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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.
Does 5 turbines really make it a farm?
So shall we look at subsidies to the fossil fuel sector, which dwarf all the renewable energy subsidies put together?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Normally I am the first to ridicule USA, but in this case, I won't. It is their very first installation, it is obvious that it will be expensive - they lack infrastructure to mass produce offshore windparks. The next windpark will be far cheaper.
Americans, you have my congratulations for the first step! Took you long enough but you'll get there eventually.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Hopefully not. They'll make a damned good profit with all the hot air that'll be blowing.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
4 links to articles asserting that fossil fuels get subsidies, and the only subsidy actually named is, hilariously, the cap on liability for nuclear accidents. If you had doubts about the neutrality of Wikipedia before, ask yourself why that would be included in a section titled "Impact of fossil fuel subsidies".
One article also links to another article that mentions production expenses for drilling, and loss of value of a field. These may sound familiar to people who have ever done business taxes, because similar deductions are available to most businesses. Also listed in that article are generic tax breaks available to all or most businesses.
See that "Preview" button?
47.9 cents/kWh? That's insane
It's 0.50-1.50kWh here in Ontario. This is what Feed in Tariff programs do, drive the price of electricity through the roof. It is now so bad in Ontario, that people are going broke trying to pay for electricity bills. The federal Liberals, are now looking at this *exact* policy. If it passes, you can be assured that you'll likely see mass protests and riots in the streets here in Canada. People can't afford 0.18/kWH(which is the peak price in Ontario) already. Top this off with the provincial Liberals in Ontario, the federal Liberals in Ottawa and the NDP in Alberta wanting to push a carbon tax? Not a chance that there won't be huge problems, especially when the most conservative estimate is that it will raise the cost of goods across all sectors by 20%
You want to know what the kicker is? In Ontario "green energy" accounts for under 1% of total generation and over 55% of the total price sold to consumers.
Om, nomnomnom...
Thank you. With all those idiots here making ignorant comparisons, its nice to see that someone actually thinks about the "why" part.
Is Amercia really so far behind with renewables?
Yes and no. The answer like most things having to do with America the answer is complicated. America actually has quite a lot of wind and solar power installed with more coming all the time. But America also has some pretty entrenched fossil fuel interests and a climate denying political right and some NIMBYs that makes installing renewable power more difficult than it should be. America is pretty far behind on off-shore wind power in particular. Sad given that America is in many ways a maritime nation with some of the longest coasts in the world.
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.
The inhabited area of Texas is far smaller than that of the UK, especially if you don't count whole cattle ranches as residences.
Texas is very close in size to France (696,241 km^2 vs 643,801 km^2) but has roughly 40% of the population (26 million vs 66 million respectively). The UK population is roughly the same as France but an area of 242,495 km^2. So the population density of Texas is lower but if you take the rural areas of Texas out of the equation (most of West Texas) the population density isn't too far off from the UK. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are all in the eastern half of the state and together account for most of the population. So the density of the "inhabited" parts of Texas (the eastern half mostly) is actually pretty close to the UK.
And Obama and both Clintons were once anti-gay rights. What's your point?
LOL an Ontario Conservative shill on Slashdot, whodathunkit!
Not sure if you don't read, or just like spouting ideology but pretty much everything you said is in error, other than the fact that you posted some op ed pieces of conservative based newspapers about Ontario people mad about energy bills. I'll concede that the Liberals "green" direction of a few years ago hasn't produced the results they wanted, and it likely has resulted in slightly higher energy costs. You could also say that (subtracting the "green" bit) about just about just about every political party in Ontario for the last 20 years, Conservatives included. That privatization stuff that Harris and his Conservatives did for the only reason to try and make their budget look balanced was BS. At least the "green" plan actually had some positive environmental benefits if not anything else!
OK, so exactly what did you get wrong? Let's start!
First:
"The FIT Program is open to projects with a rated electricity generating capacity greater than 10 kilowatts (kW) and generally up to 500 kW." is located right in the website your cited if you actually took 5 seconds to read it. Do you know what 10-500KW is? This is the home generation, typical solar, basically when someone puts a couple PV panels on their roof and calls it a day. The FIT program is not for a 20MW solar farm, or a 200MW wind farm, which is where the actual generation occurs, and the those Liberal subsidies kick in. So you are not even talking about the correct thing.
Second:
"Most conservative estimate is that it will raise the cost of goods across all sectors by 20%". I think the emphasis here is "Conservative", in political party spin. I note you cite nothing here, and I can only assume you made up that value off the top of your head. It's nice and round, and ridiculous. For one, "across all sectors" is obviously false, as not all sectors produce pollution, or consume a lot of energy. Not going to bother looking it up, feel free to actually cite something.
Third:
In Ontario "green energy" accounts for under 1% of total generation". Also a totally made up number. I know for a fact, so I did look it up:
In summary, not including Hydro, Wind/Solar/Bio probably make up about 18% of total generation... a far cry from 1%
https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/o...
Anyway I'm sure you consider these all to be Liberal lies or something, but for anyone else reading, do the 30 seconds of google searches when you see these kinds of made up numbers and nonsense in posts...
The problem of course, is that while the US has a good bit of coastline, we have a lot of real estate that is a long way from the ocean.
Of course we do. We also have the ability to transmit electricity there. And don't kid yourself. A huge percentage of the population of the US lives within two hundred miles of the ocean. This includes the entire populations of New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Jacksonville, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and plenty more. Counties directly on the shoreline account for 40% of US population. All of these cities could easily be supplied by off shore wind power. We're idiots for not taking advantage of this power source.
The east coast of the US is prone to some serious weather excursions in the form of hurricanes. A lot of them. Even in Rhode Island. So an offshore wind facility has to be designed with that in mind.
They are. My understanding is that they stop the turbines from spinning above a certain wind load (somewhere around 125kph currently). They have a hurricane mode where the blades are pitched to neutral so it doesn't spin and then locked down facing the wind. Of course if the wind gets high enough damage is likely to result from a hurricane on land or off shore. Cuba had some wind farms survive hurricane Sandy which had winds of 110mph.