ENERGY Ӏ OFFSHORE WIND POWER
WHERE THE WIND BLOWS
Onshore wind power is only part of the story. Offshore generation poses even greater challenges, and rewards. Julian Champkin reports.
Offshore is very different from onshore. Scales are different – towers are much higher, blades much longer. Regional variations are also greater – not only in terms of shallow or deep inshore waters (the former allowing fixed farms, the latter requiring floating ones) but also in legalities and permitting – and politics and tax. Nowhere is this clearer than in
North America. The United States has nearly 1,500 gigawatts (GW) of fixed-bottom offshore wind potential; but over the last eight years, the nation’s 0.042 GW of installed capacity has lagged China (31 GW) and Europe (30GW) by almost three orders of magnitude.
Van Oord’s installation vessel Aeolus at the Dogger bank
President Biden has set an ambitious goal of achieving 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030. But last year a Danish developer cancelled two major offshore wind projects in New Jersey due to economic concerns. Perhaps more worryingly Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” should he be elected to a second term as US president. In his most explicit threat to the industry yet he reportedly said at a fundraising dinner with oil executives in April: “I hate wind”. The hatred has been reported
to stem from the former President seeing offshore turbines from his Scottish golf-course and believing they spoil the view. “If I were in the offshore wind
industry, I would probably be pretty, pretty nervous,” a former Trump administration energy official told the Washington Post. Nevertheless, in January
this year the US’s first large- scale offshore wind project, the Vineyard Wind development off the Massachusetts coast, produced power for first time, delivering around 5MW to the New England grid. The operator of the project said it expects to have five turbines operational in the early part of this year, before eventually having 62 turbines as part of the project,
30 CRANES TODAY
enough to power 400,000 homes. Unfortunately, in July this year, a blade became damaged – it is not clear how – and parts of it detached and fell into the sea. Debris washed ashore along Nantucket beaches for several days. The incident has not, of course, helped US offshore prospects. The rest of the world has been rather more welcoming. Europe has positively embraced offshore wind, especially in the North Sea. Many of the suitable shallow-water sites have already been developed with or are scheduled for sea-bed farms; attention is now moving towards floating farms – which can be placed further from shore where winds are more consistent, and made with higher towers for more efficiency.
Asia is similarly ebullient. Global
Wind Energy Council expectations are that Asian offshore wind capacity will reach 165GW by 2030. China will account for much of the growth, but analyst Wood Mackenzie recently forecast Japan’s offshore wind capacity would expand to 4GW by 2028 – a 62-fold increase from 2018. Public attitudes and policy in Japan are favourable: the government recently passed a law to allow construction of offshore wind farms beyond port-related zones.
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