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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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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.
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
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
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.
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.
I have serious fears that we're facing an unduly high risk of a major wind spill here. :(
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
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.
Especially when the reduction comes not from the wind turbines but from the power line to the mainland that lets the locals buy power from the mainland power company.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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!
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...