Off-Shore Wind May Get Blown Away
The pros and cons of offshore wind are discussed in my most recent book, Bullish on Renewable Energy. A great deal of this section was contributed by my colleague Gary Tulie, and I’m very grateful for his excellent work and continued support through the years.
Here’s a good article that goes into this topic, presenting a few data points about the new 30 MW wind farm (pictured above) off the southern coast of Rhode Island in the Long Island Sound. The price tag came in at $10/W, hardly competitive with solar, on-shore wind, coal or gas, but it’s a start, and prices are bound to fall significantly from here.
The author points out that the incoming administration can (and almost definitely will) make it much harder for projects like this to go forward. I guess we’ll see.
The price tag certainly will drop. Last week a consortium agreed a price of 54.5 euro a MWh for a 700MW wind farm off the Dutch coast. This would certainly not be possible with a capital cost of $10 per watt!
With the latest generation turbines, a 32MW wind farm could be achieved with only 4 turbines – not that such a small offshore wind farm would be likely to get built! Wind farms in the 200MW to 1500MW range are now typical of what is gaining approval.
Thanks. Yes, the is hope on the horizon (pardon the pun).
The Europeans have the specialized ships and techniques developed from decades of building offshore wind, (Since 1991.) This would lower costs but US protectionist laws keep them from operating here in favor of US workers (and higher costs.) Deregulation may help costs and projects on this front though workers may be left behind.
Several States have been battling for the site of staging area for all East Coast off shore wind, by itself a massive project that would both lower costs and has been said to be too expensive to be located in more than one place. Such infrastructure would also lower costs.
Another aspect to this massive project would be the Atlantic backbone an HVDC offshore cable that would connect all the wind farms with several ties to the East coast grid. This infrastructure would also lower eventual costs.
There is enough offshore wind resources to power the entire US 4 times over and much of it is located next to the most populous areas of the country (just where it is needed.)