by Richard R. Loomis and Susan Salter

Back in July 2006, World Energy Monthly Review ran an article, “The Truth about Brazil,” in which Accsys Technologies engineering director Robert Rapier explained that just because Brazil had made a go of ethanol as a viable alternative to petroleum, it did not mean the United States could, or should, follow suit. Rapier’s concise apples-to-oranges comparisons noted, for instance, that “Brazil had a very small 2005 petroleum production/consumption gap – 0.2 barrels per person per year – that ethanol was able to fill. The United States, on the other hand, had a 2005 petroleum production/consumption gap of 16.9 barrels per person” – a gap that expensive ethanol could never hope to fill.

“It is clear that the path to U.S. energy independence is not paved with corn ethanol,” Rapier concluded. “And Brazil’s model for energy independence is not applicable in the United States.”

Now it is 2009. Substitute wind for ethanol and Denmark for Brazil, and you get a pretty good idea of how and why our new administration is moving forward on the promise offshore wind could provide. However, as with ethanol, the scale of the problem is quite different between the United States and Denmark. Americans use considerably more electricity every year than the Danes. Making up a significant percentage of the generation needs from offshore wind is much easier in Denmark than in the United States.

Danes Follow the Breeze

The success of wind in Denmark is well documented: The oil crisis of the 1970s prompted Denmark’s government “to switch to imported coal for its thermal power stations and to start a wind energy programme targeted at generating 10 percent of electricity by 2000,” Hugh Sharman wrote for Civil Engineering in 2005. “The target was achieved and there are now 5,500 wind turbines, including the world’s two largest offshore wind farms at Nysted and Horns Rev – producing the energy equivalent of 16 percent of national demand.”

By 2007 wind had delivered 19.7 percent of Danish electricity production and 24.1 percent of capacity there. That year, Denmark was the only European Union country to achieve energy self-sufficiency – by 130 percent (meaning that energy generation was 30 percent higher than energy consumption). In 2006 the degree of self-sufficiency was 144 percent. This is beginning to sound more and more like the Brazilian ethanol solution and could attract the kind of PR that benefited corn-based ethanol in 2005 and hydrogen solutions in 2001.

With numbers like that, how could Capitol Hill resist? On the eve of this year’s Earth Day, President Barack Obama announced that his administration had issued a set of rules that will significantly boost the development of offshore wind farms along U.S. coastlines.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, such offshore resources could generate 900 gigawatts of capacity, “roughly equal to the United States’ total current electrical capacity,” noted Jad Mouawad for the New York Times environmental blog, Green Inc. “The Department of Energy has laid out a more realistic scenario, in which wind power could account for 20 percent of the nation’s power generation by 2030. Offshore wind could reach 54 gigawatts of power, the energy department suggests, out of 300 gigawatts of total wind power expected in the United States by then.”

Whose Wind Is It, Anyway?

When we talk about U.S. offshore wind power these days, we are talking about the Cape Wind project. Introduced as a concept shortly before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Cape Wind is a proposed massive wind farm to be sited five miles offshore Nantucket and Cape Cod. The organization’s Web site, CapeWind.org, puts the project in lyrical terms: “Miles from the nearest shore, 130 wind turbines will gracefully harness the wind to produce up to 420 megawatts of clean, renewable energy.” The site states that “in average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands’ electricity needs.”

But the project then spent the subsequent seven years embroiled in debate, much of it pitting the alternative-energy supporters against the moneyed denizens of Cape Cod and Nantucket.

Cape Cod resident Wendy Williams, coauthor of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound, is a journalist who has followed the wind project for years. When the technology was first being developed, she noted in her blog, “the federal government awarded the industry an investment tax credit. This credit inspired lots of activity – but not necessarily lots of power production. Some of the early investment money was well-used, and some was not.”

To correct this problem, Williams continued, Congress in the 1990s “passed legislation that gave wind-energy developments a production tax credit, which allowed write-offs of just under 2 cents a kilowatt-hour for power actually produced. This cleaned up the problem of bogus investments, but encouraged a different kind of investor – corporations in need of a tax write-off to help the bottom line.”

So last fall, “when the market dropped with plummeting oil prices, so did investment interest from those same corporations. The wind industry suddenly found itself flailing desperately for funds.” President Obama’s stimulus plan, Williams wrote, “lets investors choose. Investors may now opt for a production tax credit, an investment tax credit, or, in some cases, cash in hand, once the project becomes operational.”

In an article for New Republic’s environment blog, The Vine, Williams noted that Cape Wind “has undergone two separate multimillion-dollar environmental impact statements by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS). Both studies, running several thousand pages apiece, have given the project a relatively clean bill of health.”

Not in My Back Beach!

If the MMS approves of Cape Wind, others are not so eager to jump on the bandwagon. Opponents include:

• Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. “We’re feeling very good; it’s not a done deal, that’s our message,” President and CEO Glenn Wattley told the Nantucket Independent in May. “There’s the FAA permit; the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t issued a Clean Air Act permit; the Wampanoags have asked that Cape Wind be moved out of Nantucket Sound, so there’s some serious issues that go beyond the view that are not resolved.”
• Save Our Sound. Audra Parker, the organization’s COO, said: “I haven’t seen the final [MMS] report yet but the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] has not completed its studies on the project’s effects on radar. Section 106 of the Historic Preservation Act on (the impact on) historic tribes sites has not been completed. And the rules for finalizing offshore energy projects have not been finalized.”
• Waterkeeper Alliance. This group issued its rebuttal to the MMS study, saying that the agency “released this final report at the 11th hour of the [George W.] Bush administration despite an ongoing investigation by the Department of Interior’s Inspector General regarding potential misconduct in MMS’ review of Cape Wind.” The Waterkeeper Alliance called the MMS report, which characterizes Cape Wind’s impact on air traffic as “negligible to minor,” a gross misrepresentation, adding that the FAA found the “potential for physical and/or electromagnetic interference to the radar systems used by the FAA.”
• Sen. Edward Kennedy. The Democratic icon, long an advocate for alternative energy, is foursquare against Cape Wind. Could the fact that the siting is located offshore Cape Cod, where Kennedy resides, have anything to do with his resistance?

The U.S. Coast Guard also has acknowledged the potential for radar interference to vessel navigation, according to Environment News Service.

Property and politics aside, we must remember the scale issue we have here in the United States. The Cape Wind project, which is the closest of the large wind farms to completion, will generate approximately 454 megawatts of power and, according to the Cape Wind Web site, replace 113 million gallons of oil per year. However, this would still leave our installed wind capacity at only 1.7 percent, a long way from making a real dent in our power needs.

The arguments against the offshore facility should, therefore, focus on the difference between producing clean, renewable power and the surface impact of producing it with offshore wind farms and today’s technology. Cape Wind requires 24 square miles to produce the 420-454 megawatts of power possible at a cost of over $900 million. A similar gas-fired project would require only 1.5 acres and significantly less investment. However, the arguments for and against the project have gone in numerous directions, helping to cloud the debate over the practicality of offshore wind.

Hooray for Our Side

At a House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment hearing timed around the 20th anniversary of the March 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, Democratic congressmen “were falling all over themselves to praise ‘the enormous potential’ of the ocean winds,” wrote Williams on her blog. “Republicans … not so much.”

Williams went on to document some bizarre statements from the right-hand side of the aisle. “Ohio’s John Boehner, the Republican minority leader, said that transporting oil by barge might continue to be a problem ‘if you have a lot of windmills they might collide with.’ Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young made a cameo appearance, during which he warned young mothers that if they continued their anti-oil tantrums, they would no longer have ‘Pampers’ available to them. ‘Think about that!’ the famous congressman warned triumphantly.”

Nevertheless, a step forward for the project’s electrical systems was reached on March 12, when the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board voted to grant Cape Wind a Certificate of Environmental Impact and Public Interest that “effectively rolls up all nine state and local permits related to the electric cables into one ‘composite certificate,’” as Business Wire noted.

By March 25, House of Representative Democrats introduced legislation to speed up the permit process for offshore energy projects, including wind. “Unlike offshore oil and gas development, which is dirty, dangerous and finite,” said Lois Capps (D-Calif.), “offshore renewable energy sources are truly the ‘wave of the future,’ offering clean, renewable energy with a nearly unlimited supply.” Massachusetts’ secretary of energy, Ian Bowles, told Capps, “I think your legislation is terrific.”

The hurrahs from the House were in sharp contrast to similar legislation introduced last year, during the Bush administration. That bill was “blasted,” as Environment and Energy Daily put it, in a House subcommittee hearing by David Kennedy, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Ocean and Coastal Resource Management Office. Kennedy told the press that the Bush administration bill would duplicate efforts by NOAA and other federal agencies that already have “extensive expertise and existing hydrographic, oceanographic and geographic data for many of these areas.”

Ironically, President Bush, widely viewed to be no friend of the alternative-energy crowd, put forth wind-power goals during his administration that easily match the goals of President Obama.

A July 2008 Department of Energy report, 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply, for example, would have required U.S. wind power capacity to grow from 11.6 GW in 2006 to more than 300 GW over the next 23 years – a rise of 20 percent. “This ambitious growth could be achieved in many different ways, with varying challenges, impacts, and levels of success,” according to the document. “The 20% Wind Scenario would require an installation rate of 16 GW per year after 2018.”

Even more ironic is the lack of project analysis that might suggest that Cape Wind is a good project in the first place. With limited sources of energy, could these resources be better deployed elsewhere along the coast? Are other higher-generation wind machines available to us and not yet exploited because of the hype over Cape Wind?

Is the United States the Next Denmark?

On April 6, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar spoke at a summit meeting for America’s Energy Future. Later on, he told reporters: “The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility. It is not technology that is pie-in-the-sky; it is here and now.”

But is it? Allen Brooks of the online newsletter Musings from the Oil Patch noted that, according to the Department of the Interior (DOI), “there is actually the potential of 1,024 GW of wind power off the East Coast. The DOI’s analysis relies on estimates provided by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.”

The DOI report notes the potential of 900 GW of power off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California on the West Coast, but due to the deep water, it is less likely to be developed. “With a theoretical potential of 1,024 GW of East Coast wind power,” Brooks continued, “if the turbines ran at 100 percent of their rated power generation for 24 hours a day, they [would] have the potential to produce 8.8 million GW of electricity, or more than twice the total amount of electricity generated throughout the entire United States. Since wind doesn’t blow steadily all day, the DOI assumed only a 40 percent efficiency output for the wind turbines, providing them the analytical support to conclude that this potential wind power could in theory replace all coal-fired along with most other sources of electricity in the country.”

A key point about the DOI conclusion, Brooks said, “is that it believes there is only 253 GW of East Coast wind power in shallow water, or in water depths of less than 30 meters, or roughly 100 feet deep. This means that three-quarters of the wind power potential the DOI believes exists is in water depths greater than 100 feet, and that presents a technological challenge for exploiting it. At the present time there are proposals for about 2,000 MW of wind power off the East Coast, with the Cape Wind project off Cape Cod the closest to development. Cape Wind is planned to have 130 wind turbines with 454 MW of potential wind power, or nearly a quarter of the total proposed wind power capacity currently proposed offshore the East Coast.”

Looking around the world, big offshore projects are being approved, but the cost to capacity is being downplayed. The London Array was recently approved to produce 650 megawatts with 175 turbines and requiring 90 square miles. The project will be huge. The economics in the UK are different from those in the United States, but it will require a massive investment to produce relatively few megawatts compared to demand.

Wind Has Its Place

Wind is definitely one of the bright spots for non-hydrocarbon-based power generation. As the Cape Wind project and others being implemented around the world show us, significant offshore wind generation is technically out of our reach today, but the technology is nonetheless worth pursuing. Unfortunately, when even our secretary of the interior makes “pie in the sky” statements that are not challenged, it detracts from the debate about which energy strategies the United States should pursue. And when our congressmen suggest that a lack of Pampers might erupt because of wind energy … well, how could anyone find them credible, much less agree that we should examine the projects in more detail?

The United States has a very large appetite for energy, and it is growing as we grow our economy and expand our population. Our quality of life is among the highest in the world, and of course we would strive to keep it that way. This means that we must consistently push the envelope to find cleaner, cheaper and more efficient ways to produce and use energy.

We can only hope that this administration does not begin pushing solutions that will fail to generate the needed energy at the expense of technology and projects that would ultimately help. These would include valuable wind energy projects that may be overlooked because they do not fit the high profile of the projects of Denmark.