What the Cape Wind Verdict Means for Offshore Wind Power

The Cape Wind Associates have officially received approval from U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, to build a wind farm five miles off the island of Nantucket, Mass. This is federally owned property and the lease to develop the area for energy generation needed a stamp of approval from the Administration. It’s the first offshore lease to receive such a thumb’s up. Ever. So I wondered what it would mean for offshore wind energy generation in the United States.

I called up Jeremy Firestone, a senior research scientist for the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware, where he teaches courses on wind power and climate change policy. Firestone is also involved with the University’s own 2MW wind turbine, which it installed near the Delaware Bay to better understand the effects of marine conditions on turbines as well as avian impacts. He sounded relieved by the news of the Cape Wind approval.

“We’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for what seems like forever,” he said.

The Cape Wind project originally applied in 2001 for the permit to build the 130-turbine, 420 MW wind farm, and almost immediately met with opposition from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. The group has cited many reasons for opposing the project, including threats to the environment, the economy, public safety and the view. And immediately following Salazar’s decision, the alliance filed a lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of environmental groups.

But while there may be many reasons to oppose a wind farm, its impact on the environment and society is far lower than coal and oil, said Firestone. In just the last few weeks, the United States has seen two major disasters related to fossil fuels: the explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine south of Charleston, West Virginia, which killed 29 people; and the explosion and sinking of the Deep Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. And in 2008, an earthen wall holding back 525 million gallons of ash slurry at the coal-fired Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee collapsed, flooding 400 acres of land with potentially toxic muck.

Independent of the occasional catastrophe, the coal and oil industry regularly afflict the environment in devastating ways.

“Coal? It has tremendous human health and wildlife impacts,” said Firestone.

All coal plants produce toxic solid waste including arsenic, mercury, chromium, and cadmium. They use water to cool machinery and typically discharge the heated water into nearby streams, which kill fish larvae.

“Look at the climate change impact on avian species. Those dwarf any impact we might expect from wind power,” said Firestone.

Oil platforms permanently change the seafloor they’re built into and most of the oil polluting waters isn’t a result of an oil-rig explosion or ship wreck, he said. One-quarter to one-half of oil pollution is the result of operational discharging from ships, while even more is land-based that makes its way into the ocean.

Even hydroelectric dams “change a stream into an impoundment,” said Firestone.

“Wind power is comparatively benign,” he said.

Had the Cape Wind project not been approved, “it would have been a huge setback to the industry as a whole,” he said.

And it may have negatively impacted the Blue Water Wind farm proposed for 13 miles off the coast of Delaware. Survey results have shown that statewide more than 80 percent of the population support the project.

Offshore wind is especially interesting along the East Coast, where large population centers are located close to the ocean. Walt Musial, who leads offshore wind energy research activities for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., said in this video that 28 coastal state consume 78 percent of the nation’s electricity.

Those regions need lots of electricity, which if generated in part by wind, would require massive turbines in order to be economically viable. But the characteristically small size of the states coupled with dense metropolitan areas make land-based wind farms difficult to consider. What’s more, the rail and road system limit the size of the turbines that can be transported over land.

But just offshore, the Atlantic coast is relatively shallow and it gently slopes away from the coast, providing a good foundation for wind turbines. Theoretically, the turbines can be built at factories along the coast and then transported to the ocean location by barge. Fewer, larger wind turbines could accommodate electrical demands.

For Cape Wind, that won’t happen until the group can negotiate a deal with an electric utility, and then raise $2 billion it will take to fund the construction.

Image: Windmills at Middelgrunden outside Copenhage; iStockphoto