PORTLAND, Maine — A consortium of environmental groups released a report Thursday touting the value of offshore wind power along the Atlantic seaboard and urges federal and state governments to act aggressively to support its development, even as Maine researchers are moving toward placing a scale model of a floating turbine in the Gulf of Maine next spring.
Catherine Bowes and Justin Allegro of the National Wildlife Federation wrote the new report, titled “The Turning Point for Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy.” Representatives from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Environment Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Maine AFL-CIO attended a press conference to make the report public on Thursday morning.
“Congress is now debating whether to continue huge subsidies for big oil and gas, and whether to extend support for clean renewable energy sources like wind,” Dylan Voorhees, clean energy director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said in a release announcing the report. “In Maine, we are fortunate to have a large, untapped potential for clean, homegrown, offshore wind power. Maine people, businesses and workers agree that offshore wind power can help Maine people and our economy and environment as we cut our addiction to dirty, imported fossil fuels.”
The report notes that the United States generates no power from offshore wind at present, but that “recent actions by the federal government, along with bipartisan leadership from coastal state officials, have put critical building blocks in place —– bringing us closer than ever before to finally tapping this massive domestic energy source.”
Progress reports on offshore wind development in 10 Atlantic Coast states and a discussion of how to develop offshore wind farms without threatening wildlife are included in the 54-page document.
Among the report’s recommendations are to elevate the Department of Energy’s scenario for achieving 54 gigawatts of cost-effective offshore wind energy by 2030 as a national priority; codify goals for renewable energy generation; extend tax incentives including the federal Investment Tax Credit for offshore wind, the Production Tax Credit and Advanced Energy Project Credit; take direct action to secure buyers for offshore wind power; increase funding to the U.S. Energy and Interior departments and relevant state agencies to support research and deployment of offshore wind energy; enact strict pollution reduction policies related to all power sources; and coordinate offshore wind energy development decisions with federal, state, tribal and regional coastal and marine spatial planning efforts “in a manner that is consistent with the goals of America’s National Ocean Policy.”
The effort to generate power from wind in the Gulf of Maine continues to focus on floating turbines, according to Dr. Habib Dagher of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine, where research and development of model floating turbines continues through a consortium known as DeepCwind.
Firms such as Cianbro and Bath Iron Works have committed more than $30 million in private funding to the public-private partnership, according to Dagher. If it gains the required permits, the consortium plans to place a ⅛-scale model of a floating turbine in the Gulf of Maine next spring, Dagher said.
After initial research, development and installation costs, floating wind turbines will eventually produce wind energy at a lower cost than the fixed units used in offshore European sites and land-based wind energy farms, Dagher said.
In August, Gov. Paul LePage criticized the cost of wind energy in general and called it a “boutique energy source.”
Dagher told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday that, while “nascent technologies” such as offshore wind power need to be “incentivized,” his team and LePage share the same goal, which is to “create jobs and reduce costs.”
“The goal of the research is to get the cost of the energy to be competitive,” Dagher said, noting that his team has been working closely with Ken Fletcher, director of Maine’s Office of Energy Independence and Security.
Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management continues to accept comments on an application by Statoil North America to move ahead with plans to construct a floating wind farm off the coast of Maine. The federal agency set an Oct. 9 deadline for potential competitors for the Statoil project to express interest in any of the 22 square miles that Statoil proposes to lease for offshore wind energy production in federal waters off Maine.
Comments on potential environmental impacts can be submitted through Nov. 8.
“The fact that StatOil has applied to build four floating turbines in the deep waters off Maine’s coast shows that our state is a center of gravity for progress on offshore wind. We’ve gotten this far thanks to the leadership of the Ocean Energy Task Force and the Legislature. Now it’s time to move full steam ahead — for Maine’s environment, economy, and energy independence,” Rep. Stacey Fitts, R-Pittsfield, House chairman of the Joint Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology, said in a Natural Resources Council of Maine release about the report.
Keep it up! Don’t let big oil companies, their half billion dollars of global warming propaganda, their Republican puppets, or America’s addiction to oil stop you!
What is the latest on tidal?
http://bangor-launch.newspackstaging.com/2012/09/13/news/down-east/electricity-flows-from-ocean-turbine-to-grid-for-first-time-in-western-hemisphere/
Thanks.
What do you get when you mix corrupt Union thugs, tax wasteful U-Maine PHD’s, the green mob and Ken Salazar….. More reasons to vote for Romney…!
After Romney were elected, do you, or he, have a long term, or final solution to the problems that you have with there being any ” Union thugs, tax wasteful U-Maine PHD’s, the green mob and Ken Salazar” in Maine.
Start with:
*The right to work means if I don’t want to pay into a union plan I don’t have to-
*No more fun money for Dr. (BS Project Pork-Barrel) Dagher
*Doing away with ObamaCare
*Fire that useless POS Salazar
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 48% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns 45% of the vote.
Do they not understand that their intolerant hatred was insulted or just not care ?Then, which is worse ?
Actually, with Romney and LePage the subsidies given to the Wind industry would dry up, and without them, the wind industry dies. Why, if a product is so fantastic, does it have to be subsidized? Let any fat cat that wants in on it to have at it. T. Boone Pickins tried it and in his own words, “lost his a**.”
Here we go again!!!!!!! This grandious plan to build offshore wind turbines, financed by our taxpayer dollars, which we are severely short of, and put money into the pockets of people like Angus King and his family is as far offline as the failing Wind Turbines that are being put up onshore. Their plan is to have 54 gigawatts of power available by 2030 . . . . that is the plate value of the turbines. Since the best wind sites onshore have only produced 26% of their plate capacity since they have been operating, and we might up the value of offshore to 30%, that would mean that at most we would have 18 gigawatts of power for an investment of perhaps a billion dollars. Unbelievable. And the transmission losses would be enormous.
Now let’s consider a plant that could be built right next to the existing transmission lines that could produce 540 gigawatts 24/7/365 using clean natural gas. That is TEN TIMES the PLATE CAPACITY and 30 times the real value of the offshore turbines. It would not require an upgrade of $19 to $26 billion in grid upgrades, would not require imports from countries that don’t like us, might take up an area of 100 acres, would provide real jobs, not temporary ones, and could be built for a fraction of the offshore price. We have one in Veazie that was built in 2000 for about $300 million non taxpayer funds. It produces electricity for about 1/4 the price of the wind turbines and does not require grid upgrades, is continuous, reliable and is very clean, and if you didn’t know it was there, you would never notice it.
This whole fascination with wind has to be stopped, and real energy solutions need to be enacted. Wind only makes a few really rich elites even richer with taxpayer dollars. And remember – WE DON”T HAVE ANY MONEY! Maine really does not need the power . . . we produce twice as much as we really need. And with predicted growth in Maine at 1-2% for the next forty years, we don’t need more. Wind does not provide real jobs. Maine is the cleanest state in the union environmentally right now. We sequester more CO2 per capita than any other state. We have no oil or coal plants, and produce more than 50% of our power with renewables. Wind should not even be an option on our table.
You make some interesting statements. But I don’t see any links to information backing them up.
Many here state facts that come frome myth or wishful thinking. Is that what you’re doing?
In August, Gov. Paul LePage, …. whose major economic development accomplishment has been legalizing the sale of fireworks … criticized the cost of wind energy in general and called it a“boutique energy source.”
Go figure.
“And his major accomplishment is that the State of Maine now has its financial house in order. ”
Oh, but don’t you read the News ?
““At this point in time it would be a request for dollars,” Stefanie Nadeau, who directs the state’s Office of MaineCare Services, told the Bangor Daily News. “We don’t necessarily have a plan on how to fill the gap other than a supplemental request. That’s our contingency plan.”
Nadeau’s comments came a day after a federal court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Attorney General William Schneider to force a federal agency to expedite approval of Maine’s request to make about $20 million in cuts to its Medicaid program, also known as MaineCare.
The state had filed the request with federal officials on Aug. 1 seeking a decision by the start of September so the cuts could take effect Oct. 1. When the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicated it wouldn’t meet the state’s desired Sept. 1 deadline for ruling on the cuts, Schneider petitioned the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to force an expedited decision.
That was the case a three-judge panel summarily dismissed on Thursday.
On Friday, Schneider said the judges’ decision was not a rejection of “Maine’s substantive legal arguments” that the Medicaid cuts in question are allowed by federal law. “We continue to believe that Maine has a strong legal argument on the substantive merits of this case,” he said in a written statement.”
http://bangor-launch.newspackstaging.com/2012/09/14/politics/mainecare-director-says-if-state-cant-cut-medicaid-it-will-request-more-money-for-budget/
LePage’s scetret special session is going to be about funding his budget short fall, now.
Mitt Nival:
Gov. Paul LePage …… IS RIGHT! It is an expensive, unnecessary, unreliable, intermittent, “boutique energy source” that will stretch our grid to it’s breaking point.
And his major accomplishment is that the State of Maine now has its financial house in order. This is a MAJOR accomplishment after the 40 years of a series of administrations that cared nothing for the people of Maine, but only their own cronies, and how rich they could become. All you have to do is take a look at all the old government employees on the roles of these big government sponsored projects in the Wind Industry. . . . Prime among them is Angus King and all his relatives.
If giant turbines could be strapped to the backs of whales that were trained to swim really fast near the surface, (and the extension cords were long enough), think of the billions of homes that could be powered. It’s a whale of an idea! Think I could get some of those subsidies for inventing it? Speaking of whales, has anyone asked what infrasound does to them?
Free birth control to all humans, (we’re at 7 BILLION and multiplying like rabbits) planting trees and building small thorium reactors would be far, far more beneficial than wasting more money we don’t have.
To Jason Web:
The Veazie power plant is there for you to look at. The facts and figures are public domain. Go look them up. My statements are NOT fantasy, like the fantasy that we were sold by BIG WIND that we are the Saudi Arabia of Wind in the US. We are actually in the lower 89th percentile of wind in the US. You want some facts?
http://api.ning.com/files/AlUWUzhZhdnBZIK2jIzsmzlUkOa3wFokl9kv9ylEI9*AV*j-dQpA7IsXkGWyjwg08u7dnEh5FlXycuMHxm1Y*npUk5*3SgH0/20FactsAboutWind_FMM.pdf
Beware of special interest groups frantically urging you to spend your money on something they don’t want to explain in too great of detail. (Don’t read the fine print – nothing important there for you to see.) The fact is, we have no idea yet what the overall costs of massive offshore wind development will be – and they don’t want to talk about it. But, they do want us to put goals for offshore wind energy capacity into law, even before the first TEST project has been deployed. They also want you to believe that what costs they are willing to talk about aren’t costs, at all – they’re benefits. They’ve learned to pencil whip the balance sheet so that the construction costs are now actually profit.
I’m starting to hold onto my wallet when I see the NRCM, NWF and CLF coming toward me.