Guest post by David Middleton
Deepwater Wind LLC is on the verge of completing the first offshore wind farm in U.S. waters, a milestone for an industry that has struggled for a more than decade to build in North America.
Workers have installed blades on four of the five 589-foot turbines at the site off the coast of Rhode Island and construction may be complete as early as this week, according to Chief Executive Officer Jeff Grybowski. The 30-megawatt, $300 million project is expected to begin commercial operation in early November.
“We will finish in advance of our original schedule,” Grybowski said in an interview at a dock on Block Island. “And we are in-line with our budget.”
After years of false starts, the offshore wind industry appears to be gaining momentum in the U.S. The federal government has awarded 11 leases to companies to develop projects along the East Coast, off New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia. This month, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed a bill requiring utilities to buy 1,600 megawatts of electricity from offshore wind farms over the next decade. And in the coming weeks, New York State plans to release a long-range plan to develop wind farms off the coast of Long Island.
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$300,000,000 / 30 MW = $10,000,000/MW
Nuclear power plants can be built for less than $6,000,000/MW. Combined cycle natural gas power plants cost less than $1,000,000/MW. And… nuclear and natural gas can operate at 85-90% of capacity. While offshore wind turbines can only be expected to operate at less than 50% of capacity.
The economics of offshore wind don’t make any sense at all unless electricity prices are well over 20¢/kWh… like they are in much of Europe.
Fortunately for the owners of the Block Island Wind Farm, they will be getting Euro-sized electricity prices…
Under the contract, National Grid will pay Deepwater a maximum of 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour for the electricity in its first full year of operation. After that, the price will increase 3.5 percent per year – theoretically to 25.3 cents in the second year, 26.1 cents in the third year, etc.
One difference between the agreement approved Wednesday and the one the PUC rejected in March is that the new deal is “open book,” which means any cost savings Deepwater achieves while building the wind farm will be passed on to ratepayers in the form of a lower electricity price.
Onshore wind power is relatively cheap and works very well in some places, like Texas, where the physical geography enables fairly high capacity factors. Texas has more wind generation capacity than most countries, yet the average residential electricity rate is only about 11¢/kWh. New Englanders are already paying over 19¢/kWh… Why would they want to pay more?
Oh yeah… I forgot. They want to fight climate change. Which, if there actually was a need to fight climate change and they were serious about fighting it, they would be pursuing an N2N strategy (natural gas to nuclear). The fastest, most cost effective, way to reduce carbon emissions would be to transition from coal to natural gas and nuclear power.
that Roger is a very funny person. sadly he probably believes what he says.
Want to curb future CO2 emissions ??
Then commercialize Gen III and Gen IV fission reactors ..
I find it maddening that we have these advanced taxpayer
funded reactors ready to go yet we fail to deploy them ..
The technology is just too disruptive to the existing fossil fuel
primary energy producers and they are doing everything
in their power to ensure that these reactors never see the light of day ..
The manufacturers of nuclear fuel assemblies to the existing
fission fleet have no incentive to support these reactors either
as their fuel cycles are radically different ..
Instead we get increasing carbon taxes and token investments
in orders of magnitude less efficient wind and solar ..
Some of the features
Significantly more efficient fuel utilization vs existing fission fleet
Operate at atmospheric pressures
Cheaper to build
Can burn “spent” fuel from existing fission fleet
Passively safe
No possible meltdown
No possible steam explosion
Orders of magnitude less long lived waste
Abundant energy for at least the next 5000 years
No “new” science required prior to commercialization
Check out Kirk Sorensen’s U-tube videos for the history of the MSBR
Martingales ThorCon reactor ( MSR )
Russian BN-850 reactor ( IFR )
GE’s PRISM reactor ( IFR )
James you seem to be a little confused. We are building new reactors. I had been working in ‘new reactors’ division of my company since 2006. Just before retiring I was at plants under construction in China. One reactor just started up in the US and 4 are under construction.
We build reactors to make electricity where it is needed. Not to reduce ghg. That is not a design criteria. As it happens, the ghg per kwh is much lower than wind and solar.
I have also worked at a fuel assemble plant which included a specificity line. Each reload core is individually designed and manufactured. One or two truck are needed to transport.
James seems to be disappointed that we are not building crazy idea reactors to match the crazy idea off shore wind farms or crazy idea solar.
Working on proven ideas is just as interesting and rewarding crazy ideas.
Anything offshore cost ten times more to operate than onshore just research the oil industry
“the taxpayer funded Gen III and Gen IV nuclear reactor”
Which taxpayers and which reactors? Idiots like James like to repeat thing they saw on a u-tube videos.
Here is how it works in the US. A crazy idea gets promoted. It gets into an appropriations bill. Companies that build reactors bid on them.
For example my company got cost sharing money to design a High temperature modular gas cooled reactor. The prototype was to be built in Idaho with commercialization set for 2025.
The driving force was to produce hydrogen for fuel cells cars.
Here is what happens to crazy ideas. Some of us more practical engineers will tell you they are crazy ideas but you insist on paying us anyway. So we work on crazy ideas for a while and during that time we just get paid and put out pretty color brochures so you will give more money.
Meanwhile, another crazy idea comes along to capture the short attention span of the public and funding will stop.
Some will that there is a conspiracy. It takes a lot of work to make good ideas work. It is really hard to make a crazy idea work.
“fiascos being built at Vogtle and Sumner ”
So Roger tell me about the offshore wind farms being built near San Diego!
Location, location, location! Those are the three most important factors for deciding what kind of power plant to build.
The first reason not build near Roger is Roger is against nuclear and anything near him. Second, no wind!
China is building an $11 billion wind farm in Mongolia.
That ought to beautify region, lord knows the Himalayas are fairly ho hum.