David Wojick, Ph.D
CFACT President Craig Rucker has blown the whistle on Federal plans to put hundreds of floating wind generators off the Oregon coast. Floating wind is the latest green energy fantasy, taking its place along with hydrogen, EVs, battery storage, and net zero.
The idea is that where the water is too deep for conventional offshore wind generators, we will simply put these huge towers and turbines on floats. Pretty much all of the West Coast fits this bill, as does most of Maine.
Responding to a Federal request for comments on a big floating wind proposal for Oregon, Rucker explains clearly that the technology needed to do this does not exist and may never exist in an economically feasible form. The federal agency is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The plan is to designate hundreds of thousands of ocean acres as Wind Energy Areas and then start auctioning them off to floating wind developers.
His succinct comments are here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Comments-concerning-BOEMs-Draft-Wind-Energy-Areas.pdf
I want to dive into the technology a bit to show what a boondoggle floating wind really is.
First, let me say that, sure, we can put huge turbine towers on floats. Our fighter jets take off from and land on floats, right, floats called aircraft carriers. But they are really big, hence expensive. The same is true for floating wind, albeit at a somewhat smaller scale.
Look at it this way. Suppose you took a sailboat and put a 600′ tall mast on it. At the top, you put an 800-ton turbine with three 500′ long wind-catching blades. How big would that boat have to be not to blow over when hit by severe wind and waves?
The answer is very big indeed, in fact, huge. Now compare this huge float with the simple monopile that conventional offshore generators sit on. The monopile is a simple steel tube, maybe 30′ in diameter and a few hundred feet long, driven solidly into the ocean floor.
Compared to the huge float, the monopile is small and cheap. But simple monopile base offshore wind facilities are already tremendously expensive. Floating wind is projected to cost much more, from 2.5 to 3 times more, in fact.
In addition to the huge float holding up the turbine tower, there have to be a bunch of monster mooring chains anchored firmly to the ocean floor in all directions to keep the float from rocking too much in heavy seas or from capsizing. Then, too, the power lines taking off the electricity have to somehow get from these bobbing floats to the distant shore.
The highly specialized fabrication facilities and work boats required to make and install all this stuff in deep water do not exist. Given that over 50 vastly different floating wind designs have been proposed, we do not even know what to build.
I say projected because no utility-scale floating wind facility exists in the world today. BOEM is talking about quickly building thousands of Mega Watt (MW) of floating wind. Five leases pegged at 3,600 MW have already been sold off California. But as Rucker points out, the biggest facility in the world today is an experimental 88 MW and that just fired up a few months ago.
Those five California leases are, in effect, experimental. The developers are each going to try to produce an economically viable floating wind facility. As things stand, the odds are very long against them. I can hardly wait to see the Construction and Operations Plans, which are the first required step in the long road toward project approval.
But the ultimate crunch point is selling the juice via a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). If costs run three times regular offshore wind, which is already extremely expensive, then the required PPAs might simply be unobtainable.
However, California just passed a law allowing the State to directly buy offshore wind energy. Perhaps the plan is for the State to buy horrendously expensive electricity, sell it to the utilities at the much lower going wholesale rate, then let the taxpayers eat the losses. It is, after all, Crazy California.
Mind you, this silly game is being played around the world. Several countries have launched similarly speculative large-scale floating wind projects, and many more are talking about it. Of course, they are also talking about mass-scale hydrogen, EVs, and net zero. It is all part of the same green nonsense.
As for the American floating wind fantasy, stay tuned to CFACT as this engineering comedy unfolds.
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“First, let me say that, sure, we can put huge turbine towers on floats. Our fighter jets take off from and land on floats, right, floats called aircraft carriers. But they are really big, hence expensive.”
Those “floats’ also happen to be nuclear powered. If BOEM is willing to go with nuclear powered floats for the wind turbines this could work. Something like the diesel powered solar scam in Spain a few years back. It would still be crazy expensive, but clearly those guys don’t care about cost or we would not be having this discussion in the first place.
No just stop. It is a nutty idea period. Just because we might be able to build it does not mean it is fit for purpose. What next power lines to space? Beamed energy from orbital space solar farms. Extreme ideas are a dime a dozen. Tell them to spend their own personal funds first. Leave me out.
It is not as though wind generators are good for grid supply. They are not an equivalent to conventional generators but few will know or appreciate that fact.
Politicians seem to think that wind (and solar) can replace conventional generation, sometime, sooner or later, they will find out their error.
Those final words will come to describe far more than just wind power generation. Carbon sequestration, slow high=speed trains that after 15 years around 80 percent has achieved environmental approval; battery powered EVs as general transportation.
At first I thought the writer was describing the “war on terror.” Afghanistan is such a better place now.
Let’s put water turbines in the Gulf Stream and generate lots of power while concurrently cooling Europe, maybe even creating a European Mini Ice Age. Cool, a twofer.
Equinor, a Norwegian company, just put in operation 11 Highwind, floating offshore wind turbines, each 8 MW, for a total of 88 MW, in the North Sea.
They will provide electricity to 2 Norwegian oil rigs.
The existing diesel generators on the rigs will counteract the up/down output of the wind turbines, and provide almost all the electricity during low-wind periods.
The capital cost of the whole set-up is known to Equinor and the Owners of the oil rigs, but that info is carefully hidden from the public.
The production cost likely will be greater than 46 c/kWh, without subsidies, more than
23 c/kWh, with subsidies
Rich Norway can afford to dabble in such expensive follies, but impoverished Maine would buckle some more under such a heavy burden
If such units were used off the California coast, a high voltage cable would be hanging from each unit, until it reaches bottom, say about 1000 feet.
That hanging cable would need some type of support system
Then the cable would run horizontal to shore
Tampen is in up to 300m/1,000ft of water in the Norweguan Trench. At least they will have good data on weather and sea conditions from the oil and gas platforms. It will only supply an average of around a third of the power requirement, and at least they already have the gas turbines needed for backup.
“Look at it this way. Suppose you took a sailboat and put a 600′ tall mast on it. At the top, you put an 800-ton turbine with three 500′ long wind-catching blades. How big would that boat have to be not to blow over when hit by severe wind and waves?”
I think the dimensions are a bit exaggerated, since the largest wind turbine in the world has 425 foot long blades; but, hey, it’s not that far off.
As an engineer, I would do several things to wind turbine design to make it economically feasible, or at least more so. The first is putting the generator on the ground, and connecting it to the rotor via gearboxes and vertical shafts. That greatly alleviates both the high center of mass problem, and the ghastly maintenance procedures. I would also build the rotors using aluminum wing technology, which might be heavier (though not necessarily as much as you might think), but would be both less expensive than composites, and both repairable and recyclable, which composite blades are not. Fora floating wind turbine, I’d extend the tower shaft well below the waterline, albeit with a smaller diameter, and fill it with concrete, all to minimize the overturning moment. Mounting the whole thing on a semi-submersible would be the cheapest route for off-shore basing. Would it be worthwhile economically? Nope, no way ever. But t wouldn’t be as monumentally, stupidly uneconomical.