Lake Ontario Idea

See http://www.principlepowerinc.com/products/windfloat.html for details

This is a picture of a big deployment of wind turbines in deep waters, sometime in the future. So far, just one of these units has been deployed off of the coast of Portugal, in deep waters. Despite the ungainly look, these floating platforms are very stable (it was designed by former US Navy captain and close associate of Admiral Rickover (US nuclear Navy fame), who also was instrumental in starting up the US wind industry with his MIT course in the 1970's). It has been operational for about 2 months, and seems to have made it past this awesome and massive winter hurricane that slammed England with 165 mph winds. This foundation can be assembled in harbors, where the cost to do this is much less expensive than it is to assemble a wind turbine far offshore at the site where it will be used. The unit gets anchored to the ocean or lake bottom, wired up to the offshore substation/other turbines, and then its "sit back and make some money time".

It turns out that in shallow waters, it is less expensive to use other foundations. For Lake Erie, the "gravity" or "caison" one seems really appropriate - this is a 1800 ton or so concrete structure that is floated out to the site, then carefully sunk to the bottom; then the wind turbine is placed on the part sticking out of the water (these were used for Copenhagen harbor's wind farm). Another popular style is the monopole - ideal for those 5 to 25 meter depths - which is a BIG piece of pipe (now 5 meters, or 16 feet in diameter with a 3 to 4 inch wall thickness). A variety of tripod or tetrapod ("jacket") style units are good for perhaps 50 meter depths - which also need 3 or 4 smaller monopoles rammed into the seabed, with the foundation platform placed on them. And there is also the "jack-up platform", which has been used in thousands of offshore oil and gas platforms in the 10 to 100 meter range. So many options..... the judge of what will be best is, of course, the cost to do this. Capitalism at work.... along with ingenuity, skill and a need for quality done on time and at or under budget.

Foundations amount to roughly half of the price of offshore wind turbines, so economies of scale that can lower the per unit cost of foundations are important. This is where mass production can come in handy. The raw material (for example, for a 500 ton monopole), might only be $500,000 in steel, but the entire foundation system and associated labor can go for $8 million or more for a 3.6 MW wind turbine, where the total installed cost is likely to be $16 million a pop. This is not for amateurs, and big stakes can be involved with projects now typically between $1 to $2 billion. So maybe a Detroit style assembly line would come in handy.

Lake Ontario has an average depth of 89 meters, or about 282 feet, and a lot of the shallow parts of this pond are in Canadian waters, near the mouth of the St Lawrence River. Most of the 2500 square miles of the lake that is "U.S. territory", are, in offshore wind terms, "deepwater". There is some shallow water near the shore, but near the shore, wind speeds tend to slow down:
from http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/bathy/ont_bathy.gif

Add that to the lake Ontario wind speed map:
from http://www.awstruepower.com/wp-content/media/2010/09/NYSERDA_AWST_NYGreatLakesFS.pdf, pg 80

The brown color that is the bulk of the offshore portion of this map signifies average wind speeds in the 8 to 8.25 m/s range at 80 meters above the water. Half of Niagara, Monroe and Oswego as well as all of Orleans, Cayuga and Wayne County's waterfront has this combination of very decent wind speeds and deep water.

The normal rule is between 10 to 20 MW of capacity per square mile of water surface. Getting 2000 MW of wind capacity would thus need about 100 to 200 square miles of surface, or between 4% to 8% of the US part of Lake Ontario's surface. And that would produce around 800 MW of electricity, on average - in other words, it could readily produce more electricity than any one of the 3 smallest nukes on the NY Lake Ontario shoreline. Replacement of all of those nukes (Ginna, Nine Mile 1, Nine Mile 2 and FitzPatrick) would need about 2800 MW delivered, or about 7000 MW of offshore capacity, which would need about 2300 units of 3 MW each, or 350 square miles of offshore array. Bigger turbines would result in bigger floating platforms, though less platforms and turbines to get the same energy output.

Of course, eminently feasible, especially when the offshore arrays are connected to pumped hydroelectric storage units in the finger lakes, and also to NY City for a market for this electricity. And that gets rid of upstate NY's very own Fukushima/Chernobyl issue. Sounds good to me. Now all we have to worry about is the nukes in Ontario, Ohio and Michigan....

But the cost?!?! Well, for a bit, let's forget that somebody's investment is another person's job, and let's say the installed cost is roughly $4.5 million per MW of capacity. That's about $31.5 billion, but it can be spread out over a number of years (10 to 20, for example); let's assume 10 years. That's $3.15 billion per year worth of capital investment, or about 48,000 job-years/yr of direct jobs (assuming most of the project is sourced in the region/in state/near state. That electricity at 280 MW per year added (delivered version) would come in between 15 to 20 c/kw-hr, and it would gradually raise everyone's electricity price (but that also pays for close to 50,000 jobs), all of about 0.22 cents/kw-hr per year. Oh well that's the cost of getting rid of upstate NY's potential Fukushima problem (those are all GE boiling water reactors, too, just like at Daiichi....). And whether these are privately owned and financed (high cost version), or owned by the people of NY State via NYPA and are all bond financed (low cost version), the job creation potential is still there, waiting.

Just like thousands of upstate NY'ers, waiting for a job, or a job that depends on these primary jobs becoming a reality. Meanwhile, on the northern side of the pond, Windstream Energy (http://www.windstreamenergy.ca/), the only company to receive a FIT contract with Ontario for an offshore wind farm (300 MW one near Wolfe Island, in the shallow northeast part of Lake Ontario), is pressing on regardless of whether Ontario has a moratorium on offshore wind turbine arrays or not. Check out http://www.offshorewind.biz/2012/01/19/windstream-energy-to-build-ontarios-first-offshore-wind-farm-canada/ and http://www.offshorewind.biz/2012/01/19/windstream-energy-to-build-ontarios-first-offshore-wind-farm-canada/. They are busy lining up subcontractors and at the same time working on the Liberal and New Democrat members of Parliament (the Conservatives are a lost cause and seem terribly "whored out" to pollution sourced energy generators - is that universal or what?) with the virtues of that combination of electricity made without pollution, nuke "oops" probabilities and jobs, jobs, jobs, not to mention some perceptible increase in sales of made in Hamilton, Ontario steel. And while there is pollution associated with the manufacture the components and assembly of the wind farm, the energy payback is typically more than 30:1. One unit invested to get a return of 30 in a 25 year time frame. Who wouldn't want that?

And lastly, a word from the fishes.... Fish like offshore piers and floating platforms, and so do all the birds that depend on the fish for food, or the people who like sport fishing. Tourism... it goes well with offshore wind farms. Maybe they can even have sailboat races through the wind turbine array - more tourism. But above all, good for cows and pigs, too, as one of their favorite mottos is "eat more fish..." After all the nasty things we have done to Lake Ontario and it's aquatic residents, can't we at least be nice to them and provide some happy hunting waters for Lake trout and similar big boys....


So, support your local lake trout! Get an offshore wind farm located in a Great Lake near you. And hurry up about it, while we still have a viable climate that let's trouts live in the Great Lakes......

DB