The answer, as Weinstein sees it, is to construct floating generators. Offshore wind energy is following a development that oil and gasoline firms charted with drilling rigs: transferring from onshore to offshore to floating installations, Weinstein stated.
Weinstein has been concerned in a number of the world’s first demonstration tasks for floating wind energy, together with a 50 megawatt set up in Scotland. In complete, about 125 megawatts of demonstration tasks have been put in globally, and one other 125 megawatts are below building.
And the pipeline is rising shortly. In complete, over 60 gigawatts of offshore wind tasks the world over are within the planning levels, with South Korea, the UK, Australia, and Brazil among the many prime international locations in deliberate capability.
JOSHUA BAUER, NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY
A milestone, and what’s subsequent
Now, California is becoming a member of the checklist of governments leaping into the floating wind farm sport.
The state auctioned off 370,000 acres of the ocean, which was divided into 5 websites throughout two areas off the coast of California. The websites are in water as much as 1,300 meters deep, and would require floating wind expertise. My colleague James Temple printed a narrative diving into the public sale earlier this week.
Corporations bid on websites that might collectively home sufficient wind generators to generate as a lot as 4.5 gigawatts of electrical energy, sufficient to energy over 1.5 million houses. In complete, the websites offered for $757 million, with the biggest web site fetching almost $174 million.
The public sale represents a brand new part for floating offshore wind. Lower than a decade in the past, Weinstein instructed me at EmTech, individuals didn’t take the expertise severely when she proposed plans to construct farms within the state. “Folks checked out me and stated, ‘you’ve received to be loopy, why are you doing this, this isn’t going to work,’” she stated.
Now, firms might begin the journey to constructing US floating wind farms in earnest. However the public sale is only one of a collection of many steps between conception and energy era. Corporations have years of planning and constructing forward earlier than they begin producing electrical energy from the websites. Securing the permits alone might take 5 to seven years.
