Despite potential, Maine lags offshore wind power race

[jpak]

http://www.mainebiz.biz/news44046.html

Windmills in the Gulf of Maine could produce as much electricity as 100 Maine Yankee nuclear plants. So why is a state like Delaware tapping its coast before us?

In Bergen, Norway, a project funded by an oil and gas company is being built to harness powerful winds. These gusts are located more than 30 miles from shore at depths of over 300 feet, race up to twice as fast as winds on land, and could generate more than 200 times the energy produced by Norway’s current alternative energy king, hydro power. Capturing deep water wind is a powerful business prospect — the energy could be worth the equivalent of one billion U.S. dollars annually.

The Norwegian company Sway, a wind turbine manufacturer founded in 2001, has for years been working to build what researchers worldwide recognize could be a very lucrative invention — a cost-effective wind turbine for ocean waters deeper than 200 feet. The idea, on the surface, seems perfect — replacing fossil fuel energy with clean wind power collected by turbines placed so far out to sea they’re invisible from shore. But executing that deceptively simple plan has turned out to be one of alternative energy’s most confounding riddles. Besides the obvious challenge of figuring out how to keep floating turbines from being toppled over by unusually powerful gusts or ocean swells, there’s the conundrum of how to erect the turbines in the first place — current designs have them roughly twice as large as your average onshore windmill — as well as how to conduct maintenance on them, make sure the gear boxes don’t short out, and transfer the energy from the turbine to the shore to the lamp in your home. In the United States, there’s also a particularly perplexing web of regulatory requirements that even confuses the agencies charged with granting the permits. More on that later.

In Norway, though, the winds of change do appear to be moving. Last winter, Sway secured a $30 million investment from Norway’s oil and gas utility StatoilHydro to test a 575-foot turbine (275 feet above water, 300 below, plus a dropped anchor line) five miles from Norway’s shore. The company intends to erect the first prototype turbine in 2010, according to Forbes magazine.

The Sway turbine is long and lean with a mast the color of an overripe lemon. The plan is to tow the mast out to sea with a barge, stand it upright by weighting one end, and pop the blades on the top using a crane on the barge. The turbine is then towed by the barge out to deep water, the base of the stem drops an anchor into the seabed that fills with sand, and the anchor is secured to the mast and the top of the turbine by cables. The result is an elegant wind turbine with a slight lean that alone could produce up to 5 megawatts of energy, or enough to power about 1,000 homes.

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