5 ms·

For those surprised by this being the first, keep in mind that offshore wind farms are considerably more expensive than onshore wind farms, solar, etc. Many cou

For those surprised by this being the first, keep in mind that offshore wind farms are considerably more expensive than onshore wind farms, solar, etc. Many countries that have invested heavily into offshore have done so either because land is a premium or the geography makes in difficult to build on land. If you have land to spare, onshore wind farms can often be cheaper to both build and maintain.

spiderice 3y ago
Why do it here then? We have a ridiculous amount of land where we could put solar farms, no?
- WJW 3y ago
  Because offshore wind can be even cheaper than onshore solar, basically. It all depends on local grid conditions of course.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  There are a couple of cases for offshore wind in the US: - To supply power to densely populated coastal urban areas, where there isn't a lot of free land for onshore farms nearby. - To provide some after-dark generation in areas where daytime solar power already surpasses the limits of demand. The second case gets weaker if there is room for onshore wind power in the same region, or if storage prices keep falling so that solar electricity can be used after dark. The second case gets a little stronger if a region's highest seasonal electricity demand occurs in winter instead of summer.
  - xen2xen1 3y ago
    Offshore wind farms can also slow down hurricanes. Studies have shown that a large wind farm could reduce a storm by a whole category level. Not a small thing.
    - theultdev 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - bretpiatt 3y ago
        TLDR: This is a real thing, turbines have built in protection, and there innovating on the whole system to really do this. It's a potential game changer vs. trying to build seawalls or levees. Read more, "Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines", https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 ...and..., "Wind Turbines in Extreme Weather: Solutions for Hurricane Resiliency", https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-weather-solutions-hurricane-resiliency https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-w...
        theultdev 3y ago
        I'm aware of the current built in protections we deploy for land installations. Those prototypes for hurricane prone sea installations do look promising though, especially the downwind blades. Looking forward to seeing successful test data for these blades, it's certainly not going to be easy to withstand these forces.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        How far do you think nearly-horizontal wind is going to carry a huge piece of metal? Unless you think it's not going to sink pretty quickly after it lands?
        theultdev 3y ago
        I don't know, do you know how far it can carry them? It can carry roofs of trailer homes over miles after ripping them off, I believe it can carry wind turbine blade multiple miles. Have you never heard of massive schools of fish, including sharks, being sucked up and carried miles away onto land? I think you underestimate the power of a hurricane. Regardless, it's a reasonable concern to have, is it not? It should be proven to be safe, not the other way around. Don't assume something isn't hazardous.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Because NY state isn't going to be the most efficient place to put solar farms. And running distribution long distances is also expensive and inefficient.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rowls66 3y ago
    NY state has plenty of room for onshore wind, just not in the places where most of the people are.
- thinkcontext 3y ago
  To add some more points the others have made: - You can make the turbines substantially bigger offshore than onshore - There's better wind offshore - Both the previous ensure there is a higher capacity factor - There's a lot more flexibility in connecting to the grid. Grid accessibility is a huge challenge in siting onshore projects. You either need to be near an access point or conquer the immense, years long hurdles of constructing new transmission lines - The farms can have a large number of turbines which makes capital and labor more efficient
  - Retric 3y ago
    > higher capacity factor It's mostly the other bits. Modern US wind farms built between 2014-2020 have a 39% capacity factor, there's only so much room to improve upon it. That said different areas have different wind patterns and electricity's value depends on the time of day not just total kWh / year.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  It's really an economic equation that you have to optimize for our moronic system of law. Do you want to go to war against Sea NIMBYs or Land NIMBYs? How much energy can you generate with a windmill weighed against how much it will cost to litigate against people who claim you are giving whales cancer. How much energy can you generate with solar panels and how long will it take to prevail over the people who say you are wrecking the habitat of the critically endangered San Benito Burrowing Amoeba.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  And shut down the country at 4PM in the winter.
- delfinom 3y ago
  In this example, Long Island being a giant island is still out of land remaining to build any large scale power plant, and the island along with NY is in dire need of more generation capacity.
davis 3y ago
It's also partially self inflicted due to the Jones Act which means boats to do the work need to be made by the US. A special boat that has legs that makes installation possible is required to do the work but we can't just use foreign boats which are already made and designed for this kind of thing. https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-act-biden-law/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-ac...
- thinkcontext 3y ago
  I remember for a previous wind project in US waters they were using a foreign vessel in construction. That made it necessary for it to go to port in Canada adding hundreds of miles and a ton of logistic problems.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Yep. You could have seen the towers of Vineyard Wind 1 in the port of Halifax recently.
  - ianai 3y ago
    Yes, and so much could be addressed and fixed if the US Congress could commit to some acts of representative democracy. Laws could be written, laws could be changed, and many or all the seeming impasses could be legislated away-through acts of representative democracy. Something, something, people should politely write their representatives and otherwise fulfill their civic duties.
- wcoenen 3y ago
  There are a bunch of different types of special vessels needed to build and maintain offshore wind: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/OCSNCOE/ORE-Support-Vessels/Types/ https://www.dco.uscg.mil/OCSNCOE/ORE-Support-Vessels/Types/
- patrick451 3y ago
  This sounds like a good thing. If we had more laws like this, we likely wouldn't be in the current situation where national security is threatened by squabbles between China and Taiwan.
avar 3y ago
Many countries that have invested heavily into offshore have done so either because land is a premium or the geography makes in difficult to buil on land. The Netherlands is investing heavily in offshore wind, and last I looked it's not those reasons, but NIMBYs. The cost per kW for offshore wind is higher, and even in a country as dense as The Netherlands the footprint of a windmill is relatively trivial, and can be combined with farming etc. But people don't like how they look and sound, so we're paying a premium to have wind installed offshore.
- autoexec 3y ago
  There's been research done showing that people's view on how windmills look is most strongly influenced by how they feel about wind energy in general. I wonder if people in the Netherlands have disproportionately negative views of wind energy. As for noise, it probably varies a lot depending on how close you are, and the type of turbines in use so maybe it does bother some people (although not everyone feels that way https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-sound-and-almost-no-fury-life-in-the-shadow-of-australias-windfarm-hell https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-...) but I know there's also a lot of fear around "wind farm syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome) which I'd place in the same category as people worried about wifi and 5G signals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...) making them sick and hopefully that can be overcome with education.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    Give the people who have to live near these machines a benefit from it, such as a monthly discount on electricity? Has this been tried?
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      Sort of like the people who are willing to have a cell phone tower put on their property. Ugly, but the rent more than makes up for that.
mc32 3y ago
One of the reasons they insist on offshore is that there they can transport very large blades via ship --but building in water is way more expensive and maintenance is costlier. In the continental US very large blades are difficult to transport (twists and turns on the way there) and there aren't planes capable of carrying such large bales to destination. I think there may be a start up trying to get one into certification.
- Arrath 3y ago
  There's a reason a good number of wind farms were build along the Columbia River Gorge, beyond it being a very windy place. Floating the turbine components upriver via barge shortened the last stretch of delivery that would have to be via trucks and eased the logistics considerably.
codewench 3y ago
Also previous attempts[0] have been bogged down in endless red tape by groups against the creation of such projects. [0] see for example the Cape Wind project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
whazor 3y ago
The latest wind turbines at sea don’t require subsidies anymore.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
They are more expensive but still cost effective (i.e. cheaper than burning fossil fuels or nuclear power). And winds tend to be more predictable and stable on the ocean. So, the capacity factor is better. And you are right that off shore wind is a lot less controversial. More importantly, it's way less hassle and risk. There are no NIMBY's blocking it. There are no complex land ownership issues to resolve. Magic wands to make all that go away sadly don't exist. So, there's very little land where you can just decide to plop down a few hundred wind mills without getting bogged down in years of bickering with the locals, sorting out all sorts of complex issues, etc. Also, out on the ocean there are no roads to navigate so moving big/heavy things around is a lot easier to do. All you need is ships. Transporting a blade that is over a 100m long over land is hard and expensive. The infrastructure just isn't ready for that. Off shore wind mills can be bigger than onshore wind mills for this reason. Floating offshore wind is now also becoming a thing. This will unlock areas further away from the coast. Mass producing, mostly pre-assembled wind mills and shipping them out is a scalable business. Companies have been doing this for a few years now and it's working. They are getting good at it. They are making incremental improvements and learning ways to improve things. This learning effect is very real. There's no shortage of suitable spots to place these things. It's more a matter of how many GW do you need and how expensive is that going to be?
- thedrbrian 3y ago
  > According to this page [1] it was $2 Billion for the installation of 130Mw of this farm and that it's only got a 20 year lifespan . Say a generous 50% capacity factor gives us 65Mw output or 1560Mwh per day for a total of 569400 Mwh per year. About 11,380,000 total from this farm in the next 20 year. so 2,000,000,000 / 11,380,000 = $175.62 per Mw and that assumes you bought all of the energy in that initial 2 billion and that there's no maintenance required. cheap [2] Assumes a cost for operation and maintenance for various forms of power plants and puts gas turbines at $20 and offshore wind at $181. still cheap. How much cheaper is it to have dispatch-able wind power? [1]https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/new-england-is-moving-ahead-with-offshore-wind-facilities-despite-their-cost/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/new-eng... [2]https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-om-how-does-the-industry-stack-up-on-cost-4417756/?cf-view https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant...

spiderice 3y ago

Why do it here then? We have a ridiculous amount of land where we could put solar farms, no?

WJW 3y ago
Because offshore wind can be even cheaper than onshore solar, basically. It all depends on local grid conditions of course.
philipkglass 3y ago
There are a couple of cases for offshore wind in the US: - To supply power to densely populated coastal urban areas, where there isn't a lot of free land for onshore farms nearby. - To provide some after-dark generation in areas where daytime solar power already surpasses the limits of demand. The second case gets weaker if there is room for onshore wind power in the same region, or if storage prices keep falling so that solar electricity can be used after dark. The second case gets a little stronger if a region's highest seasonal electricity demand occurs in winter instead of summer.
- xen2xen1 3y ago
  Offshore wind farms can also slow down hurricanes. Studies have shown that a large wind farm could reduce a storm by a whole category level. Not a small thing.
  - theultdev 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - bretpiatt 3y ago
      TLDR: This is a real thing, turbines have built in protection, and there innovating on the whole system to really do this. It's a potential game changer vs. trying to build seawalls or levees. Read more, "Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines", https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 ...and..., "Wind Turbines in Extreme Weather: Solutions for Hurricane Resiliency", https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-weather-solutions-hurricane-resiliency https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-w...
      - theultdev 3y ago
        I'm aware of the current built in protections we deploy for land installations. Those prototypes for hurricane prone sea installations do look promising though, especially the downwind blades. Looking forward to seeing successful test data for these blades, it's certainly not going to be easy to withstand these forces.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      How far do you think nearly-horizontal wind is going to carry a huge piece of metal? Unless you think it's not going to sink pretty quickly after it lands?
      - theultdev 3y ago
        I don't know, do you know how far it can carry them? It can carry roofs of trailer homes over miles after ripping them off, I believe it can carry wind turbine blade multiple miles. Have you never heard of massive schools of fish, including sharks, being sucked up and carried miles away onto land? I think you underestimate the power of a hurricane. Regardless, it's a reasonable concern to have, is it not? It should be proven to be safe, not the other way around. Don't assume something isn't hazardous.
pixl97 3y ago
Because NY state isn't going to be the most efficient place to put solar farms. And running distribution long distances is also expensive and inefficient.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rowls66 3y ago
  NY state has plenty of room for onshore wind, just not in the places where most of the people are.
thinkcontext 3y ago
To add some more points the others have made: - You can make the turbines substantially bigger offshore than onshore - There's better wind offshore - Both the previous ensure there is a higher capacity factor - There's a lot more flexibility in connecting to the grid. Grid accessibility is a huge challenge in siting onshore projects. You either need to be near an access point or conquer the immense, years long hurdles of constructing new transmission lines - The farms can have a large number of turbines which makes capital and labor more efficient
- Retric 3y ago
  > higher capacity factor It's mostly the other bits. Modern US wind farms built between 2014-2020 have a 39% capacity factor, there's only so much room to improve upon it. That said different areas have different wind patterns and electricity's value depends on the time of day not just total kWh / year.
jeffbee 3y ago
It's really an economic equation that you have to optimize for our moronic system of law. Do you want to go to war against Sea NIMBYs or Land NIMBYs? How much energy can you generate with a windmill weighed against how much it will cost to litigate against people who claim you are giving whales cancer. How much energy can you generate with solar panels and how long will it take to prevail over the people who say you are wrecking the habitat of the critically endangered San Benito Burrowing Amoeba.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
And shut down the country at 4PM in the winter.
delfinom 3y ago
In this example, Long Island being a giant island is still out of land remaining to build any large scale power plant, and the island along with NY is in dire need of more generation capacity.

davis 3y ago

It's also partially self inflicted due to the Jones Act which means boats to do the work need to be made by the US. A special boat that has legs that makes installation possible is required to do the work but we can't just use foreign boats which are already made and designed for this kind of thing. https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-act-biden-law/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-ac...

thinkcontext 3y ago
I remember for a previous wind project in US waters they were using a foreign vessel in construction. That made it necessary for it to go to port in Canada adding hundreds of miles and a ton of logistic problems.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Yep. You could have seen the towers of Vineyard Wind 1 in the port of Halifax recently.
- ianai 3y ago
  Yes, and so much could be addressed and fixed if the US Congress could commit to some acts of representative democracy. Laws could be written, laws could be changed, and many or all the seeming impasses could be legislated away-through acts of representative democracy. Something, something, people should politely write their representatives and otherwise fulfill their civic duties.
wcoenen 3y ago
There are a bunch of different types of special vessels needed to build and maintain offshore wind: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/OCSNCOE/ORE-Support-Vessels/Types/ https://www.dco.uscg.mil/OCSNCOE/ORE-Support-Vessels/Types/
patrick451 3y ago
This sounds like a good thing. If we had more laws like this, we likely wouldn't be in the current situation where national security is threatened by squabbles between China and Taiwan.

avar 3y ago

Many countries that have invested heavily into offshore have done so either because land is a premium or the geography makes in difficult to buil on land. The Netherlands is investing heavily in offshore wind, and last I looked it's not those reasons, but NIMBYs. The cost per kW for offshore wind is higher, and even in a country as dense as The Netherlands the footprint of a windmill is relatively trivial, and can be combined with farming etc. But people don't like how they look and sound, so we're paying a premium to have wind installed offshore.

autoexec 3y ago
There's been research done showing that people's view on how windmills look is most strongly influenced by how they feel about wind energy in general. I wonder if people in the Netherlands have disproportionately negative views of wind energy. As for noise, it probably varies a lot depending on how close you are, and the type of turbines in use so maybe it does bother some people (although not everyone feels that way https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-sound-and-almost-no-fury-life-in-the-shadow-of-australias-windfarm-hell https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-...) but I know there's also a lot of fear around "wind farm syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome) which I'd place in the same category as people worried about wifi and 5G signals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...) making them sick and hopefully that can be overcome with education.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Give the people who have to live near these machines a benefit from it, such as a monthly discount on electricity? Has this been tried?
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Sort of like the people who are willing to have a cell phone tower put on their property. Ugly, but the rent more than makes up for that.

mc32 3y ago

One of the reasons they insist on offshore is that there they can transport very large blades via ship --but building in water is way more expensive and maintenance is costlier. In the continental US very large blades are difficult to transport (twists and turns on the way there) and there aren't planes capable of carrying such large bales to destination. I think there may be a start up trying to get one into certification.

Arrath 3y ago
There's a reason a good number of wind farms were build along the Columbia River Gorge, beyond it being a very windy place. Floating the turbine components upriver via barge shortened the last stretch of delivery that would have to be via trucks and eased the logistics considerably.

codewench 3y ago

Also previous attempts[0] have been bogged down in endless red tape by groups against the creation of such projects. [0] see for example the Cape Wind project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind

whazor 3y ago

The latest wind turbines at sea don’t require subsidies anymore.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

They are more expensive but still cost effective (i.e. cheaper than burning fossil fuels or nuclear power). And winds tend to be more predictable and stable on the ocean. So, the capacity factor is better. And you are right that off shore wind is a lot less controversial. More importantly, it's way less hassle and risk. There are no NIMBY's blocking it. There are no complex land ownership issues to resolve. Magic wands to make all that go away sadly don't exist. So, there's very little land where you can just decide to plop down a few hundred wind mills without getting bogged down in years of bickering with the locals, sorting out all sorts of complex issues, etc. Also, out on the ocean there are no roads to navigate so moving big/heavy things around is a lot easier to do. All you need is ships. Transporting a blade that is over a 100m long over land is hard and expensive. The infrastructure just isn't ready for that. Off shore wind mills can be bigger than onshore wind mills for this reason. Floating offshore wind is now also becoming a thing. This will unlock areas further away from the coast. Mass producing, mostly pre-assembled wind mills and shipping them out is a scalable business. Companies have been doing this for a few years now and it's working. They are getting good at it. They are making incremental improvements and learning ways to improve things. This learning effect is very real. There's no shortage of suitable spots to place these things. It's more a matter of how many GW do you need and how expensive is that going to be?

thedrbrian 3y ago
> According to this page [1] it was $2 Billion for the installation of 130Mw of this farm and that it's only got a 20 year lifespan . Say a generous 50% capacity factor gives us 65Mw output or 1560Mwh per day for a total of 569400 Mwh per year. About 11,380,000 total from this farm in the next 20 year. so 2,000,000,000 / 11,380,000 = $175.62 per Mw and that assumes you bought all of the energy in that initial 2 billion and that there's no maintenance required. cheap [2] Assumes a cost for operation and maintenance for various forms of power plants and puts gas turbines at $20 and offshore wind at $181. still cheap. How much cheaper is it to have dispatch-able wind power? [1]https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/new-england-is-moving-ahead-with-offshore-wind-facilities-despite-their-cost/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/new-eng... [2]https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-om-how-does-the-industry-stack-up-on-cost-4417756/?cf-view https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant...