The latest in the Biden administration's renewable energy efforts is a floating offshore wind turbine. Large ocean areas are off-limits to economic energy development due to the higher cost of floating turbine versions. Over the next decade, the program will aim to drop the costs by more than 70% and position the US as an industry leader in this industry.
While offshore wind is booming in Europe and China, existing hardware is built directly up from the seafloor, which necessitates sitting in shallow waters. It works out well for the US East Coast, where a broad continental shelf can host large wind farms. The US's long delay in adopting offshore wind has ceded the field to the countries that pioneered it, as most of those projects involve a partnership with European companies.
A new map of the potential for offshore wind in the US shows that many areas are too deep to be exploited by wind turbine. The Great Lakes, Hawaii, and the West Coast are included. There are areas open to development along the East Coast.
According to the Department of Energy, there's potential for more than four Tera watt of wind power between fixed and floating turbine. That's enough to cover the US's annual electricity use for about three months.
Costs are the problem. They need to fall a bit before they can compete with natural gas. Nuclear power costs are higher than floating wind costs. The new "wind shot" program is meant to address that and simultaneously build the capacity to install floating turbine while making them cost competitive with natural gas. It's possible that US companies will be leaders in floating wind power.
AdvertisementThere may be issues with the use of the word "moonshot" in regards to government programs, but the term wind shot is based on an earlier, successful DOE program called "Sunshot." The goals for cost reductions in photovoltaic power were similar to those of SunShot, which was launched around a decade ago. Several renewable energy programs have been spawned by that success.
The cost of the panels is the most important factor in determining the challenges of solar power. Barriers that limited solar's economic potential were the cost of permitting and support hardware, as well as the ability to manage a lot of intermittent power on the grid. The issues with floating wind have nothing to do with the cost of the turbine. The effort is centered on the hardware.
The design of the floating platforms and the tethers that link them to the ocean floor will be improved for the offshore wind shot. Ensuring the supply chain can be put in place to feed a domestic manufacturing industry is one of the things the DOE will be working on.
The DOE will fund contests for floating platform designs, develop software to help design offshore farms and integrate them into the grid, and fund analysis of ports and the grid along the west coast to determine how to support an offshore wind industry there. The Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter and Afloat, with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control, will focus on field testing some of the designs that came out of an earlier program.
In addition to the obvious benefits from a leadership position in an industry that's likely to grow dramatically in the next decades, the focus on floating offshore wind offers the possibility of repurposing some of the offshore fossil fuel extract industry and workers. It is possible that having an obvious path to continued relevance will reduce resistance to some of the changes that will inevitably have to be made.
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