A new report from an environmental nonprofit found the United States has enough offshore wind energy potential to power the entire nation’s electricity grid two times over.
Even in a future where Americans forego fossil fuels to power cars and heat homes with electricity, researchers from Environment America say offshore wind alone could meet close to the entirety of the nation’s electricity needs.
One of the keys to scaling up, the report argues, is an emerging piece of technology: floating turbines.
Unlike the “fixed-bottom” turbines in use today off Rhode Island, which are mounted to the ocean floor on massive underwater towers, a floating turbine can be tied down to the same surface using chains. That makes for a huge cost difference in places like California, where a turbine may need a support tower 50 stories tall to reach the ocean floor.
Dr. Habib Dagher is designing a new kind of floating turbine at the University of Maine, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy in the form of $50 million.
“Eventually we’re going to run out of space to put fixed-bottom turbines,” Dagher said at a conference yesterday introducing Environment America’s report. “We’ll have to start looking at floating also off Massachusetts’ coast, and beyond in the rest of the northeast.”
“On the West Coast,” he added, “it’s all deepwater, so you have only one choice: it’s floating turbines.”
Dagher has argued that floating turbines could bring states like Maine and California, previously overlooked because of their deeper waters, into America’s growing network of offshore wind farms.
There are other advantages too: companies can place them as far offshore as they want, far away from fishing vessels and property owners ready to sue over a spoiled view.
Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org.
