Construction Begins on Wind Farm off Block Island
The Rhode Island-based firm Deepwater Wind, which had hoped to build a wind farm to power the East End off of the Montauk coast, has begun work installing five turbines in a demonstration project off the coast of Block Island, which could be the first offshore wind farm in the United States.
The Deepwater ONE project off of Montauk was not among the bid winners of last year’s alternative energy contracts awarded by the Long Island Power Authority, though East End wind energy advocates had staged several rallies in support of the project at LIPA board meetings in Uniondale last fall.
Deepwater Wind won a 30-year lease in 2013 to 256 square miles of prime federal lands about 30 miles off the coast of Montauk, where they initially planned to build about 35 6-megawatt turbines, but have room to install up to 200 turbines, if a utility company agrees to buy the electricity they produce.
The smaller, 30-megawatt Block Island project, has not been suffering the same setbacks. Deepwater Wind received $290 million in financing for the Block Island project earlier this year from Societe Generale in Paris, France and KeyBank National Association, putting the project ahead of Massachusetts’ Cape Wind in the pipeline after that firm suffered financing and power-purchasing setbacks this spring.
The project is expected to be online providing power to Block Island by the end of 2016.
Deepwater Wind previously signed a turbine supply and maintenance agreements with turbine maker Alstom, which will supply the Block Island Wind Farm with five of Alstom’s 6-megawatt Haliade 150 offshore wind turbines.
Deepwater Wind has selected Fred Olsen Windcarrier to provide its jack-up vessel Bold Tern for the turbine installation three miles off the coast of Block Island.
Work is now underway on some of the wind farm foundation components at Specialty Diving Services in North Kingstown, R.I., where Deepwater Wind held a launch celebration last week.
The 1,500-ton foundations are being constructed by Gulf Island Fabrications in Houma, La.
“We remain committed to hiring as many local workers as possible to support this endeavor, and our fabrication agreement is just the start of our commitment to kickstarting a homegrown economic engine,” said Deepwater Wind CEO Jeff Grybowski.
videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3tSW-DDIdnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RtgBWNKwBkE
eagle hit http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8NAAzBArYdw
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Wind farms are clusters of turbines as tall as 30-story buildings, with spinning rotors as wide as a passenger jet’s wingspan. Though the blades appear to move slowly, they can reach speeds of up to 170 mph at the tips, creating tornado-like vortexes. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/12/house-panel-subpoenas-white-house-on-wind-power-eagle-deaths/
Bob Sallinger with the Audubon Society of Portland said wind farms across the country have killed more than 80 eagles over the last decade.
“If you have dozens and dozens of them on the landscape it is basically a giant Cuisinart for birds,” said Sallinger. “Bald eagles took decades to recover … we almost lost them because of DDT. Golden eagles are a species biologists are concerned about because they appear to be declining.” http://www.kgw.com/news/Official-Wind–257599781.html
“Improperly sited and operated wind energy facilities can kill significant numbers of federally protected birds and other species,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, urging developers to follow the Service’s Land-based Wind Energy Guidelines. “That’s why it’s imperative that wind energy developers work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to minimize these impacts at every stage in the process.”
Commercial wind power projects can cause the deaths of federally protected birds in four primary ways: collision with wind turbines, collision with associated meteorological towers, collision with, or electrocution by, associated electrical power facilities, and nest abandonment or behavior avoidance from habitat modification.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/utility-company-sentenced-wyoming-killing-protected-birds-wind-projects-0
A recent study by federal and state scientists found that U.S. wind turbines could kill up to 1.4 million birds of all species per year by 2030 as the wind energy industry continues to expand. http://www.ibtimes.com/should-wind-turbines-be-allowed-kill-eagles-debate-ratchets-bird-group-lawsuit-1607240
http://silverford.com/blog//wp-content/uploads/2012/02/wind-speeds-on-site1.jpg
“I estimated 888,000 bat and 573,000 bird fatalities/year (including 83,000 raptor fatalities) at 51,630 megawatt (MW) of installed wind-energy capacity in the United States in 2012,” writes K. Shawn Smallwood, author of the study that was published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/20/wind-turbines-kill-more-birds-than-bp-oil-spill/