Plugging into the power of wind farms

By Shelia Watson

Coastal residents are well acquainted with the power of the wind. In fact, they’ve given names to incidents of its overabundance: Katrina. Camille. Hugo.

But recent initiatives to harness the wind’s potential for energy production could revise even a hurricane victim’s opinion of one of nature’s most powerful forces.

“Wind energy is renewable and inexhaustible,” said Nick Rigas, director of the South Carolina Institute for Energy Studies at Clemson University. “And it’s one of the lowest-priced energy sources around.”
It’s also potentially right off South Carolina’s shores.

A Stanford University study conducted in 2003 concluded that “the greatest previously uncharted reservoir of wind power in the continental United States is offshore and near shore along the Southeastern and Southern coasts.”

The Southeast’s offshore waters may have gone “uncharted” in terms of wind power, but it certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. Although offshore wind farms have been proposed for Cape Cod and the area off the Texas Gulf Coast, the Stanford study, along with analyses by the Department of Energy and other agencies, have singled out the Southeast as one of the most viable regions for offshore wind farms.

Further studies and discussions are on the horizon, including the Southeast Regional Offshore Wind Power Symposium, scheduled for Feb. 26-27, 2007, in Charleston.

The choice of location for that event was intentional.

“This is a tri-state effort,” said Rigas. “North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia are all involved in this. We’re working with universities in each of these states to promote an understanding of offshore wind potential in this area.”

The symposium, hosted by Clemson, Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University and Coastal Carolina University, is sponsored by several big players in the energy industry, including Santee Cooper, Savannah River National Laboratory, the South Carolina Energy Office and the U.S. Department of the Interior–Minerals Management Service.

Nick Rigas

“Energy has become a global issue with global factors that have global consequences,” Rigas said, adding that energy is crucial to economic development all over the world.

Repurposing an old idea

Using wind as an energy source is nothing new. Rigas notes that it is “one of the oldest forms of energy, harnessed by man as early as 5000 B.C. in Egypt.” Over the years, many countries embraced the concept, especially in Europe, and typically in the form of windmills.

Modern wind development took off in the United States in the 1970s after the oil embargo. Today about 1% of the nation’s electricity is generated by land-based wind farms, primarily in the Midwest and West Coast. New onshore projects in California, Texas and New York will help power more than 700,000 homes, according to a statement from the American Wind Energy Association, the national trade association of the U.S. wind energy industry.

Europeans were the first to attempt to harvest energy from ocean winds. In 1991, Denmark placed 11 turbines off the Atlantic coast near the port of Vindeby. Since then, the concept of offshore wind farms has been gathering momentum, with 17 projects currently providing 600 megawatts of generating capacity off the shores of northern Europe.

According to the European Wind Energy Association, another 150 wind projects are planned, which will provide an additional 70,000 megawatts of offshore capacity by 2020.

Offshore turbines are still unproven in the United States, but a 2004 study by the National Renewal Energy Laboratory outlined the potential.

“Offshore wind energy development is an unexplored U.S. domestic power resource that is estimated to be economically developable using megawatt-scale wind turbines in large offshore wind farms within a decade,” the report stated. “Taking into account significant exclusions for shipping lanes, environmental easements and viewshed concerns, areas off the coast of the United States, within a 50-nautical-mile limit, contain resources of almost 907 (gigawatts), an amount greater than current installed U.S. electrical capacity.”