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First Offshore Wind Farm In US Waters Delivers Power To Rhode Island (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, energy company Deepwater Wind announced that its wind farm three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, has the all-clear to sell electricity to the regional power grid. The Block Island Wind Farm is the first offshore wind energy plant in the U.S., and it's expected to produce 30 MW of electricity at full capacity. Deepwater Wind is slowly ramping up energy output and still must provide additional paperwork to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, but the executive director of that organization, Grover Fugate, told the Providence Journal, "we don't anticipate any major issues" to getting the wind farm fully online. The one hitch in the Deepwater's plan is that one of the five turbines was recently damaged when a drill bit was left in a critical part of turbine. According to the Providence Journal, "the bit had caused damage to an unspecified number of the 128 magnet modules that line the circular generator and are critical to producing energy." Although the magnet modules can apparently be replaced easily, Deepwater needs to have the components shipped from France, where General Electric, the manufacturer of the wind turbines, makes them. For now, four turbines capable of churning out 6 MW of power each are operational. The Providence Journal notes that National Grid will pay Deepwater Wind 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour of power, with the price escalating over time to 47.9 cents per kilowatt hour. Because the residents of Block Island have some of the most expensive electricity rates in the nation, they will actually see energy savings, despite the price. Mainland Rhode Islanders, on the other hand, will pay an extra $1.07 per month on average.
I can probably see a hundred or so from my house in the UK. Is Amercia really so far behind with renewables?
Nope. America is ahead of Britain in both total capacity and per capita wind power generation. Texas alone has more installed wind capacity than all of the UK. However, China has us both beat in total capacity, and Denmark has us both beat in per capita generation.
The US is very, very far behind on off-shore wind and the first installations are always expensive. Given 5-10 years they should be able to get to where Europe is and get the price down too, although of course Europe will have moved on in that time as well.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Five turbines is more of a backyard wind power vegetable patch. There is an off shore wind farm at Anholt in Denmark that has 111 turbines and outputs 400MW, there is at least one bigger wind farm that Siemens built in the UK near London (IIRC) that has something like 170 turbines and outputs ~600MW. There is an even bigger array of wind farms coming on line at Nordeney in Germany called Gode Wind 1, 2, and 3 which will have a max output of something like 900MW. But let's not be too hard on our American friends, I applaud any effort on their part to kick their fossil fuel addiction and they do have a habit of not doing things in small measures for long.
I don't know about the oceans/seas in the America's, but I do know that the North Sea once was land. The North Sea isn't deep and there are plenty of "underwater hills" that can be used as a base to build a wind farm. That alone makes it less expensive to build wind farms. How deep is the ocean around the American shorelines? I don't think it is cheap to build a wind farm when the bottom of the sea/ocean is like 500 meters deep. But again, I don't know anything about the geology of the American oceans.
Here you go:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
- http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
And don't get me started on the subsidies nuclear has received since its inception because... strategic.
The U.S.has the second largest installed wind capacity - nearly all of it onshore. Offshore wind farms in the U.S. are complicated by geography. Winds in the Northern hemisphere blow predominantly from the west, so the strongest offshore winds are to the west of land masses (which slow the wind down). Europe is blessed with an extensive continental shelf to its west. So it's relatively easy to build an offshore wind farm there several tens or even a hundred kilometers from shore, before the winds are slowed down by land.
About half the U.S. West coast (California) has practically no continental shelf. You go a kilometer offshore and the water is already deeper than the European continental shelf. Go a few more kilometers offshore and the water is 1-3 km deep. Northern California to Washington does have a slight continental shelf, but (1) practically nobody lives along the coast north of San Francisco, and (2) the bulk of U.S. hydroelectric power is there giving the region the cheapest electricity in the country. So in the geographic region of the U.S.which is most analogous to Europe in terms of strongest winds, offshore wind farms are unfeasible due to underwater topography, (lack of) population, or economics.
The U.S. East coast has a large continental shelf, but due to the direction of the prevailing winds, you have to go far offshore to find winds stronger than what you'd find onshore. The focus of most offshore wind in the U.S. has been just south of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, where the shoreline turns almost directly east-west, allowing wind speeds to pick up relatively close to shore. It's still nowhere near as good as the offshore winds west of Europe though. The wind farms off Scotland enjoy some of the highest capacity factors on earth - higher than 60%. Typical offshore wind capacity factor in the U.S. is closer to 30%-35%.
But what do I know. I'm just an ignorant American.
The area around Block Island has a maximum depth of 60 meters.
I don't think that's quite how it works.
More likely the islanders have been paying overprice until now to get power generated on the mainland out to the island, but now that a wind farm is built close to the island they can get that power cheaper than what they're getting right now, and it's the people on the mainland that end up paying more because now THEY are doing the long import.
Or maybe you could do a little research instead of assuming. They did not have a mainland connection, so they paid for high price diesel. This project included a mainland connection as part of the agreement, because wind power can't work by itself, it needs a grid with traditional sources to offset its intermittency.
What is not talked about is the fact that power culd have been less expensive overall had they just build the mainland connection and built more on-shore wind.
The west coast is pretty much useless with an extremely short continental shelf.
About 58% of US wind resources off shore are in waters too deep to mount to the sea floor. Fortunately a lot of work is going into developing floating wind turbines so this should become a non-issue in due course.
According to the DOE the US has over 2,000 gigawatts of available wind power offshore which is more than enough in theory to supply the entire current electricity consumption of the US. Frankly we are being foolish to not take full advantage of offshore wind.
The east coast does not have reliable wind patterns for efficient wind generation.
That's evidently not true at least as a general proposition since they are installing wind farms on the east coast including the one discussed here near Rhode Island. I'm sure it's focally true for some areas but clearly not for the entire eastern seaboard.