Floating wind farm proposed off Vineyard relies on unproven technology :: Cape Wind :: America's First Offshore Wind Farm on Nantucket Sound

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Floating wind farm proposed off Vineyard relies on unproven technology
Saturday, March 15, 2008
...Blue H, a subsidiary of a Dutch company, this week announced it wants to build 120 floating wind turbines in deep water 23 miles off Martha’s Vineyard and sought government approval to install a test turbine. Company officials then joined with the main opposition group fighting Cape Wind's proposed wind farm off Cape Cod in touting Blue H as a viable alternative that would be far from ferry lanes and invisible from shore.

...There's only one problem: No one knows whether a floating wind farm will work.

..."I don’t think they can get a large-scale operation going in two to three years, but the first step is to get a single experimental turbine up," said Walt Musial, principal engineer for ocean renewable energy at Colorado’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The idea for a floating wind farm off the Vineyard -- in water 167-feet-deep -- would need to overcome numerous technical obstacles, such as determining how big the floating platforms' submerged structure should be to support a turbine, how ocean currents will affect the dynamics of the structure, and even how the transmission cable will operate, said Musial.

...Because of the uncertainties surrounding floating wind turbines, experts and wind energy advocates are viewing the proposal as a hopeful but a faraway option. "I wouldn’t see them as a competitor [to Cape Wind] at the moment," said James F. Manwell, director of the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is working with a group developing European standards for wind turbines mounted on the ocean floor. "Nobody’s even begun to think about floating. You’re going to have to go through testing, verification. It’s going to take years."

Note: Click here to read this article on the Boston Globe website

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