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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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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
What I would honestly like to know is how much energy a windmill takes out of the air.
Probably much less than the heat a coal plant puts into it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
If they cause storms, it might be better to turn them off. I don't think that it is a coincidence that when they run, there is wind and when they don't there isn't.
Next on Fox: Does wind energy cause all the huricanes and why are we not allowed to use coal, like King Trump demands.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
Britain is not the best comparison for Europe. First off, Britain is always a laggard when it comes to clean power - it was a laggard just in cleaning up its act with sulphur emissions with the coal plants. The UK is also not really Europe and generally doesn't subscribe to Europe's more progressive policies when it comes to energy. Expect a lot of backsliding on this once Brexit is complete and EU regulations are no longer pulling the UK kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
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