The nation’s first big offshore wind farm is coming
Clip: Season 50 | 5m 22sVideo has Closed Captions
The first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US is being built off Massachusetts.
Offshore wind has been slow to take off in the US, compared to Europe. So, why now? What will the impacts be?
National Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Carlisle Companies. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the NOVA Science Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers.
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The nation’s first big offshore wind farm is coming
Clip: Season 50 | 5m 22sVideo has Closed Captions
Offshore wind has been slow to take off in the US, compared to Europe. So, why now? What will the impacts be?
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- This giant tube is part of the first big offshore wind farm in the US now under construction off the coast of Massachusetts.
The company behind the project, Vineyard Wind says a single spin of one of the turbines could power a home for a day and 62 of these each, more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, are being installed about 34 miles from this beach.
When complete Vineyard Wind says the project will be barely visible from nearby islands and will power over 400,000 homes and businesses.
But there are now a number of offshore wind projects in development.
In fact, by 2030, the US aims for offshore wind to generate 30 gigawatts of energy enough to power about 10 million homes.
Still, offshore wind has been slow to spin up in the US compared to Europe where there are thousands of wind turbines.
So why offshore wind?
What kind of impact will it have and why now?
- A lot has evolved.
It's taken a lot of time to develop the regulatory situation to get various stakeholders comfortable.
The economic environment.
- [Caitlin] The prospects for abundant clean energy from wind becomes pretty obvious.
When you look at a map of where the wind blows the most, that's the dark blue.
There's a lot of it in this center of the country where many onshore wind farms have sprung up but most of the population lives closer to the coasts and it's hard to transmit energy that far.
- It's extremely challenging to build long transmission lines when it comes to getting permitting rights across multiple states.
- [Caitlin] But just offshore, there's a whole lot more dark blue, and that wind is close to the large population centers in the US.
The trick is getting it to shore.
- To build out a grid that can take the power from this location to where the load centers are.
That is a huge part of ensuring that this industry is successful.
- So how do they do it?
For Vineyard Wind, cables carrying the electricity are buried under the sea floor and come ashore under this beach.
From here, they continue underground over four miles to this place.
Whoa, that's kind of cool looking.
A substation that converts the electricity to a voltage that then feeds into the electrical grid.
Every big wind project will have to make landfall somewhere that requires construction and a substation, both of which can be disruptive and the effects of construction extend offshore too, like on the fishing industry and marine animals.
These are some of the reasons why offshore wind has faced a lot of opposition in the US.
- During construction.
That will probably be the time when they are the most significant impacts, for example, on commercial fishing.
So even if you could fish there there probably wouldn't be many fish to catch.
- [Caitlin] That's because noise can be disruptive to marine animals and driving a pile for a wind turbine is pretty loud.
- Sound travels exceptionally well underwater because sound is conducted very well by seawater but the travel path of that sound is disrupted when the sound wave hits an air pocket in the water because air is not as good a conductor of sound as water is.
- [Caitlin] One solution that Vineyard Wind is using is as simple as it is clever.
Create a curtain of bubbles.
Yeah, bubbles.
- The idea of the bubble curtains is to put hoses on the seabed around the turbine tower and force pressurized air out of small holes in those hoses.
The idea is that that air bubble curtain will impede the transmission of the sound.
It won't stop it but it will make the signal much less loud.
- [Caitlin] Once construction is over, the fishes and fishing should return.
- There may be some changes in the distribution of species as a result of the presence of the wind farm.
For example, the additional structure that's now in the water there may attract certain species of fish that wouldn't have been there in that abundance previously.
- [Caitlin] Wind developers will need to take a number of precautions to protect the marine environment but nothing can fully protect from all harm and global warming itself could cause far more damage than wind farms to the ocean ecosystems.
- My personal view is that the change is worth pursuing in the interest of slowing the negative effects on our ocean ecosystem that global warming and climate change is having right now.
It's not free.
It comes at a cost and that's a trade-off that we have to consider when we decide to put wind farms into the ocean.
- Some think that we should be focusing more on developing different carbon-free energy technologies like solar and nuclear.
They too come with trade-offs.
It's still early days for the US offshore wind industry and there are a lot of complexities to navigate from the marine environment to the fishing and shipping industries to residents.
- We really are in a situation where we have to decide what changes and sacrifices.
In some instances we are prepared to make to ensure that our grandchildren have a workable and livable planet.
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