Offshore wind power has the potential to provide all the electrical power needed by the Northeast with thousands of extremely large wind turbines located offshore. But one of the biggest hurdles to creating that reality is getting the wind power from offshore generation points to the power grid on land.
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Eric Hines
Overcoming those hurdles is both an engineering and a political challenge. And Tufts students and faculty are in the midst of efforts to solve both. Their work has the potential to generate thousands of new jobs and fuel a massive infrastructure effort not seen since the New Deal in the 1930s.
Tufts Now recently spoke with Eric Hines to get a better understanding of those “last mile” engineering and political challenges. Hines is Professor of the Practice and Tsutsumi Faculty Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts School of Engineering.
How important is wind power overall in the U.S. right now?
In 2021, utility scale wind and solar power from large-scale farms provided approximately 12 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. That’s an amount dwarfed by fossil fuels, which account for approximately 60 percent of total U.S. electricity production-with nuclear, hydroelectric power, and other renewables being the other major sources.
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We have heard a lot about offshore wind farms in New England. Why build them there? And what companies are involved?
Consistent winds and shallow federal waters on the Outer Continental Shelf make New England and the Mid-Atlantic among the best places to build offshore wind farms in the U.S. While Iowa, Texas, and Oklahoma also offer ideal locations for generating land-based wind energy, state decision-makers on the East Coast have been attracted to our offshore wind resource because it is so close to our major coastal cities.
Thus far, the Europeans have invested a lot more than the U.S. in developing offshore wind technology. Currently, it is predominantly companies from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal that are obtaining leases from the U.S. federal government to create wind farms off the coast of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states.
Is wind power more costly?
While there is a lot of infrastructure involved, ultimately, the average price of offshore wind power contracted for purchase to date is comparable to average wholesale electricity prices from fossil fuels in New England in 2022.
Are wind farms more effective as an energy resource than solar panels?
From our perspective, solar energy and wind energy are complementary renewable energy sources. Neither solar nor wind energy alone can do the job. We need both.
In order to understand offshore wind, one has to consider scale. A single wind turbine is taller than Boston’s Prudential Tower. Approximately 1000 of these mammoth offshore wind turbines operating at 100 percent capacity could generate all the power New England needs. Renewables such as solar and wind operate, however, at approximately 25 to 50 percent capacity due to the natural variations in resource availability. Solar is on the lower end of this capacity spectrum and offshore wind is on the higher end.
Electricity demands fluctuate daily and seasonally, and a few times per year peak demands can reach more than twice the typical daily demand. Furthermore, to cut CO2 emissions, we must transition our energy sector to an electricity-based system where we generate our electricity with renewables. Assuming a 100 percent increase in electricity demand between now and 2050 and a 50 percent capacity factor, approximately 4000 offshore wind turbines plus well-designed storage could meet New England’s energy needs in 2050.
By comparison, to generate a similar amount of energy, you would need solar panels blanketing every home as well as miles and miles of open land. Large office buildings in downtown Boston or Manhattan couldn’t build enough onsite solar panels to supply their energy needs.
Getting all the power generated by wind turbines into the on-land power grid is a huge challenge, isn’t it?
Currently, each offshore wind project is seeking its own unique connection to our existing land-based grid via a point of interconnection. This is complicated by the fact that offshore wind lease areas are awarded by the federal government and power purchase agreements are awarded by individual states. This rapidly evolving and complicated regulatory system has led, for example, to more than one company developing plans to provide energy to New York from wind farms off the Massachusetts coast.
There is ongoing work in several states and at the federal level to develop long-range plans that can avoid 200 or 300 different cables landing on our sensitive coastlines from different points offshore-it’s the equivalent of a hodgepodge of extension cords.
If you build an addition to a house, you could supply all the energy through a bunch of extension cords from your old house into the addition. But instead, you hire an electrician and build a system that will be durable, efficient, and safe. We need to have the same approach to building our renewable energy supply with offshore wind power.
If, as a society, we do this right, we have the potential to simultaneously save the planet, create healthier communities, and create tens or even hundreds of thousands of new, high-paying jobs.
