Green Tech

Development of offshore wind farms has been restricted to places where turbines can be attached to the sea bed.

But earlier this week, Siemens and energy company StatoilHydro installed what they call the first large-scale floating turbine. The installation is off the coast of Norway, and testing is expected to last for two years.

The Hywind turbine will still have a ballast that is tied to the sea floor with cables. Wires will transfer the electricity produced to the mainland grid starting in July.

A Hywind floating wind turbine being hauled to sea off Norway.

(Credit: Siemens)

If successful, the project could open up offshore wind to countries that don't have relatively shallow waters of 100 feet to 165 feet off their coasts. The Hywind is suitable for depths of about 400 feet to more than 2,200 feet.

"Hywind could open...new opportunities for exploitation of offshore wind power, as the turbines could be placed much more freely than before," Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology of the Siemens' Wind Power business unit, said in a statement.

The turbine in Norway will be 7.4 miles offshore where the water is 721 feet deep. It will be utility-size turbine, with a hub height of about 100 feet, capable of generating 2.3 megawatts of electricity.

To address the conditions of the deep sea, the turbine will have a specially designed control system that will seek to dampen the motion from waves.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released images on Wednesday depicting offshore wind energy potential around the world.

Gathered from almost 10 years of satellite data, the wind maps can be used by offshore wind energy developers to measure which sites have the best resource.

Red and white colors indicate high wind energy is available while blue color reflects lower energy.

(Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

The best sites, depicted in red, have a steady and high wind speed for most of the year. Offshore wind turbines have the advantage of not having wind blocked by buildings or land formations.

Wind energy could supply 10 percent to 15 percent of the world's electricity needs, said Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dimotakis said offshore wind turbines could produce electricity cheaper than solar energy could.

There are no offshore wind farms in the United States, but many expect that it's a matter of time before one will be built. New types of turbines are being developed so that they can be anchored farther offshore.

The Cape Wind project, though highly criticized, is moving forward in its approval process. And a project led by Bluewater Wind off the coast of Delaware was recently approved by the state legislature.

Earlier this week, oil prospector T. Boone Pickens announced the Pickens Plan, which set the goal of getting 20 percent of U.S. electricity in 10 years from land-based wind turbines in the middle of the country

Wind power's best days may be out at sea.

Energy company StatoilHydro on Thursday announced Hywind, a project to test a large-scale offshore wind turbine.

Click on the image to see a 3-meter-high prototype.

(Credit: StatoilHydro)

The 2.3-megawatt turbine, a Siemens machine that is 65 meters high, will sit atop a buoy tied down by three anchors.

The system can work in depths ranging from 120 meters to 700 meters, according to StatoilHydro. It will be tested, starting in 2009, off the coast of Norway.

Building offshore wind turbines is an idea that has been advocated for some time. One advantage is that they are, in theory, out of sight, allaying NIMBY (not in my backyard) sentiment.

But there are a number of technical challenges and the cost burden of building electricity transmission lines back to where it can be used.

So there is still a lot of research and development required before offshore turbines are deployed for commercial power generation.

"The wind turbines must work satisfactorily even when subjected to movements, and it must also be possible to carry out necessary maintenance to the highest of safety standards," said Alexandra Bech Gjørv, the head of new energy at StatoilHydro, in a statement.

Want some turbines to build a wind power park? Get in line.

High demand--coupled with the engineering challenges of building turbines that can extract hundreds of kilowatts or megawatts of power from the wind--has created a shortage. Wind park developers, thus, are being forced to jostle their plans and supply line relationships to keep projects on track.

The town of Hull, Mass. installed wind turbines last year. This is their medium-size turbine, a Vestas V47 that can turn out 660 kilowatts of electricity.

(Credit: Martin Lamonica)

If you order now, you might not get turbines until late 2009 or later.

"There has been a backlog for a significant period of time. The lead time is around a year to a year and a half," said Myke Clark, vice president for policy at Finavera, which develops wind parks and wave energy parks. "It is a pretty significant problem for developers to find turbines."

Finavera has avoided much of the pain, he added, through equipment acquisition strategies and close relationships with suppliers.

The shortage may also have been a factor in the purchase of Airtricity, which operates wind parks, for $2.7 billion earlier this year by Scottish and Southern Energy, some have speculated. Airtricity had committed contracts for turbines. The company's main operations are in Europe but it is expanding to North America and Europe.

The solar industry has been struggling with shortages since 2004 when the German government beefed up subsidies. Growing demand in Spain, California, and Canada has exacerbated the problem.

You can look at the situation from both a pessimistic and an optimistic perspective. On the down side, the shortage puts a cap on the growth of wind power, which is one of the more cost-effective sources of renewable energy. There are a limited number of manufacturers of large turbines--General Electric, Vestas, etc.--so the picture won't change quickly. These things are big (the span of the blades can be larger than the wingspan of a 747) so it's not a manufacturing task for the lighthearted. Some start-ups are coming out with small turbines for individual buildings, but it represents a sliver of the market.

On the positive side, the shortage means demand is high. As a result, investors seem to have high confidence in wind.

"It is easy to get financing. It is difficult to get turbines because there is such a demand for them, so there is a big delay for that," Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government's green-technology arm, said in a recent interview.

On the other hand, the U.S. is contemplating letting several alternative energy incentives and tax credits lapse. That could cut the shortage, at least in the U.S. way back, said one analyst.

DUBLIN, Ireland--It's easier here than in most industrialized nations to green the electrical grid.

Peak demand for electricity in the Republic of Ireland comes to about 5,000 megawatts, Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government's green-technology arm, said in an interview in SEI's Dublin offices. The peak occurred last December, at 4,907 megawatts.

Studies show that onshore and offshore wind turbines located in the republic could deliver approximately 5,000 megawatts of power over both parts of the island, he added. This figure takes into account only sites where it would be somewhat practical to put wind turbines, wind speeds, the geography, and the transmission grid. If Northern Ireland is counted, the figure jumps to 6,000 megawatts. In all, the wind blowing over the island contains 8,000 megawatts of power.

"There is enough onshore-accessible wind for about 100 percent of our electricity requirements," he said. "In terms of our accessible resources, the biggest and most successful so far is wind."

The blustery situation has created a rush toward wind in the nation. The Republic of Ireland already has installed about 800 megawatts worth of wind turbines, and wind park developers have or are expected to file applications to put an additional 3,700 megawatts worth of wind onto the grid. The government will likely surpass its goal of having 1,200 megawatts of wind by 2010. (Ireland's ultimate goal is to get 33 percent to 42 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, a fairly high figure for an industrialized nation.)

While most of the turbines are located on land, developers are also looking at offshore wind, similar to the Arklow Bank park developed by General Electric and Airtricity. Tidal-power companies are also receiving a lot of attention.

If Ireland can execute on the potential, it would rank up with France, in terms of renewable energy. France, though, relies on nuclear power, a form of energy banned in Ireland, Germany, and some other EU states.

Chalk it up to geography. The island is one of the first landfalls for winds crossing the Atlantic, so wind hits harder and more constantly than most places in continental Europe. The capacity factory for onshore wind turbines--the measure of how much of the time the turbine is actually cranking out power--comes to 35 percent in Ireland. In Europe, the average is about 25 percent.

That means cheaper power. Electricity from wind costs about 6.2 euro cents a kilowatt-hour here--less than the 8.3 cents a kilowatt-hour that electricity from gas-fired plants costs, Brennan said. The wind figure doesn't include the costs of having a reserve (i.e. a gas facility that can produce power in slack times). Still, it costs less to generate power from wind than from gas.

Wind from offshore turbines costs about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour because of the higher maintenance and construction costs.

Expanding wind power, of course, comes with obstacles. For one thing, the wind doesn't blow all of the time, and often blows when people don't need power. Thus, the country would need power storage systems and there's not much that exists that can store hundreds of megawatts of wind-generated power.

"Power generators love a constant use of power, but they have always had this human demand curve they've had to deal with," he said.

To that end, SEI is participating in experiments with flow batteries from VRB Power Systems at a wind farm in Donegal. The batteries, ultimately, could be capable of storing 2 megawatts of power from the 7-megawatt wind plant.

The country also has a 300-megawatt pumped hydro facility in Turlough Hill. With this, wind power is used to pump electricity uphill. The water then gets released to churn hydroelectric turbines during peak times.

Second, setting up thousands of megawatts worth of wind farms means laying down a massive network of transmission lines. In turn, that means negotiating leases with lots of farmers and landowners. Bureaucratically, that's a mind-boggling task.

"It is easy to get financing. It is difficult to get turbines because there is such a demand for them, so there is a big delay for that," he said. "But in Ireland, the biggest delay is getting a grid connection."

As a result, it might be easier to actually concentrate on offshore wind farms. These farms could feed power into undersea cables connected to a power station built near the shore connected to the grid. No farmers involved.

Thirdly, any wind power buildup is going to have to be kind to owners of fossil fuel plants. If the country moves too quickly to wind, the profits of fossil fuel plant owners could be impacted. Fossil fuel plant owners, however, are needed for backup and reserve power.

Finally, wind turbines are in short supply these days, so erecting massive numbers of wind farms will take time. And in those intervening years, power consumption will continue to climb.

The British government on Monday proposed the construction of up to 7,000 offshore wind turbines to accelerate the country's conversion to cleaner power.

The proposal, unveiled by U.K. business secretary John Hutton, is meant to help achieve the European Union's goal of producing 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, according to reports.

Britain will overtake Denmark next year as the country with the most offshore wind power, Hutton said at an energy conference in Berlin.

The country now gets about 2 percent of its energy from renewable sources. The plans call for increasing the amount of wind capacity from 8 gigawatts now to 25 gigawatts of offshore winds by 2020.

Hutton said such an increase in turbine installations will undoubtedly change the coastline of Britain.

"There is no way of making the shift to low-carbon technology without making a change and that change being visible to people," Hutton was quoted saying.

In the U.S., wind is one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity, although off-shore wind is still not part of the mix in a significant way.

There have been a few large off-shore wind projects proposed, including Cape Wind in Massachusetts, which faces political and local opposition. A planned project off of Long Island, N.Y., was scrapped because it the financial benefits were not compelling enough. A Stanford University research team concluded that off-shore wind could supply 5 percent of California's electricity.

Via BBC News.