https://www.wired.com/story/us-energy-offshore-wind-jones-ac...
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 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.
People like to walk and hike and camp and holiday places, and sometimes they don't like it if their view is "ruined".
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.
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
Nothing like walking on the beach to relax and seeing wind farms or oil rigs off the coast.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/californias-oil-spi...
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.
Or maybe the advertising was just crap which is why American investments failure hangs over recent firings.
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).
As in, you really can't travel in a straight line for very long without encountering man-made structures anywhere in the Netherlands.
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).
This is tired. Let's build a busy train track outside your bedroom window and see how long this condescension last.
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...
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.
[0] see for example the Cape Wind project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
- 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.
That’s actually worth more than the energy generation.
- 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
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.