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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.
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.
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.