Fazny Zavahir: First U.S. Offshore Wind Farm Gets a Step Closer

After nine years of political wrangling, the U.S. is finally getting its first offshore wind project. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar this week signed the 28-year lease for Cape Wind, a $1 billion, 130-turbine project in the Nantucket Sound that could provide up to 75% of all electricity for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. But the signing of the lease isn’t the last hurdle Cape Wind has to clear. It’s not even close.

Opponents of the 25-square-mile project argue that Cape Wind could raise electricity prices for local residents (because of the cost of electrical grid and transmission line improvements), block airplane radar, and ruin the local landscape. The Cape Wind project still has to deal with a number of lawsuits from these opposing groups, and developers still haven’t received approval for contracts to start construction by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the project is in the midst of a deal with the National Grid utility to buy half of Cape Wind’s power.

Assuming all those hurdles are cleared, the project developers still needs to get the Cape Wind operating plan approved by federal regulators before they can break out the shovels. But if the rest of the red tape can be overcome, Cape Wind will be online by 2012–potentially generating an average output of 182 megawatts, or enough to power 70,000 homes. We’ll still be lagging behind China, of course.

Fazny Zavahir | Solar industry shows it is gaining power

Studies point to a bright future as one of the industry’s biggest events draws thousands to the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The amount of electricity generated by new solar installations this year is expected to be twice as much as the capacity added last year, enough to power 200,000 more homes, bolstering the market for clean-tech jobs, according to several studies unveiled this week.

The studies — all timed to the solar trade show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, one of the industry’s largest — are painting a rosy outlook for the renewable energy industry.

One of them, slated for release Wednesday, said that over the next year more than half the solar companies expect to hire more employees, boosting the nation’s solar workforce 26%. The study by the Solar Foundation, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group, said 93,000 people work in the solar energy industry in the U.S.

The report comes as at least 27,000 people are expected to pass through the Solar Power International convention, which organizers bill as the biggest solar trade show in North America. More than a thousand companies are exhibiting.

When the conference launched in 2003, just a thousand people showed up to visit 100 exhibitors. The event has boomed each year since, and last month it was named by Trade Show Executive magazine as the convention with the most dramatic growth.

The domestic solar market has grown more than 50% each year over the last decade, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Assn., a trade group co-sponsoring the convention with the Solar Electric Power Assn. “Now we’re reaching a scale where we make a difference,” he said.

Resch noted that the largest solar installations, which produced just 500 kilowatts earlier in the decade, now exceed 500 megawatts, or enough to power 100,000 homes. “There is literally no limit to the size and the growth rate of solar in the United States,” he said.

Much of the growth has occurred in California, according to the Solar Energy Industries Assn. Well over half the U.S. solar industry’s $6-billion value is based in the state, the association said. The trade group chose Los Angeles because “it’s the epicenter of the solar energy market,” Resch said.

But for the next three years, the convention is heading east, with plans to move to Dallas, then Orlando, Fla., and Chicago.

Other states are stepping up efforts to have solar companies locate projects and open manufacturing plants away from California. Global competition is heating up as well, with several Asian and German companies exhibiting at the convention.

Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers, for instance, produced 80% of the crystalline silicon cells used in solar panels in the third quarter of 2010, a report from research group Solarbuzz said.

Fazny Zavahir | Google backs ‘superhighway’ for wind power

Internet search engine giant Google announced Tuesday that it is investing in a mammoth project to build an underwater “superhighway for clean energy” that would be able to funnel power from offshore wind farms to 1.9 million homes without overtaxing the already congested mid-Atlantic power grid.

The project, dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection, calls for spending as much as $5 billion to create a 350-mile network of underwater cables stretching from northern New Jersey to Virginia. It would eliminate the need for offshore wind developers to build transmission lines of their own, easing what can be a barrier for such projects.

Google is partnering with Good Energies, an environmentally focused international investment company based in New York, London and Switzerland, and Tokyo-based Marubeni to finance the project. The project is led by Trans-Elect, an electric transmission company in Chevy Chase.

Bob Mitchell, chief executive of Trans-Elect, said at a news conference that the venture constitutes “a huge, huge bold project” that would “stimulate development that is otherwise impossible” offshore along the East Coast. The grid would transmit 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy.

Rick Needham, director of green business operations at Google, cautioned that the project is in its early stages but said, “we’re willing to take calculated risks on large-scale projects that can move an industry.” He added, “It provides a smart, scalable platform for future expansion.”

Although several offshore wind farms are in development along the East Coast, none is operating. Some, such as the Cape Wind project, which won federal approval in April, have encountered fierce local opposition on aesthetic and environmental grounds. Others face bureaucratic hurdles.

The Obama administration has identified offshore wind development as top energy policy priority, and administration officials have vowed to ease the way for wind farms off the East Coast.

“By identifying high-priority areas offshore for potential wind projects, we can explore the development of a transmission backbone in the Atlantic Ocean to serve those areas,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said last month. “Rather than develop transmission infrastructure plans on a piecemeal basis, we should – in close coordination with the private sector, states and tribes – lay out a smart transmission system up front.”

John Breckenridge, managing director of Good Energies, said at the news conference that the grid would fix “a lot of what’s been done wrong in the renewable energy industry generally,” where offshore wind projects have been planned “in a haphazard way.”

The transmission line would address the problem of wind’s intermittent supply by tapping into a much broader swath of the coast to meet consumer demand.

While the project is outside of Google’s normal focus, officials said, “We believe in investing in projects that make good business sense and further the development of renewable energy.”

Google will provide 37.5 percent of the equity for the initial development, in which officials hope to obtain the approvals required to begin construction, according to Jamie Yood, Google spokesman. The New York Times, which first reported the project in its Tuesday print edition, said Google’s initial investment in the project will be $200 million.

Mitchell said Trans-Elect hopes to begin construction in 2013 on what it calls a “backbone transmission project.” He said they hope to complete it by 2020, although an initial stage should be finished and operational by 2016.

Consumers who would receive electricity through the grid would help fund the project, Mitchell added, although he said at this point, “It’s hard to say what will be the impact on the consumer.”

The mid-Atlantic is ideally suited for offshore wind technology, the project’s backers said, because the water remains relatively shallow 10 to 15 miles offshore – far enough out so that the wind turbines would be barely visible from land. Mitchell said that could address the “visibility” issues that have plagued the Cape Wind project on Nantucket Sound.