(Update: check out Rod Adams' take on this).
The cynical scam of the day is:
[Google] The wind cries transmission
[New York Times] Offshore Wind Power Line Wins Praise, and Backing
In a stunning victory for Green Utopia, the market today cast a decisive vote of confidence in wind power. Google, partnering with a Wall Street investment firm, invested $5 billion in an "Offshore Wind Power Line". That is, a $5 billion underwater transmission line which could potentially carry wind power. Although, as it happens, there are 0 offshore wind farms in the area.
By putting strong, secure transmission in place, the project removes a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind, an industry that despite its potential, only had its first federal lease signed last week and still has no operating projects in the U.S.
Enormous, risky gamble?
No. The ulterior motive is briefly alluded to in the Times' paragraph #13:
Yet even before any wind farms were built, the cable would channel existing supplies of electricity from southern Virginia, where it is cheap, to northern New Jersey, where it is costly, bypassing one of the most congested parts of the North American electric grid while lowering energy costs for northern customers.
An absolutely brilliant way to push a profitable transmission project through: spin it as a "wind power project". You don't need any actual wind farms, or any contracts for future wind farms, just the mere possibility of wind power being sent on these lines will win you fawning approval on the front page of the New York Times.
Incidentally here is that arbitrage quantified, the electricity price difference between the industry-friendly red state and New Jersey:
| Industrial | Commercial | Residential | |
| New Jersey | 12.72 c/kWh | 15.20 c/kWh | 16.86 c/kWh |
| Virginia | 6.41 c/kWh | 7.63 c/kWh | 10.77 c/kWh |
[EIA] Retail electricity prices by sector and state, June 2010
Yes, a very profitable transmission line it will be! And look who's just gobbling this stuff up:
Environmentalists who have been briefed on the plan were enthusiastic. Melinda Pierce, the deputy director for national campaigns at the Sierra Club, said she had campaigned against proposed transmission lines that would carry coal-fired energy around the country, but would favor this one, with its promise of tapping the potential of offshore wind.
(Virginia electricity is 51% coal, 39% nuclear. Fools!)
A few more scattered observations.
The transmission cost estimate is $5 billion for 6 GW capacity, 350 miles length. It will be built by 2021 "at earliest", 11 or more years in the future. I doubt the $5B figure includes financing costs over that time period.
Here's a few offshore wind purchase agreements in the region, for perspective:
| Bluewater Wind | Delaware | 13.9 c/kWh + 2.5%/year escalation | source |
| Cape Wind | Massachusetts | 18.7 c/kWh + 3.5%/year escalation | source |
| Deepwater Wind | Rhode Island | 24.4 c/kWh + 3.5%/year escalation | source |
(The last one has a funny story: the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission originally rejected the 24.4 c/kWh contract, state law requiring them to protect consumers from "commercially unreasonable" costs. So the state legislature changed the law!)
(Note these are wholesale purchase costs, not retail costs to end users like the other table.)
The NYT articles quotes some interesting people defending this project. For one, Jon Wellinghoff, the lawyer in charge of FERC (seriously) who thinks baseload electricity is unnecessary (seriously).
Even more curiously, it quotes
By the time the Interior Department could issue permits for such a line, for example, the federal subsidy program for wind will have expired in 2012, said Willett M. Kempton, a professor at the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware and the author of several papers on offshore wind.
...
Mr. Kempton of the University of Delaware and Mr. Wellinghoff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the backbone would offer another plus: reducing one of wind power’s big problems, variability of output. “Along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, we tend to have storm tracks that move along the coast and somewhat offshore,” Mr. Kempton said.
If storm winds were blowing on Friday off Virginia, they might be off Delaware by Saturday and off New Jersey by Sunday, he noted. Yet the long spine would ensure that the amount of energy coming ashore held roughly constant.
This is interesting for many reasons. For one because this quoted person recently accepted $150,000 from Google. For another because he chairs a committee in the AWEA, the US wind industry lobby.
But what's most interesting is his flat out lies about his own research. He asserts an integrated wind output that is "roughly constant":
If storm winds were blowing on Friday off Virginia, they might be off Delaware by Saturday and off New Jersey by Sunday, he noted. Yet the long spine would ensure that the amount of energy coming ashore held roughly constant.
I invite you to look at his own data -- his simulation of an integrated offshore wind grid on the entire Atlantic, Key West to Maine -- and decide for yourself whether its output looks "roughly constant".
[PNAS] Electric power from offshore wind via synoptic-scale interconnection
(The bottom row is the sum of the outputs of the individual sites). Or for that that matter, whether it's disturbing that the entire 3,000-mile Atlantic coast integrated together is so unreliable that you get a whole week operating at 5% capacity.
I'll have more to say about this particular wind apologism in the near future.
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