A rising tide lifted floating wind turbines. Now comes the real test
EXCERPTS
The business case for floating turbines, as opposed to their fixed-bottom counterparts, boils down to two points: they can do their thing making power farther from shore, where the high winds are and the people generally aren’t. In some places like California, the coastal shelf slopes so steeply that floating wind has been seen as the only option. But the engineering challenges of keeping buoyant, vibrating skyscrapers stable—and the high costs of solving them—serve as a potent counterweight......................
Substantial challenges remained, however, starting with cost. The levelized cost of electricity from a new floating wind project (a metric which attempts to make apples-to-apples comparisons between different types of energy possible) was about double that of fixed-bottom wind when the WindShot was announced, as much as three times that of a combined cycle gas plant and roughly equivalent to a new nuclear plant, based on data from Lazard and the Department of Energy....................................
“The deployment of commercial scale [floating] projects is still held back by some technical challenges in our view that have yet to be solved,” says Harrison Sholler, a wind energy analyst at Bloomberg NEF, citing in particular the dynamic power cables and offshore substations needed to transmit power from the structures to land.
Then there is the supporting cast: the ports, supply chains and transmission lines, without which a major floating project often can’t be built—all quite costly to develop.
Take just the ports, which, due to floating platforms’ size, must have large staging areas immediately adjacent to deep water. Studies conducted under the Floating WindShot priced the new and upgraded ports that would be required at upwards of $1 billion each...........................................
https://themainemonitor.org/rising-tide-lifted-floating-wind-turbines/
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Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law
Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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