The United States has its first large offshore wind farm, with more to come | Hacker News Reader

The United States has its first large offshore wind farm, with more to come

apnews.com

189 pointsgeox107 comments

For those surprised by this being the first, keep in mind that offshore wind farms are considerably more expensive than onshore wind farms, solar, etc. Many countries that have invested heavily into offshore have done so either because land is a premium or the geography makes in difficult to build on land. If you have land to spare, onshore wind farms can often be cheaper to both build and maintain.

Why do it here then? We have a ridiculous amount of land where we could put solar farms, no?

Because offshore wind can be even cheaper than onshore solar, basically. It all depends on local grid conditions of course.

There are a couple of cases for offshore wind in the US:

- To supply power to densely populated coastal urban areas, where there isn't a lot of free land for onshore farms nearby.

- To provide some after-dark generation in areas where daytime solar power already surpasses the limits of demand.

The second case gets weaker if there is room for onshore wind power in the same region, or if storage prices keep falling so that solar electricity can be used after dark. The second case gets a little stronger if a region's highest seasonal electricity demand occurs in winter instead of summer.

Offshore wind farms can also slow down hurricanes. Studies have shown that a large wind farm could reduce a storm by a whole category level. Not a small thing.

Wow I’ve heard of that. Do you have further reading I could check out?

That’s actually worth more than the energy generation.

Because NY state isn't going to be the most efficient place to put solar farms. And running distribution long distances is also expensive and inefficient.

NY state has plenty of room for onshore wind, just not in the places where most of the people are.

To add some more points the others have made:

- You can make the turbines substantially bigger offshore than onshore - There's better wind offshore - Both the previous ensure there is a higher capacity factor - There's a lot more flexibility in connecting to the grid. Grid accessibility is a huge challenge in siting onshore projects. You either need to be near an access point or conquer the immense, years long hurdles of constructing new transmission lines - The farms can have a large number of turbines which makes capital and labor more efficient

> higher capacity factor

It's mostly the other bits. Modern US wind farms built between 2014-2020 have a 39% capacity factor, there's only so much room to improve upon it. That said different areas have different wind patterns and electricity's value depends on the time of day not just total kWh / year.

It's really an economic equation that you have to optimize for our moronic system of law. Do you want to go to war against Sea NIMBYs or Land NIMBYs? How much energy can you generate with a windmill weighed against how much it will cost to litigate against people who claim you are giving whales cancer. How much energy can you generate with solar panels and how long will it take to prevail over the people who say you are wrecking the habitat of the critically endangered San Benito Burrowing Amoeba.

And shut down the country at 4PM in the winter.

In this example, Long Island being a giant island is still out of land remaining to build any large scale power plant, and the island along with NY is in dire need of more generation capacity.

It's also partially self inflicted due to the Jones Act which means boats to do the work need to be made by the US. A special boat that has legs that makes installation possible is required to do the work but we can't just use foreign boats which are already made and designed for this kind of thing.

https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-ac...

I remember for a previous wind project in US waters they were using a foreign vessel in construction. That made it necessary for it to go to port in Canada adding hundreds of miles and a ton of logistic problems.

Yep. You could have seen the towers of Vineyard Wind 1 in the port of Halifax recently.

Yes, and so much could be addressed and fixed if the US Congress could commit to some acts of representative democracy. Laws could be written, laws could be changed, and many or all the seeming impasses could be legislated away-through acts of representative democracy. Something, something, people should politely write their representatives and otherwise fulfill their civic duties.

There are a bunch of different types of special vessels needed to build and maintain offshore wind:

https://www.dco.uscg.mil/OCSNCOE/ORE-Support-Vessels/Types/

This sounds like a good thing. If we had more laws like this, we likely wouldn't be in the current situation where national security is threatened by squabbles between China and Taiwan.

Yep. The jones act is likely the only reason America has any shipbuilding capacity left

Nah, Congress keeps shipbuilding alive like any other too big to fail shit show, making the navy buy and maintain ships they don't want and at exorbitant costs because the ships are flawed from day 1.

All the Jones Act has done is increase shipping costs in the country as every shipper is forced to use trucks and rail freight instead. It impacts everything, even the costs to build homes because heavy bulk goods more or less end up on trucks over long distances.

    Many countries that have
    invested heavily into offshore
    have done so either because land
    is a premium or the geography
    makes in difficult to buil
    on land.

The Netherlands is investing heavily in offshore wind, and last I looked it's not those reasons, but NIMBYs.

The cost per kW for offshore wind is higher, and even in a country as dense as The Netherlands the footprint of a windmill is relatively trivial, and can be combined with farming etc.

But people don't like how they look and sound, so we're paying a premium to have wind installed offshore.

There's been research done showing that people's view on how windmills look is most strongly influenced by how they feel about wind energy in general. I wonder if people in the Netherlands have disproportionately negative views of wind energy. As for noise, it probably varies a lot depending on how close you are, and the type of turbines in use so maybe it does bother some people (although not everyone feels that way https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-...) but I know there's also a lot of fear around "wind farm syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome) which I'd place in the same category as people worried about wifi and 5G signals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...) making them sick and hopefully that can be overcome with education.

Give the people who have to live near these machines a benefit from it, such as a monthly discount on electricity? Has this been tried?

Sort of like the people who are willing to have a cell phone tower put on their property. Ugly, but the rent more than makes up for that.

Or like oil - “black gold.”

It is not just where people live.

People like to walk and hike and camp and holiday places, and sometimes they don't like it if their view is "ruined".

So called Bürgerbeteiligungsgesellschaften (citizen participation companies) are quite common in rural Germany. Basically a citizen of a concerned community can opt to become a shareholder of such a company and gets a yearly kickback from the proceeds. It's not quite that simple but that's the basic idea.

The other form you find even more often is the so called Energiegenossenschaft (energy cooperative) which is organized like any other cooperative. The federal system of the FRoG promotes these local cooperatives over capital companies in certain areas, such as utilities.

AFAIK, there is no model where you reap benefits without doing something first, ie. join a cooperative or buy shares.

I wonder if it's more proximity that's the issue. In larger countries a wind farm would most likely just be an eyesore on the horizon or nearby hills, but in the Netherlands it could effectively be in someone's backyard, blocking the visible sky and casting large shadows.

I went to university in Aberystwyth 20 years ago, and there were wind farms visible in the distance.

As people were still complaining about them being eyesores back then, on one occasion I just scanned over the horizon, seeing what I could see — Those turbines were only noticed because they were unusual, they were greatly outnumbered by the unsightly clutter of pylons, the roads[0], and even particularly ugly farm buildings.

[0] despite this being rural Wales where even the major road from there to anywhere else, the A44, was slightly narrower than an American residential street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YitFrEFRt576Yz7K9?g_st=ic

I think this is all a way of saying The Netherlands land is at a premium. Views and noise pollution are valued higher than cheaper electricity. The United States has over 200 times more land than The Netherlands, and only 20 times the population. The US has plenty of windy places with adequate infrastructure where selling electricity is valued higher than view/noise because no one lives within 30km of the windmill.

> Views and noise pollution are valued higher than cheaper electricity.

Nothing like walking on the beach to relax and seeing wind farms or oil rigs off the coast.

I love walking on the beach, and I can’t imagine seeing a tiny structure miles off in the distance somehow detracting from the experience.

I’m thinking the sight of this (oil rigs off the Huntington Beach coast):

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/californias-oil-spi...

I loved for years on the coast with wind farms in the distance, I quite liked it. Like living in a solar punk town.

Interesting the official Ørsted promo video about South Fork Wind is 3 minutes long, and contains no more than 8 seconds of footage showing the actual turbines.

8 seconds! Don't blink. The main focus is slow-motion shots of smiling people and kids. They really don't want any focus on how they look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5R_5Tzd5wQ

Maybe the advertising company believed vibes were more important, or maybe they had focus group claim so, or figured you needed lots of smiley vibes to deal with local population being NIMBY about possibility of barely seeing a wind farm from the famous beach resort New York /s

Or maybe the advertising was just crap which is why American investments failure hangs over recent firings.

I went to college on a beach town. The oil rigs in the distance was a fixture of the landscape and generally referred to positively (even by those who were no fan of the oil and gas industry.) I can only assume wind farms would be even cooler!

Or ships passing by on the horizon, or aircraft painting contrails in the sky. Really terrible to have a sight line to evidence of human existence. And all those fields, vineyards, orchards and meadows humans have created in place of native forests! Unbearable!

I’m thinking the sight of this (oil rigs off the Huntington Beach coast): https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/californias-oil-spi...

Seems ironic that the last generation of windmills is an iconic image of the country.

> I think this is all a way of saying The Netherlands land is at a premium.

Artificially at a premium because of local government (and by proxy their upper midde backers). Or basically always why houses are expensive absent major population booms or extreme land shortages. So basically we can just call it "land is a premium" because people don't seem to care these days even though hypothetically people knocking on your door offering millions is very persuasive even to NIMBYs but that option is so out of reach for developers they don't even try to rally support (unless it's a mega project with people richer than the local powerbrokers).

The land is expensive. The people that own the land have capital. The people that own the land leverage their position of authority to influence local regulations. This is all just part of the premium.

I mean, if there are countries where one can legitimately say land is scarce, Netherlands is definitely one of them. Compare maps of the Netherlands today with 100 years ago and you can see they've done tons of land reclamation and draining projects. And it wasn't for fun, it was because they needed the land for agriculture and human settlement.

And population density is way higher than most places in the US.

So they use less Land for housing!

Haha, per person, yes, but even then I'm fairly sure that a way larger percentage of land is used for housing than it is in most areas in the US.

As in, you really can't travel in a straight line for very long without encountering man-made structures anywhere in the Netherlands.

"people don't like how they look and sound" is just another effect of density. I doubt Dutch people are inherently more NIMBY than Americans, it's just there's nowhere to hide infrastructure in the Netherlands (unless offshore).

Cost per kW might be higher, but offshore has higher capacity factor which is very important.

> but NIMBYs

a high rise is one thing, but having windfarms near residential areas is probably not great. they are quite loud.

> But people don't like how they look and sound

and they have the right to object. They should not have to pay a sacrifice without compensation. This is why that premium exists - it spreads the cost of that sacrifice (to whoever is going to consume the power generated).

Sea is much more windy than land as well

At least here in the UK (which has the second most offshore wind generation in the world behind China) it's both - onshore wind got stuck in NIMBY planning hell and there's not really enough land in the right places to make it an easy option. Also, it looked for a while like with sufficient investment offshore wind could actually wind up being cheaper due to higher capacity factor, larger turbines, etc. Frustratingly, a lot of the British press has been pretending that the NIMBY issues didn't exist and the current government just made them up for ideological reasons or because their super-rich donors didn't like wind turbines, along with presenting onshore wind as the solution to all our problems and essentially ignoring the offshore wind and pretending the government has done nothing on renewables. (This seems to happen with literally everything - whatever the current governemnt didn't do or cancelled is spun as a magic solution and any problems it was having before are written out of existence.)

> but NIMBYs.

This is tired. Let's build a busy train track outside your bedroom window and see how long this condescension last.

One of the reasons they insist on offshore is that there they can transport very large blades via ship --but building in water is way more expensive and maintenance is costlier.

In the continental US very large blades are difficult to transport (twists and turns on the way there) and there aren't planes capable of carrying such large bales to destination. I think there may be a start up trying to get one into certification.

There's a reason a good number of wind farms were build along the Columbia River Gorge, beyond it being a very windy place. Floating the turbine components upriver via barge shortened the last stretch of delivery that would have to be via trucks and eased the logistics considerably.

Also previous attempts[0] have been bogged down in endless red tape by groups against the creation of such projects.

[0] see for example the Cape Wind project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind

The latest wind turbines at sea don’t require subsidies anymore.

They are more expensive but still cost effective (i.e. cheaper than burning fossil fuels or nuclear power). And winds tend to be more predictable and stable on the ocean. So, the capacity factor is better. And you are right that off shore wind is a lot less controversial. More importantly, it's way less hassle and risk. There are no NIMBY's blocking it. There are no complex land ownership issues to resolve. Magic wands to make all that go away sadly don't exist. So, there's very little land where you can just decide to plop down a few hundred wind mills without getting bogged down in years of bickering with the locals, sorting out all sorts of complex issues, etc.

Also, out on the ocean there are no roads to navigate so moving big/heavy things around is a lot easier to do. All you need is ships. Transporting a blade that is over a 100m long over land is hard and expensive. The infrastructure just isn't ready for that. Off shore wind mills can be bigger than onshore wind mills for this reason. Floating offshore wind is now also becoming a thing. This will unlock areas further away from the coast.

Mass producing, mostly pre-assembled wind mills and shipping them out is a scalable business. Companies have been doing this for a few years now and it's working. They are getting good at it. They are making incremental improvements and learning ways to improve things. This learning effect is very real. There's no shortage of suitable spots to place these things. It's more a matter of how many GW do you need and how expensive is that going to be?

According to this page [1] it was $2 Billion for the installation of 130Mw of this farm and that it's only got a 20 year lifespan . Say a generous 50% capacity factor gives us 65Mw output or 1560Mwh per day for a total of 569400 Mwh per year. About 11,380,000 total from this farm in the next 20 year.

so 2,000,000,000 / 11,380,000 = $175.62 per Mw and that assumes you bought all of the energy in that initial 2 billion and that there's no maintenance required.

cheap

[2] Assumes a cost for operation and maintenance for various forms of power plants and puts gas turbines at $20 and offshore wind at $181.

still cheap.

How much cheaper is it to have dispatch-able wind power?

[1]https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/new-eng...

[2]https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant...

I don't see the cost of keeping backup generation on the grid for when the wind isn't blowing.

It's still new though. I'd be concerned about corrosion issues which aren't as common in land installs. Has that been assessed?

Because these are so reliant upon political capital, the biggest impediment to these things is public opinion. The problem here is that the bar is unreasonably high. If the solution doesn't solve climate change, it's useless. The bar isn't the status quo, which is going to kill off humans. But our solutions will never work like that. Short of not existing, the human race at the scale at which we exist will always have an impact. It's about decreasing and minimizing the impact at incremental, evolutionary levels, rather than "solving" climate change.

Point being, this is good, but we'd be better off if we could just build on-shore wind farms. But...NIMBY, and an impossible bar.

This is all true, but we need to start somewhere.

At least the offshore wind farms aren’t super far from population centers. There is a permitting issue for new long distance transmission.

Keep in mind this is the first large *offshore* wind farm in the US.

When it comes to onshore wind power, the US is 2nd only to China in wind power production, and adding a ton of wind power capacity per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country

> the US is 2nd only to China in wind power production

Only because you could the "US" as a single entity without adjusting for area, population, or total generation.

The US 29th in terms of electricity produced by wind, China is 32nd.

The US is 12th in per capita electricity generation from wind based on this data. Where are you getting those numbers from?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-electricity-per-capi...

From your very link, sorted by % of electricity generated.

Denmark produces 55% of its electricity from wind. Ireland 33%. Germany and the UK about 23%.

The US at just 10% is down below places including Turkey, Morocco, Brazil, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It is slightly better than average across the world which is something.

Started construction in Feb 2022, with an estimated cost of 16.3 cents per kWh.

https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...

Curiously, at a whopping 115-metre-long, the blades on the Siemens Gamesa wind turbine exceed by 10m the maximum length that can be transported by the Radia Windrunner blade-transport plane [2].

[1] https://www.designboom.com/technology/siemens-gamesa-longest...'.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690182

Yes but it's an offshore turbine, so it can be transported by see. I think the plane is targeting onshore turbines.

It's an off-shore turbine only because the blades are too big for ground transport. Really feels like missing an opportunity not aiming higher with that purpose-built plane.

Not wishing to entirely trivialise this, Ørstet energy used to be Dong energy and I cannot stop thinking the US investment market wouldn't buy in until a name change.

Opposition to wind is growing from existing energy supply sources, because their income is under threat. Corporate power companies have zero social conscience. It's a huge problem in Australia where they combine with opposition political parties and amp up local opposition to "ugly" windmills.

Wind power at sea is harder, and so more expensive than on land but has some advantages alongside all the marine disadvantages. Coastal wind is often very predictable. For every whale fan concerned they impede migration there's a lobster fishery looking at increased yield from spawning ground improvement.

I'm not sure on the point your making (phallic or Chinese sounding), but I hadn't realised that DONG energy was originally Dansk Olie og Naturgas A/S (DONG), meaning Danish Oil and Natural Gas.

It's both. Anti CCP and the phallic probably combined to make it a harder sell to the US market.

or lean into it with Big Dong Energy marketing.

They sold off their oil and gas business in 2017 for a billion dollars before the name change [wikipedia]. Obviously the 'ONG' in their name no longer represented their activities. The idea their former name would be offensive to Americans is highly unlikely!

It’s a bit depressing.

Seeing how Germany and Austria cram solar panels into little patches of land all over the place is in stark contrast to New Zealand where I live.

If they can make it work, surely we can?

We are better placed for sun and the wind blows. We are mostly hydro already, I suppose that’s a plus.

Maybe it's similar to BC, Canada. They're mostly hydro powered, so they already have clean energy that's fairly cheap. As a result, the economics for solar never made much sense.

However, with crazy-cheap panels and low hydro reservoirs due to climate change, solar now makes sense and it's appearing on more and more roof tops.

BC being extremely mountainous and relatively cloudy can't help either.

Yes, the valleys and rain don’t help either. The interior gets a lot of sun though, especially the Okanagan.

Rooftop is not very cost effective. It works for individuals because of awkward rules about what they owe for society maintaining their access to the larger grid. It’s much more expensive than a dedicated utility scale solar plant overall

That's a pretty negative perspective. 87% of electricity in NZ is from renewable sources. NZ is a world leader, and should be lauded.

What is the basis for your perspective that NZ is failing to "make it work"? NZ is so far ahead of Germany it's not funny (Austria is similar to NZ with 87%).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_New_Zeal...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

> What is the basis for your perspective that NZ is failing to "make it work"?

Regarding solar! Not about renewables as a whole. Any perception that NZ is green is primarily due to other factors than environmental concern. Hydro was a good choice and it’s green, not because of it being green. We burn coal to make milk powder and trash our rivers to fuel the dairy industry.

Recycling efforts are abysmal and there is a regressive attitude to greening transport.

The high level of green energy is great, I just grow frustrated at the lack of progress.

How would solar help with "milk powder"? Or recycling? Or transport?

> How would solar help with "milk powder"? Or recycling? Or transport?

Sorry, I might be missing your point here as you already know my answer - solar power is an energy source.

Dehydrating milk by burning coal is a dirty option. Fonterra burns a lot. They don’t say how much but numbers up to 700k tons are claimed [1]. I’d love a better source, as real usage is likely lower. However they do use more than a decent sized power plant.

An electrified rail network is basic infrastructure. We send everything by truck. It destroys the roads and the bridges. It clogs the cities as the ports are located poorly for road access (Auckland and Tauranga). We depend on a few ships to connect the North and South Island. Electric ships have been considered but we have made zero actual progress replacing our aging and decaying ships.

Encouraging the use of electric transport seems an obvious thing when we are a heavily hydro country. We may be losing Rio Tinto, who use a huge percentage of our power. We could use this energy for transport. Instead we are upping taxes on electric cars and dropping taxes on large, fuel inefficient utes/suv/trucks (not sure what everyone calls them).

We could do a lot better with what we have.

[1] https://coal.org.nz/economy-coal/

A tragedy for a country that in many aspects are looked upon as a technological beacon.

But the profits are low in green energy which is why the backing from governments are essential. The private sector will not save you on this one.

The first....wow

I think that used to be the case, but more and more often I'm seeing distributed wind and solar/storage reported as the cheapest way to add power generation.

I would think it’s the opposite… once you invest in the equipment, then “generation” is essentially free isn’t it?

As opposed to fossil fuels where you have to keep drilling and mining.

The buck stops at selling the energy to net a profit, not producing it

Not correct. In the United States, utility scale solar and on shore wind has a lower average LCOE than anything else, including gas, without considering subsidies.

Gas is still cheaper than an offshore but it’s close.

The subsidies are to develop it faster And in more circumstances

Keep in mind this is the first large *offshore* wind farm in the US.

When it comes to onshore wind power, the US is 2nd only to China in wind power production, and adding a ton of wind power capacity per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country

My comment is based on my experience with reading this book, which explains the narrative quite well.

But I accept that people are biased and won't listen by default. Good luck USA.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

Sounds like you’re biased and not listening because you read a book

Sure. I read a book from someone who was in the space his whole career and I don't listen to shallow commentary, so I must be fucked. Makes absolutely no fucking sense mate

Yes you read a book and are actively disregarding everyone as shallow commentary as a result.

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