass+geothermal, aka all of the above solution.
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.
Even if it was bad, what's the alternative? Pumping CO2 in the atmosphere?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
In 10 years Li Ion battery storage will be cheap enough that above US$ 0.20/kWh it will be cheaper to go off grid. Most roof top solar PV is selling to the grid at US$ 0.03/kWh, but today storage is way more expensive than the solar panels.
Plus compressed air energy storage will drop in price.
That's the real purpose of the subsidies today, we have the base scientific knowledge to achieve lots of things, but investors don't put their money on hopes and dreams, they demand return on investment.
Over the next 10 years subsidies for pure renewables (without storage) should be zero. And subsidies moved over to renewables with 30 minutes bare minimum of peak production, with even higher subsidies for at least 2 hrs storage, which would make wind able to generate at night and release stored capacity before solar PV can ramp up around 10AM. And Solar with 2 hrs storage would close the cycle until sunset. Plus the possibility of wind energy storage discharge until Solar PV ramps up and recharge from Solar PV during the day, and Solar PV storage charge from wind during the night. If that were possible we're talking 4 hours worth of storage for matched Solar+Wind, just enough to close the cycle.
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.
Li Ion batteries is mostly Nickel, comparatively a cheap metal. Lithium has the spotlight because its the critical breakthrough, but very little is necessary.
I'm Brazilian BTW.
The bet has been that Li Ion cells will reach US$ 100/kWh anywhere between 2020-2025.
That would mean an actual 20kWh storage system @ less than US$ 5000.
20kWh allows people to fully live off grid in sunny areas.
Look into why Tesla/Elon Musk is investing billions on the Li Ion Giga Factory. A big part of the gamble is economies of scale leading to faster cost reductions in Li Ion costs. IF Li Ion prices haven't dropped significantly in the past 24 months its because the market is booming, with Tesla being the single largest worldwide buyer of Li Ion cells.
Simple solution to coal killing humans. Stop burning coal, replace coal plants with nuclear plants. Even if you include Chernobyl deaths in the nuclear statistics, the death rate is an order of magnitude or three better for nukes than for coal....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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.
China is building new nuclear reactors in a little over 5 years.
And its not just China, South Korea, India, Russia, are all doing nuclear at sane costs and sane schedules. That's called have a rational nuclear regulator.
I'm not a nuclear professional, but after all the anti nuclear crap that hit the media after Fukushima that got me so pissed off I decided to study nuclear, and all I studied showed me nuclear is being unfairly targeted. Massive lies and miss information.
Even today, the most expensive nuclear project in the world, Olkiluoto in Finland is still cheaper then energiewende, with all of its overruns. And I've heard plenty of arguments why Areva EPR is likely the most expensive reactor on the market today. GE ESBWR and Westinghouse AP1000 seems much cheaper. Yet the anti nuke types take Olkiluoto as the reference to discuss.
Wind $1.25 per peak capacity Watts... If your effective capacity factor is 20%, then you're up to $ 6.25 per Watt, and then you must add the fossil backup costs. Must talk levelized costs.
Then you need to account for the fact that a nuclear reactor can be built fairly close to its primary market, while wind turbines must be built where the wind is, then you must add transmission line costs, substations, lots of things the greenies conveniently ignore in their calculations. When you add all of that up, even with wind capacity factor of 30% it is more expensive even than Olkiluoto that you love to quote as poster child of nuclear too expensive.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
The current Westinghouse reactor offering, the AP600 and AP1000 started development work before Chernobyl. It took 26 yrs from conception to certification of the AP600 cause the US NRC didn't know how to certify a passively safe reactor, so it took them 16 years to certify it.
This isn't an intrinsic, unavoidable nuclear problem, but rather how the US NRC is setup to certify it, it can be improved.
There is a lot of vested interest in nuclear failing, or at least not innovating and continuing to be expensive.
You can either pretend we don't need it like the Germans, do nothing to help like American politicians or demand we make it more rational which will reduce nuclear costs substantially in the short term.
If you listen to actual energy professionals even those that do utility scale solar and wind, the actual technical professionals admit the same problems I'm pointing out to you. It's a fact.
Nuclear doesn't need GW scale to be economical.
Water cooled nuclear likes GW scale plants.
Gen IV reactors work just fine at 250MW scale, and they do load following, so a site with 4x 250MW reactors can reliably supply power to a market with 1GW demand without need for fossil backups while load following wind/solar if needed. But once you have a nuclear reactor, wind and solar aren't useful.
It's helpful to actually learn about nuclear from factual nuclear sites, instead of from anti nuclear sites, those are not environmentalists, but rather shills paid to bash nuclear to keep coal and natural gas in power for as long as possible.
I sugest:
https://www.coursera.org/cours...
BRAZIL has all the load following it needs. Its called big hydro. Brazil's peak electricity demand is around 100GW, with over 80GW of installed big hydro generation capacity. The critical aspect is water supply (reservoir status). Its what pumped hydro should be instead, an actual generation asset instead of a purely storage solution.
We don't have a boatload of wind cause our govt is very inefficient to do its thing. Matter of fact in many ways I'm ashamed of being Brazilian. But we could easily add 30 GW worth of nameplate wind. We also have the big advantage of the wind being the strongest when its dry, so it compliments hydro perfectly.
We also have 2GW of nuclear (2 reactors), another 1.3GW nuclear in construction, and tens of GW in various fossil plants (mostly natural gas).
This storage argument is very interesting. You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. Local storage is far from sufficient.
The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
I'm not making up lies, you're the one ignoring the inconvenient facts to your side.
I wish solar+wind could do the job, but it cant. The problem is the side that can't recognize that nuclear is essential to get rid of fossil fuels worldwide. China is burning more coal than the entire rest of the world combined. Still they are doing solar,wind,nuclear and hydro as fast as they can. They are adding clean electricity to their grid much faster than Europe or the USA, cause the govt doesn't care about NIMBY nonsense.
I wonder what the results would be of some electrical glitch putting 30 megawatts of electricity into the sea surrounding the wind turbines.
Can any EE guys weigh in on the physics of this?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nuclear power is in the billions to build a plant. We have 2 in the USA that are not coming cheap. It NEVER includes all the free or really cheap government services that nuclear power gets and needs. You complain about wind but nuclear burns money and costs more than solar; graft is always included for both. Thing is, with big massive centralized power generation you have a few powerful players who's political pull is greater than smaller more distributed alternatives (unless the smaller players can unite.)
I've read many times that no nuclear power station in the USA has ever made a profit. ever. not without accounting games shifting the cost onto tax payers. It's a game of stealing as much money as possible; not making legitimate profit. I know in my area they will build stations with lots of bonuses/incentives and low interest loans etc-- then years later get even more taken off if not chucking the remainder of the debt plus expansions of tax-free periods etc. (in the name of jobs, but really these new jobs are being subsidized.) Maybe 30 years later it gets even but the debt and incentives are not repaid. But to be fair, power generation is infrastructure that helps the local economy in ways you can't directly measure... like roads. but it would be better if it were handled like the roads... which have less overhead and work just as well.
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The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
Firstly because France is largely nuclear, which has historically been very cheap on a large scale, so a comparison to France would be tough for many countries, and secondly because it's a long-term project. The fact that it's not as cheap now doesn't mean it will stay so. But you can't build new infrastructure on a whim. For example, PV module cost is steadily going down. So when they get, say, three times cheaper in the next two decades (UMG cells, packaging improvement, manufacturing improvement...), if people at that point in time suddenly start putting them onto their roofs like crazy without some infrastructure investments done now, what's going to happen? Something nasty, I'd bet.
Ezekiel 23:20
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
It what bizarro world are those two not conservatives?
Well, considering we have a faction in this country who would make Mussolini look like a radical leftist, i suppose it's the anti-intellectual, anti-education bizarro world we're stuck in in the US currently; Sinclair was right about the whole wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible thing.
What i find most amusing is when the idiots trot out that Lincoln was a republican, therefor all the ills of the world are because of democrats... their lack of education and common sense really divorces them from the reality that Lincoln would be considered radical left in todays politics; although to be fair, so would Reagan.... 11 tax increases, amnesty for illegals, gun control.... Reagan's damn near Marx's twin!!!111!!1.
Ultimately it's not so much a bizarro world that thinks Koch and Romney aren't conservative, it's a bunch of loud and whiny complete fucking imbeciles.... they simply yell their stupidity really loud in hopes that reality doesn't get a good enough grip on them to pull their heads out of their ass. Personally i give them a lot more credit than that... their heads are so firmly planted up their 6 that nothing will ever get them popped free.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's