The news is full of grim headlines for the US offshore wind industry -- costs are up, projects are getting canceled. What's going on? Is this a permanent change or something that will pass? I discuss the state of affairs with industry analyst Samantha Woodworth.
Just one small correction, though -- hydro does NOT supply us with all the electricity we need here in the Maritimes and is not likely to do so in the future, as the sad story of Muskrat Falls clearly shows. Over 50% of our power here in Nova Scotia is produced by coal!!! And no real plan to get us off that. Most of the planned wind power is for ammonia and supposedly later hydrogen for export (and most of it is just plain subsidy harvesting).
I think you missed the NIMBYism about visuals that is still going on. The Preservation Society of Newport County, in RI, just filed suit to stop two wind farms because they damage their "viewsheds". Orsted has even provided a visual: https://www.culturalheritagepartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1.-RWF-Breakers-Visualization.pdf. It is "rich" that a society who purpose is preserving Newport Mansions, a bastion of incredible privilege, is trying to delay or stop an important solution to save the world from their disproportionate carbon footprints. There will be counter protests.
Great summary. Given that many of the offshore platforms are outside the territorial waters boundary why doesn't some billionaire go rogue and create a pirate transmission backbone all along one of the coasts? Yes, we should be able to rely on state capacity for things and the state supported monopoly on electrical transmission is about as directly in the state's lane as a thing can be. The dysfunction here is why even reasonable folk can long for autocratic systems: fewer vetoes.
Industrial facilities operations at sea is not new and this is a place where keeping up with the oil and gas industry can provide a helpful baseline of expectation. The Perdido floating oil platform, for instance, has a 267m structure perched atop a 170m spar and went into service in 2009. 2,800m below the spar, there are 35 subsea wells including a set 8 miles away connected via sea-floor pipeline. The spar floats over the wellheads, which gives it a great deal of freedom to deal with adverse surface conditions without drifting outside its expected area. Perdido sits in the Gulf of Mexico, so it gets some local weather from time to time, and was shut down temporarily for Hurricane Nicolas in '21. Perdido has a capacity of 100,000bpd and 200,000ft³ per day and, again, has been in service for 14 years. Any offshore wind farm will have a much more favorable ecological return on investment - survivability of the structure will not be the deciding point.
Ballparking on current costs; one could purchase 31 of the 35MW wind turbines for the cost of the Perdido platform alone (adjusted for inflation), and end up with 1GW of wind capacity. You wouldn't need much of a capacity factor to produce more energy at a lower environmental impact with the wind turbines. From the oil and gas you'd get only 228MWh per day and you'll lose at least half of that in conversion efficiency between combustion and electrons.
Just FYI, the jack-up ship being built for Dominion is being built in a Texas shipyard which has generally served the offshore O&G biz.
Below is a link to one of the proposed innovations for floating offshore wind, a bit different than the "spar" you mention. "Tension leg" with "weathervaning," to reduce some material requirements.
There are a lot of configurations possible and that's before anyone starts looking at vertical axis, micro-turbine arrays, or counter rotating systems. This (https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-china-floats-out-its-largest-floating-wind-turbine) semi-submersible from last year puts the 6MW tower at the back of the triangle, and I recently saw a rendering a square pyramid structure with rotor at the central vertex (seemingly maximizing material costs above and below surface). A lot of goofy ideas are yet to come, and one of them will end up being genius.
Some of the basic rules still apply: taller towers are more powerful with more consistent windspeeds, and r-cross-f is still a thing meaning you have a lot of work to do with the hull to provide necessary stability. All of that suggests setup will always be a PITA as you are either assembling on site or towing a thing that's meant to resist all dislocations - slow going along either pathway.
Can a jack-up ship get by with a sufficiently large swath hull or does it all really need absolute stability of ground contact?
I recalled a post about recent use of a YUGE ship for turbine installation recently so here you go. Yes, it's not a jack-up. It's in the Baltic, which is more sheltered than the North Atlantic, though big enough to get nasty waves, maybe just not as often? In this case the components are barged out, lifted onto the giant workboat which is so big they can pre-assemble the rotors to the nacelle on the workboat and then lift that onto the tower in the water.
My knowledge of offshore wind is broad, but not too "deep." I'm no full-on waterman. I look at this and think "Wear your hardhat, steel-toed boots and your life vest!" Not a pleasure cruise.
Great pod David. I often complain about our lack of industrial capacity for some of this stuff. Ms. Woodworth reminded me that we have great industrial capacity for building warships, which is not available for building big jack-up ships.
One big reason that offshore wind has been so affected by inflation: A great deal of that inflation has been in steel, and some particular steel products used by wind turbines. An offshore wind turbine uses 4x the steel/MW of capacity as onshore, because of the long heavy steel foundation, instead of a concrete pad.
I think floating offshore is moving a bit faster than it seems from the discussion. There are about 200 MW installed in the EU (about 50x the amount of enhanced geothermal some folks get excited about). China has a bit of steel in the water and when they go, they will GO. However, I think there are a lot of potential improvements and R&D possibilities though some of the proposals may have fatal flaws not immediately apparent to landlubbers or some investors.
Samantha Woodsworth knows lots about offshore wind but nothing about Canada. Two examples, Manitoba does not bounder any of the Great Lakes (either she is thinking of Ontario or Lake Winnipeg and Nova Scotia has almost no hydroelectricity and still uses lots of coal generation. Quebec is the big hydroelectricity exporting province.
Here is an overview of the UKoffshore wind situationhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/16/uk-to-offer-higher-subsidies-for-offshore-windfarms-after-crisis-talks
For background, they were in a similar situation to the US east coast with projests being cancelled dus to increased costs and delays.
One thing about the work around using barges to move the components from port to the installation vessel, in a large projest, this may be more economical than Dave thinks. You want the installation vessel installing not going back and fore to the port. Having barges could reduce the total installation time.
As for floating wind power, the projects in Denmark and Germany are in much shallower water than west coast US (or Canada) projects would be in. The North Sea is not the deep.
I'm pretty sure there have been some major delays in the process of transferring tower sections from rocking barges to the jack-up ships which do the installation, despite the fancy stabilizers on the barges. It's way easier to load in a sheltered port and not a long drive out to the windfarms. With the components on the jack-up ship, it just lowers its four legs, and the crane is on the same stable platform as the large, heavy, dangerous parts.
I find it interesting that David seems almost desperate for NIMBYism to be the central challenge facing the energy transition, when as far as I can tell it's a distant fourth place or so behind supply chains, interconnection queues, and debates around cost allocation.
There have been some reports that offshore wind NIMBY hysteria has been supported by BigOil&Gas, which would be ironic but not be surprising. When offshore wind leases were recently auctioned on the Gulf Coast, BigOil&Gas whiffed……they already have all the cheap onshore wind energy they need from the Panhandle & West Texas,……..previously developed to pump & process their oil. Now their plan is to use IRA incentives (corporate welfare) to employ CCS to inject Co2 into their depleted offshore oil & gas wells in order to extract more oil.
The west coast offshore lease location with the shortest probable timeline is on the Central Coast near the existing Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, providing an existing high capacity transmission interconnection. Turbine fabrication would probably be at the Port of Long Beach in LA. The North Coast lease location near the deep water Port of Eureka has superior wind conditions, but would require 200 mile undersea transmission cables to serve the SF Bay Area. The west coast offshore resource is so massive that one could imagine surplus nighttime power being used to produce electrolytic jet fuel & ammonia for distribution from repurposed California refineries located in Long Beach & the SF Bay Area.
How does the offshore wind infrastructure, permitting, cost, scale needed, and policy efforts compare to the same topics for offshore oil and gas? It seems that the fossil industry has made it work.
I think that there has to be more than 15GW of offshore wind (as Samantha envisioned) on the east coast at the end of the pod, to make a difference. Since coal and natural gas burning currently supply 67% of the US power, that leaves a current 33% of our power being clean power (+ nukes). Therefore, since the entire US has 1,300GW of power for energy end use, there has to be a large acceleration of offshore wind building to contribute substantially. I think that onshore wind and solar, with storage, will get us to the goal more rapidly.
Volts--Regarding offshore wind, I'm concerned that no one seems to be talking about the obvious risks of rough weather tearing apart the huge, vulnerable blades on the MW-sized turbines. And what about the saltwater-induced corrosion that will quickly damage and destroy not only the foundational structures, but also the electronics and electrical-generation mechanisms within the nacelles themselves. I just don't see that offshore will last long enough to compensate for the ecological damage required to build it.
Except they've been used in Europe for decades and it is now perfectly fine?
Rough weather is only an issue when there is a fault in the pitch system for the blades, corrosion is dealt with through excellent coating & anodes (learned from oil & gas) and regular maintenance.
Foundations barely change over the two-three decades of use.
As for the ecological damage, anything is better than burning coal to make electricity
Yeah, though offshore is relatively new for supplying power. I just wonder (perhaps too cynically) whether enthusiasm may have blinded some enthusiasts to legitimate concerns.
Yeah, mate, I do think your concerns are getting "too cynically" exaggerated. It's easy to look at these big industrial projects and get a bit freaked. Maybe in your field of view "... no one is talking about..." "concerns" or "obvious risks" but that does not make it true. Beyond the specific problems rebutted, what are the other "legitimate concerns?"
Below is a link to how the first two USA offshore projects dealt with one "concern" during construction, which is always more disruptive than operation. Note the headline sez it's a "new" strategy even though it was already deployed and the effects of one summer of pile driving on local whales aren't clear anyway.
A Nantucket captain of whale-watching ecotour boats wrote in their local paper, “No one denies that there are some impacts … The sonic blasting used by the oil and gas industries is not used for turbines. Impacts to the benthic community are temporary. Observations in Europe show displacement of fauna during construction but they return afterwards. It is my belief these turbines will create a sanctuary for species like the North Atlantic Right Whales because large fast-moving ships — one of the leading causes of mortality — will not be in the area.” He's not a Johnny-come-lately like many of the critics.
Onshore there are similar mitigation measures for birds, raptors and bats. Nationwide, bald eagles have doubled or more in population in a decade with a greater increase in wind power.
I live in a county with 13,000 oil wells and I don't like 'em one bit but there are still miles of sweet backcountry and healthy wildlife. Unlike wind and solar, those wells get depleted and, in addition to the GHGs all along that supply chain, the drillers will keep moving into the woods if we don't deploy renewable, sustainable wind and solar and electrification on an industrial scale ASAP.
That was a fantastic overview. More in-depth discussions to follow I hope. Still shaking my head about the failure to index contracts for inflation. I greatly appreciate the transcript as I have a hearing problem.
Very informative episode!
Just one small correction, though -- hydro does NOT supply us with all the electricity we need here in the Maritimes and is not likely to do so in the future, as the sad story of Muskrat Falls clearly shows. Over 50% of our power here in Nova Scotia is produced by coal!!! And no real plan to get us off that. Most of the planned wind power is for ammonia and supposedly later hydrogen for export (and most of it is just plain subsidy harvesting).
Thanks for your comment Marianne! You're correct, looks like a mixed bag...
- PEI: 99% wind (https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-prince-edward-island.html)
- NS: 21% wind/hydro (https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-nova-scotia.html)
- NB: 30% wind/hydro (https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-new-brunswick.html)
I think you missed the NIMBYism about visuals that is still going on. The Preservation Society of Newport County, in RI, just filed suit to stop two wind farms because they damage their "viewsheds". Orsted has even provided a visual: https://www.culturalheritagepartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1.-RWF-Breakers-Visualization.pdf. It is "rich" that a society who purpose is preserving Newport Mansions, a bastion of incredible privilege, is trying to delay or stop an important solution to save the world from their disproportionate carbon footprints. There will be counter protests.
Article in WSJ today on the ship that is needed to place the wind turbines, mentioned in the podcast.
The Sea-Monster-Sized Ship Disrupting Biden’s Wind-Energy Dreams:
https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/the-sea-monster-sized-ship-disrupting-bidens-wind-energy-dreams-e007942e?st=hbw2fz5qym7ux60&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Great summary. Given that many of the offshore platforms are outside the territorial waters boundary why doesn't some billionaire go rogue and create a pirate transmission backbone all along one of the coasts? Yes, we should be able to rely on state capacity for things and the state supported monopoly on electrical transmission is about as directly in the state's lane as a thing can be. The dysfunction here is why even reasonable folk can long for autocratic systems: fewer vetoes.
Industrial facilities operations at sea is not new and this is a place where keeping up with the oil and gas industry can provide a helpful baseline of expectation. The Perdido floating oil platform, for instance, has a 267m structure perched atop a 170m spar and went into service in 2009. 2,800m below the spar, there are 35 subsea wells including a set 8 miles away connected via sea-floor pipeline. The spar floats over the wellheads, which gives it a great deal of freedom to deal with adverse surface conditions without drifting outside its expected area. Perdido sits in the Gulf of Mexico, so it gets some local weather from time to time, and was shut down temporarily for Hurricane Nicolas in '21. Perdido has a capacity of 100,000bpd and 200,000ft³ per day and, again, has been in service for 14 years. Any offshore wind farm will have a much more favorable ecological return on investment - survivability of the structure will not be the deciding point.
Ballparking on current costs; one could purchase 31 of the 35MW wind turbines for the cost of the Perdido platform alone (adjusted for inflation), and end up with 1GW of wind capacity. You wouldn't need much of a capacity factor to produce more energy at a lower environmental impact with the wind turbines. From the oil and gas you'd get only 228MWh per day and you'll lose at least half of that in conversion efficiency between combustion and electrons.
Just FYI, the jack-up ship being built for Dominion is being built in a Texas shipyard which has generally served the offshore O&G biz.
Below is a link to one of the proposed innovations for floating offshore wind, a bit different than the "spar" you mention. "Tension leg" with "weathervaning," to reduce some material requirements.
https://www.x1wind.com/projects/pivotbuoy-project-part-scale-prototype-in-the-canary-islands/
Fun for energy geeks of all ages.
There are a lot of configurations possible and that's before anyone starts looking at vertical axis, micro-turbine arrays, or counter rotating systems. This (https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-china-floats-out-its-largest-floating-wind-turbine) semi-submersible from last year puts the 6MW tower at the back of the triangle, and I recently saw a rendering a square pyramid structure with rotor at the central vertex (seemingly maximizing material costs above and below surface). A lot of goofy ideas are yet to come, and one of them will end up being genius.
Some of the basic rules still apply: taller towers are more powerful with more consistent windspeeds, and r-cross-f is still a thing meaning you have a lot of work to do with the hull to provide necessary stability. All of that suggests setup will always be a PITA as you are either assembling on site or towing a thing that's meant to resist all dislocations - slow going along either pathway.
Can a jack-up ship get by with a sufficiently large swath hull or does it all really need absolute stability of ground contact?
I recalled a post about recent use of a YUGE ship for turbine installation recently so here you go. Yes, it's not a jack-up. It's in the Baltic, which is more sheltered than the North Atlantic, though big enough to get nasty waves, maybe just not as often? In this case the components are barged out, lifted onto the giant workboat which is so big they can pre-assemble the rotors to the nacelle on the workboat and then lift that onto the tower in the water.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/11/25/thialf-installs-first-v174-9-5-mw-turbine-at-arcadis-ost-1-using-floating-installation-method/
https://www.heerema.com/hubfs/Heerema%20Floating%20Wind%20Installation.pdf?hsLang=en
My knowledge of offshore wind is broad, but not too "deep." I'm no full-on waterman. I look at this and think "Wear your hardhat, steel-toed boots and your life vest!" Not a pleasure cruise.
Great pod David. I often complain about our lack of industrial capacity for some of this stuff. Ms. Woodworth reminded me that we have great industrial capacity for building warships, which is not available for building big jack-up ships.
One big reason that offshore wind has been so affected by inflation: A great deal of that inflation has been in steel, and some particular steel products used by wind turbines. An offshore wind turbine uses 4x the steel/MW of capacity as onshore, because of the long heavy steel foundation, instead of a concrete pad.
I think floating offshore is moving a bit faster than it seems from the discussion. There are about 200 MW installed in the EU (about 50x the amount of enhanced geothermal some folks get excited about). China has a bit of steel in the water and when they go, they will GO. However, I think there are a lot of potential improvements and R&D possibilities though some of the proposals may have fatal flaws not immediately apparent to landlubbers or some investors.
Samantha Woodsworth knows lots about offshore wind but nothing about Canada. Two examples, Manitoba does not bounder any of the Great Lakes (either she is thinking of Ontario or Lake Winnipeg and Nova Scotia has almost no hydroelectricity and still uses lots of coal generation. Quebec is the big hydroelectricity exporting province.
Here is an overview of the UKoffshore wind situationhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/16/uk-to-offer-higher-subsidies-for-offshore-windfarms-after-crisis-talks
For background, they were in a similar situation to the US east coast with projests being cancelled dus to increased costs and delays.
One thing about the work around using barges to move the components from port to the installation vessel, in a large projest, this may be more economical than Dave thinks. You want the installation vessel installing not going back and fore to the port. Having barges could reduce the total installation time.
As for floating wind power, the projects in Denmark and Germany are in much shallower water than west coast US (or Canada) projects would be in. The North Sea is not the deep.
I'm pretty sure there have been some major delays in the process of transferring tower sections from rocking barges to the jack-up ships which do the installation, despite the fancy stabilizers on the barges. It's way easier to load in a sheltered port and not a long drive out to the windfarms. With the components on the jack-up ship, it just lowers its four legs, and the crane is on the same stable platform as the large, heavy, dangerous parts.
I find it interesting that David seems almost desperate for NIMBYism to be the central challenge facing the energy transition, when as far as I can tell it's a distant fourth place or so behind supply chains, interconnection queues, and debates around cost allocation.
I wouldn't characterize David's perspective this way but could be a good mailbag question to ask him if he's overdone it a bit re: NIMBYism
There have been some reports that offshore wind NIMBY hysteria has been supported by BigOil&Gas, which would be ironic but not be surprising. When offshore wind leases were recently auctioned on the Gulf Coast, BigOil&Gas whiffed……they already have all the cheap onshore wind energy they need from the Panhandle & West Texas,……..previously developed to pump & process their oil. Now their plan is to use IRA incentives (corporate welfare) to employ CCS to inject Co2 into their depleted offshore oil & gas wells in order to extract more oil.
The west coast offshore lease location with the shortest probable timeline is on the Central Coast near the existing Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, providing an existing high capacity transmission interconnection. Turbine fabrication would probably be at the Port of Long Beach in LA. The North Coast lease location near the deep water Port of Eureka has superior wind conditions, but would require 200 mile undersea transmission cables to serve the SF Bay Area. The west coast offshore resource is so massive that one could imagine surplus nighttime power being used to produce electrolytic jet fuel & ammonia for distribution from repurposed California refineries located in Long Beach & the SF Bay Area.
How does the offshore wind infrastructure, permitting, cost, scale needed, and policy efforts compare to the same topics for offshore oil and gas? It seems that the fossil industry has made it work.
I think that there has to be more than 15GW of offshore wind (as Samantha envisioned) on the east coast at the end of the pod, to make a difference. Since coal and natural gas burning currently supply 67% of the US power, that leaves a current 33% of our power being clean power (+ nukes). Therefore, since the entire US has 1,300GW of power for energy end use, there has to be a large acceleration of offshore wind building to contribute substantially. I think that onshore wind and solar, with storage, will get us to the goal more rapidly.
Volts--Regarding offshore wind, I'm concerned that no one seems to be talking about the obvious risks of rough weather tearing apart the huge, vulnerable blades on the MW-sized turbines. And what about the saltwater-induced corrosion that will quickly damage and destroy not only the foundational structures, but also the electronics and electrical-generation mechanisms within the nacelles themselves. I just don't see that offshore will last long enough to compensate for the ecological damage required to build it.
Except they've been used in Europe for decades and it is now perfectly fine?
Rough weather is only an issue when there is a fault in the pitch system for the blades, corrosion is dealt with through excellent coating & anodes (learned from oil & gas) and regular maintenance.
Foundations barely change over the two-three decades of use.
As for the ecological damage, anything is better than burning coal to make electricity
Yeah, though offshore is relatively new for supplying power. I just wonder (perhaps too cynically) whether enthusiasm may have blinded some enthusiasts to legitimate concerns.
Yeah, mate, I do think your concerns are getting "too cynically" exaggerated. It's easy to look at these big industrial projects and get a bit freaked. Maybe in your field of view "... no one is talking about..." "concerns" or "obvious risks" but that does not make it true. Beyond the specific problems rebutted, what are the other "legitimate concerns?"
Below is a link to how the first two USA offshore projects dealt with one "concern" during construction, which is always more disruptive than operation. Note the headline sez it's a "new" strategy even though it was already deployed and the effects of one summer of pile driving on local whales aren't clear anyway.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/blowing-bubbles-offshore-winds-new-strategy-to-save-whales/
A Nantucket captain of whale-watching ecotour boats wrote in their local paper, “No one denies that there are some impacts … The sonic blasting used by the oil and gas industries is not used for turbines. Impacts to the benthic community are temporary. Observations in Europe show displacement of fauna during construction but they return afterwards. It is my belief these turbines will create a sanctuary for species like the North Atlantic Right Whales because large fast-moving ships — one of the leading causes of mortality — will not be in the area.” He's not a Johnny-come-lately like many of the critics.
Onshore there are similar mitigation measures for birds, raptors and bats. Nationwide, bald eagles have doubled or more in population in a decade with a greater increase in wind power.
I live in a county with 13,000 oil wells and I don't like 'em one bit but there are still miles of sweet backcountry and healthy wildlife. Unlike wind and solar, those wells get depleted and, in addition to the GHGs all along that supply chain, the drillers will keep moving into the woods if we don't deploy renewable, sustainable wind and solar and electrification on an industrial scale ASAP.
That was a fantastic overview. More in-depth discussions to follow I hope. Still shaking my head about the failure to index contracts for inflation. I greatly appreciate the transcript as I have a hearing problem.