Floating Offshore Wind Farms

http://bit.ly/7XwAG

Offshore wind farms have been in business for the past few years in Europe and China and is an extremely interesting development in the field of clean energy. The power of wind energy at high seas is much more potent and consistent than shore based installations. A typical wind turbine that would generate 1.5 MW on shore would deliver 3.5MW of power 5 miles out into the sea and over 5MW if placed around 30 to 50 miles offshore. The problem is that the current technology available permits shallow water offshore projects where fixed installation of wind turbine towers are grouted to ocean bed around 50 feet below the base of the tower.

In Europe particularly in the North Sea there are thousands of squaremiles of ocean floor with shallow seas,which is one of the reason why the British and the Danes have been ahead in exploiting this energy source quickly and effectively. The US witnessed a 9 year long regulatory battle when influential wealthy people including powerful senators such as Edward Kennedy held up the Cape Cod Project of 130 turbine wind farm in Massachussetts before it was finally cleared by environmental regulators in the last week of April 2010.

The 130 turbine Cape cod project considered an eyesore by many shall be around 5 miles away from the shore overlooking expensive property belonging to influential people and expected to generate 400 MW of power will be spread over 24 square miles and cost a Billion dollars. Such a project would take only 250 million USD in China or India making the installation cost much lower due to ample availability and cheaper prices of high tensile steel needed for the 100 meter plus Turbine towers each weighing anything between 800 to 1000 tonnes.

However the floating windfarm projects mounted on concrete hollow blocks could provide even better return on investment considering that apart fom developing hydraulic dampers to negate the effect of turbulent seas on the wind turbine all other technology is readily avvailable and foundation and installation costs may actually come down due to prefabricated nature of the installation. Coupled to conventional grid it may help reducing the load of baseload stations and reduce the consumption of oil and coal dramatically