OFFSHORE WINDS BIGGER, MASSACHUSETTS ZONES THEM

State draws zones for coast wind farms; Aims to protect sensitive areas of sea
Beth Daley, July 1, 2009 (Boston Globe)
and
Wind + water = untapped energy: An abundance of power exists above Earth's oceans, study finds; A study by UCI Earth scientists finds that wind energy over the planet's oceans is a vastly underutilized renewable resource.
Jennifer Fitzenberger, June 30, 2009 (PhysOrg)
and
A Whirlwind of Research
William P. Mahoney, March 2009 (National Center for Atmospheric Research)

SUMMARY
Global Ocean Wind Power Sensitivity to Surface Layer Stability, by Scott B. Capps and Charles S. Zender of the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California at Irvine, reviews the latest data on the world’s offshore wind resources and finds the assets are about 50% greater than previously thought.

The larger assets come from an evaluation of wind at the typical offshore wind turbine height of 80 meters (260 feet) instead of estimating assets at the shipping industry height of 10 meters (33 ft).

The study comes at a time when interest in offshore wind is growing. The federal government, through the Minerals Management Service (MMS) of the Department of the Interior (DOI), recently granted the first-ever exploratory permits for offshore wind projects, 5 permits for areas off Delaware and New Jersey. (See U.S. GREENLIGHTS OFFSHORE WIND)

A newly drawn map of New Energy. (click to enlarge)

The state of Massachusetts, where a controversial offshore installation has struggled to get built since 2001, demonstrated how much its attitude toward offshore wind has shifted by releasing a first-of-its-kind draft Ocean Management Plan that will facilitate a series of wind projects in its coastal waters.

The Massachusetts Ocean Partnership blueprint gives the state’s six coastal regional planning authorities permission to build up to 10 wind turbines each in state waters 1/3 of a mile-to-3 miles from shore. It allows communities in whose waters the wind projects are proposed to reject plans but does not allow refusal to adjacent communities.

The Massachusetts offshore region being zoned. (click to enlarge)

Larger wind projects will be permitted in Massachusetts off Cape Cod near Cuttyhunk Island and several miles off Martha’s Vineyard. The plan prohibits development in the Cape Cod Ocean Sanctuary adjacent to the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Like the Renewable Energy Zones being created in the West for land-based wind projects, solar power plants and geothermal drilling sites, the Massachusetts plan aims to pre-designate offshore locations for aquaculture farms, transmission cables, wind turbines and other ocean energy systems and to set aside the more precious pieces of the sea where there are fish nurseries, endangered whale feeding grounds and irreplaceable ecosystems. Before developers could do anything in such protected areas, they would have to prove there is no better alternative.

What it looks like in Europe. (click to enlarge)

In response to the Cape Wind controversy, Governor Deval Patrick signed an Oceans Act in May 2008, giving environmental officials a year to come up with this ocean management plan. 5 public hearings will be held in early September, public comment will be taken through November and the plan will be finalized by year’s end.

Though the plan allows much new near shore small project building, a planned Buzzards Bay project will have to be cancelled because it is too big. Wind developers are expected to accept the plan because it gives a clear signal that big installations can eventually be built in 2 other areas adjacent to federal waters farther out to sea.

The designated wind-rich areas make up only 2% of the state’s ocean zoning area but would support 166 wind turbines. Turbines in such conditions can have highly productive 2.5-to-5 megawatt capacities. They also generally generate power much less intermittently. A 166-turbine project, therefore, constitutes power plant replacement potential.

The Capps and Zender study of increased ocean wind potential was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

There's lots more to work with. (click to enlarge)

COMMENTARY
Massachusetts’ proposed Cape Wind offshore installation has, for almost the entire first decade of the 21st century, been the Jackie Robinson of offshore wind energy. It has been discriminated against in many ways for things that were and are not of significance simply because it is the first U.S. offshore installation and challenges the Big Energy status quo.

The Massachusetts blue print will have no actual impact on Cape Wind or a similar proposed project for Nantucket Sound because they are in federal waters. That the state has come around on offshore wind to the point that it has developed a plan for its state waters is indicative of how big the U.S. transition toward New Energy has been since 2001. Instead of steeling itself for more confrontations to stop offshore wind development, the state is preparing to streamline its development by putting it where it will be least controversial.

The parts of Massachusetts offshore zoned for wind. (click to enlarge)

The Massachusetts plan and the granting of exploratory permits by MMS are also indicative of increasing U.S. offshore traffic. Shipping, the fishery industries, ocean oil drilling, liquefied natural gas terminals, tourism, wind and wave and tidal energy projects are all angling for a stretch of the bounding main. More and more pipes and electrical cables are being laid in seabeds while boats, barges, and tankers ply coastal waters.

The Obama administration’s DOI has settled its jurisdictional disputes with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the 2 agencies are pushing for development in federal waters beyond the 3-mile limit (to international waters 200 miles out). The federal agencies have no control inside the 3-mile limit where the states’ rule.

Other states have used zoning rules for their offshore resources but Massachusetts is the first to write New Energy provisions into them. The plan is expected to be enacted by Massachusetts despite objections from environmentalists, who would ideally like stricter limitations on development, because of the urgency of the moment. Environmentalists are caught between local needs and global needs and are willing to compromise. The Ocean Management Plan is – or will be – that compromise. Environmentalists are reportedly willing to accept some wind and tidal projects in return for some significant protections of what is irreplaceably precious.

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Ocean winds, the new report from Capps and Zender reports, is 1.5 times or more as valuable as was previously thought. The average global ocean wind power at the height of an offshore wind turbine, they calculated, is an estimated 841 watts per square meter swept by turbine blades. Winds vary by latitude and season. During stable summertime conditions off the east coasts of Asia and North America, winds may at times be 6 times stronger than previously estimated.

Offshore wind also offers benefits superior to land-based wind and the Old Energies. Typically sited in water up to 40 meters deep, offshore turbines can - on the wide shallow East Coast continental shelf - be located closer to population centers than new coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants and closer than onshore wind installations. That reduces the need for and losses to costly new transmission. And offshore winds are much less limited by intermittencies as ocean winds tend to blow steadily and predictably.

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In the past, offshore wind development was blocked by 2 major obstacles: (1) Environmental objections and (2) the harsh ocean environment. New technologies have resolved problem 2, as proved by the 30+ fully functioning European offshore installations. The urgency of the moment seems to be on the verge of resolving the problem 1.

Footnote: Nothing could illustrate the bizarre logic of geoengineering schemes more clearly than an academic paper incorporating the new finding on offshore wind. Despite the Capps and Zender paper’s evidence of offshore wind’s enormous potential for replacing climate change-driving methods of generating electricity from Old Energy, Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh and John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have proposed using the paper’s findings as a justification for building offshore turbines simply to create a saltwater spray that would create sun-reflecting marine stratocumulus clouds to counteract the forces causing climate change. The implicit assumption is that the forces in control of power generation will not sufficiently take advantage of things like offshore wind (and solar power plants and wave energy) soon enough to avoid ever worse accumulations of greenhouse gases and the worst impacts of climate change.

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QUOTES
- Sally Yozell, director of East Coast marine conservation, The Nature Conservancy: “All eyes are on Massachusetts to lead the nation in ocean planning…It’s a great energy plan for the next century, but when it comes to an ocean plan it falls back to the previous century.’’
- Scott Capps, Earth system science graduate student and study co-author: “To our knowledge…these two studies are the first global wind power assessments at typical turbine heights…To provide access to this power, technology to place turbines in deeper water farther offshore is being refined…”
- Ian Bowles, secretary of Energy and Environ mental Affairs, state of Massachusetts: “For more than 300 years the Commonwealth has had a unique relationship with the ocean…Today, we are taking that relationship a step further by determining [its] future based on science but also recognizing the imperative of developing renewable energy . . . in an environmentally appropriate fashion.’’

Time to get busy. (click to enlarge)

- Charlie Zender, Earth system science associate professor and study co-author: “There is a lot more power out there than you might guess…In the midlatitudes, you find these stable environments where air really takes off and accelerates rapidly as you move away from the ocean's surface…There's a lot of power in the wind. The more we compare it to other energy sources, the more I'm impressed."
- Frank Haggerty, former offshore opponent in Massachusetts: “We could have no say…Turbines have their place, but where I’ve seen them they are 7 miles out - not a mile.’’
- Zender, study co-author: "There are issues with every energy resource…but wind has relatively few compared to coal, ethanol or nuclear power."
- Jono Billings, operator, Cuttyhunk Ferry Co. and wind advocate: “Their look is interesting…But I’d say the island should get something for it - like free electricity.’’