Wind farm announced for Lake Erie, could produce 1,000 megawatts by 2020
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted May 24th 2010 2:01PM
posted May 24th 2010 2:01PM
Wind farms have started popping up around the states -- including one off Rehoboth Beach -- and if the Lake Erie Energy Development Corp has its way, twenty megawatts of power will be generated off the coast of Ohio beginning in late 2012. The direct drive wind turbines, each generating four megawatts of power, will be supplied and maintained by General Electric, who designed them especially for off-shore use. Subsequent projects are also in the works by the dynamic duo, with the eventual goal of 1,000 megawatts by 2020 -- by which time the Insane Clown Posse will be eligible for the Rock'N'Roll Hall of Fame and the United States will have its first Juggalo President. PR after the break. GE and Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation Announce Great Lakes Offshore Wind Partnership at AWEA
Press Release Source: GE On Monday May 24, 2010, 6:00 am EDT
DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE (NYSE: GE - News) and Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo) of Northern Ohio announced today a long-term partnership beginning with the development of the first fresh water offshore wind farm in the US and involving a broad range of other initiatives. Under the new partnership GE will provide direct-drive wind turbines to LEEDCo's 20 megawatt offshore wind project in the Ohio waters of Lake Erie. The partnership and project is a significant step towards accelerating the deployment of offshore wind in the Great Lakes. The announcement was made at the American Wind Energy Association's annual WINDPOWER Conference in Dallas.
"Ohio's greatest potential for creating wind energy is offshore in Lake Erie, and this partnership marks a significant step forward," said Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. "In Ohio, we have all the right assets to make offshore wind energy successful, including an innovative workforce and the manufacturing strengths that would allow us to build all the component parts for wind turbines. This partnership will not only advance offshore wind technologies, it will also advance Ohio's economy. We are eager to continue the state's strong collaboration with GE and LEEDCo as we pursue this exciting, first-of-its-kind initiative for Lake Erie."
The LEEDCo-GE partnership builds on the momentum of a four-year effort by The Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force and other partners in Ohio to establish an offshore wind industry on Lake Erie, leveraging the region's strong manufacturing base.
To kick off the collaboration with LEEDCo, GE has committed to providing offshore wind turbines and maintenance services for an initial 20-megawatt wind farm. Upon its completion, targeted for late 2012, this project would be located off the shores of Lake Erie, near Cleveland, Ohio. This would be followed by subsequent projects with a long-term goal of 1,000 megawatts in the Ohio waters of Lake Erie by 2020.
At the core of the Lake Erie Project is GE's next generation wind turbine, a 4-megawatt machine designed specifically for offshore deployment. As the largest wind turbine in GE's fleet, it will incorporate direct-drive technology gained through GE's acquisition of ScanWind. The 4-megawatt wind turbine will feature GE's innovative advanced loads controls and aeroelastically tailored blade technology.
In addition to collaborating on the initial 20-megawatt project, GE and LEEDCo will create a strategic plan to identify opportunities for cost reduction to make offshore wind energy in the Great Lakes economically viable. GE and LEEDCo will also work jointly on advocacy and public policy issues to increase support for offshore wind energy, and accelerate the growth of America's offshore wind industry.
"Offshore wind has the potential to create thousands of new jobs in Ohio and become a major source of economic growth. Working with LEEDCo we have made significant progress to make offshore wind in Lake Erie a reality," said Vic Abate, Vice President of GE's Renewable Energy business, and also President of AWEA's Board of Directors. "We look forward to installing our next generation offshore, direct drive wind technology in Lake Erie. GE is committed to working with LEEDCo to achieve its vision of creating an offshore wind sector in Northern Ohio and the Great Lakes region."
"LEEDCo is pleased to be working with GE and we value the equipment efficiency, product innovation, and commercial acumen they bring to the partnership," said Dr. Lorry Wagner, President of LEEDCo. "Together, we aim to develop a cost-effective approach for installing and maintaining offshore wind turbines with the highest possible availability. We are confident that as the GE product line develops and our methodologies mature, the combination will promote a self-sustaining and growing market for offshore wind in Lake Erie and the Great Lakes, providing economic opportunity and emissions-free energy for Northern Ohio."
About GE
GE (NYSE: GE - News) is a diversified infrastructure, finance and media company taking on the world's toughest challenges. From aircraft engines and power generation to financial services, health care solutions and television programming, GE operates in more than 100 countries and employs about 300,000 people worldwide. For more information, visit the company's website at www.ge.com.
GE serves the energy sector by developing and deploying technology that helps make efficient use of natural resources. With nearly 85,000 global employees and 2009 revenues of $37 billion, GE Energy www.ge.com/energy is one of the world's leading suppliers of power generation and energy delivery technologies. The businesses that comprise GE Energy-GE Power & Water, GE Energy Services and GE Oil & Gas-work together to provide integrated product and service solutions in all areas of the energy industry including coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy; renewable resources such as water, wind, solar and biogas; and other alternative fuels.
About LEEDCo
The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo), based in Cleveland, Ohio, is a regional nonprofit economic development corporation, leading efforts to build, install, and deploy an offshore wind farm on Lake Erie while spurring economic development in Northern Ohio's wind energy industry. Initially, LEEDCo is pursuing the installation of a 20-megawatt facility offshore near downtown Cleveland. This will be followed by subsequent projects with a long-term goal of 1,000 megawatts in the Ohio waters of Lake Erie by 2020, at a price competitive with other forms of electricity generation. LEEDCo stems from the efforts of the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force, chaired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, to explore offshore wind. LEEDCo's founding partners include the Cleveland Foundation, the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Lorain County and NorTech. NorTech Energy Enterprise, an initiative of NorTech, led the effort to launch LEEDCo, which was incorporated in late 2009. www.leedco.org
Uh, good, I guess. Though how much is 1,000mW in the grand scheme of things?
@Javaguy one watt (1000mW) is barely enough to keep an Atom CPU up for two seconds.
@Javaguy I think it's only 1000 watts. I think my house uses at least 1000 watts during the evening. Bedroom lights, living room lights, computer, 2 TV's, 2 fridges, fish tank lights and filters...
@Javaguy
well, if you're referring to mW, you're referring to "milliwatts", which won't do much of anything on a grand scale.
But, one-thousand MEGA Watts is considerably higher, which is MW. Just a little clarification...
@Javaguy 1000 MegaWatts is enough to power a couple of hundred thousand homes. The first phase of this project will be able to power about 7000 average homes.
@Javaguy Allow me to smack some send into you by copying/pasting a comment I posted last week:
"There is no Silver Bullet for solving the energy problem. A combination of efficient and renewable energy sources working together can easily solve it though. Obviously wave power won't help those living in a desert or far from water but lets look at some place like the Great Plains. Plenty of land to build a solar panel farm AND wind farm. Again, there is no one solution we have to use everything we have together in the appropriate environments.
Disclaimer: I do not consider myself a subject expert for environmental issues and I did not invent the Internet."
@Javaguy - 1 megawatt is generally considered to be able to power 1000 homes
@Javaguy Various sources generally since the late 90s have published the average power consumption of a US household as 1000 W. 1000 MW would mean that it could power 1 million homes.
They're all pretty rough estimates, though, and I've seen some numbers that put the power consumption of a US home at much higher (up to 4000 W), but 1000 MW is still a pretty large number. For comparison, the largest single wind facility in the US (and world) currently is at Roscoe, TX and generates 782 MW.
@BillC
Wish they would include a cost/benefit analysis. Great that a couple hundred thousand homes can be powered by this tech in 10 years. I love that it's "green". But just how much are we paying in the way of a premium to move from away from cheaper energy alternatives?
Should be pretty simple to figure out what one of these costs to purchase and install and then maintain annually. Figure out how many homes a single one can power. Then you have a baseline of initial cost plus annual cost per household. From there it's a quick calc to see how that cost compares to what those homes are paying today with coal fired electricity (or whatever they use in the area).
@bjsguess
everyone needs to stop thinking about the initial 'premium' costs and start thinking of the long term costs
wind farms are amazing for long term costs, though solar panels are better, people call them ugly so dont put them on their houses / desert (some screwed up people i tell you)
id love to know if its at all possible to make the material for the turbines out of solar panels, 2 in 1 yeah!! :P
i should patent that XD
@Javaguy The solution to our energy problems is to go all out on nuclear power. It's the cleanest source of power on earth, it's cheap, it's cost effective, and would last us an extremely long time [surely long enough to find another power source, like fusion] A lot of people don't realize that solar and wind power isn't cost effective. They take like 15-20 years to make up the costs it takes to produce them, and thats not considering maintenance [which wind turbines will need a lot of] and the fact that solar panels degrade over time [over time they produce less and less power as they degrade, usually becoming near useless after 20-25 years or so] The only reason people put up solar/wind energy is because the government subsidizes it.
@Javaguy It is .21MW less than is needed to "Get Back to the Future!"
@Luffy
In about 100 years people are going to look back at how stupid we were for using nuclear. Radiating ourselves is not the answer, wind is a much better idea.
@Invalidd
dammit beat me to it
@Javaguy
What about building one nuclear power plant instead?
@HotDog
Exactly the comparison I was going to make. 1000MW is about the output of an average sized nuclear power plant to answer the very first question. But that would not be green of course.
@maattp wow, ignorant much? Can you tell me whats wrong with nuclear, or are you a greenpeace idiot who speaks out his ass
@Javaguy
Actually it will power one house. That house belongs to Lebron James and they'll hook him up in a vain attempt to keep him in Cleveland.
@HoldenMccrotch
Noise could be a problem with all those turbines though.
@maattp
In about 100 years people are going to look back at how stupid we were for using wind power. Large wind turbines take over 15 years to generate the same amount of energy it takes to build them in the first place. The amount of concrete needed to stabilise them is huge and concrete production is one of the most energy intensive in the world.
As you pointed out nuclear does have its flaws though. The waste produced in a whole year by a nuclear power plant can fit in a London taxi cab. That is not very much. This is without considering that new technology has recently been developed (but not put into use yet) that can utilise the waste products as a nuclear fuel to produce even more energy.
Nuclear is probably our best bet until something better (aka fusion) can be produced
@Javaguy
I don't consider myself an expert, but I have been reading quite a few studies in my research towards my Master's degree in Power Engineering.
1. Most estimates suggest that we will need something like 1000-1500 GW of newly installed clean energy sources to reduce our carbon footprint (in the U.S.) by 80% from 2005 levels. This is the target that's being set right now by congress and has been suggested by several other organizations. This one installation is 1GW, so imagine 1000 of these if we'd do it all with wind.
2. The most specific estimates I've seen, based on U.S. Department of Energy studies actually state that for a utility wind (both on- and off-shore) have the potentially lowest cost, with on-shore wind being overall lower than nuclear, and on-shore wind covering about the same cost spread as nuclear. Estimates of nuclear costs, however, are reliant on federal loan guarantees, since new plants (even without evolutionary plant designs) represent quite a risk, with literally billion-dollar pricetags.
3. Solar represents a very attractive option, but most likely not to utilities in the next 20 years. Prices to utilities for wind, nuclear, and non-carbon-captured coal and natural gas sources generally range from about 5-8 cents per kilowatt while solar (both concentrated/thermal and photovoltaic panel installations) are expected to be about twice that. It is competitive to end-users for local installation, however, because it's long-term costs are still competitive with retail prices of electricity at about 10-13 cents per kWh.
These are long-term costs, and are based on cost ranges. This data is from a paper from the National Academy of Engineers available (for purchase) here:http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12710.html
These estimates are based on the Department of Energy's Annual Energy Outlook 2007. This report is used as a basis of comparison for many long-term planning studies as well as to gauge the effects of legislature proposed by Congress.
@blland Considering a Watt is a Joule per second, then it could by your calculation run 2 atom CPUs non-stop. This would be the largest off-shore wind farm and the joint 12th biggest proposed off-shore wind farm
@Luffy
Every single year US nuclear power plants produce 4,000 tons of highly radioactive waste that need to be stored and sealed for the next hundred thousand years or so. That is NOT green!
@Javaguy
Should have included a link to the 2010 Annual Energy Outlook .
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/
@Luffy Well said.
The Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station near Toledo outputs 889 MW. Nearly a thousand times what this wind farm will output. With a single nuclear reactor.
How much will it cost to build and maintain these things in the middle of the lake? How much dirty energy will be used during construct and maintenance?
Wind is bullshit. We need to take whatever dollars are going into wind power R&D and put them into solar power technologies so we can see those new breakthroughs used in cost-effective production units sometime in the next two decades. Then, until solar can sustain us, we need to build Gen III nuclear facilities, and kick-start the hydrogen economy for real.
@Invalidd
GREAT SCOTT!!!
@macserv
No offense, but before you go on a rant, check your units.
889 MW=0.889 GW. This is a 1000 MW=1.0 GW farm.
This farm is expected to produce as much power as the nuclear plant, though I'll grant that it is an intermittent source.
@HoldenMccrotch
That's why I asked about initial costs AND maintenance costs going forward.
Look, if the initial cost is the equivalent of $20k per household and on-going cost (maintenance) is going to be roughly equivalent to what we pay today I don't see how this makes sense (I don't have any idea what those costs are - $20k used here for illustration only).
You can't pretend that the initial cost doesn't exist. You also can't always look at the big picture down the road. We have to PAY for this stuff NOW. If my local gov't proposed a plan that would keep my energy rates at where they are today but was going to charge me an extra $20k through local taxation to cover "going green" I would throw a fit.
I'm all for renewable energy. Great idea. I just want to know what it's going to cost. Is it too much to ask that we get some very basic pieces of information around what this technology will cost if we were to adopt it?
@Javaguy
Moreover haven't we got enough wind without these fans?
@bjsguess
I don't know if it was clear in my post, but the "long-term" costs that I cited were levelized, long-term numbers. That is, the entire cost of new generation + fuel over the lifetime of the installation, referred to (in this case) U.S. dollars in 2007.
I can assure you that wind energy is quite affordable. If we assume some sort of cap-and-trade or any other factor increases the cost of coal and natural gas (for example, as is not unlikely, we exhaust our most accessible NG sources) wind becomes the most affordable technology. For today...new investment has the potential to make now-expensive sources like solar and geothermal power much cheaper.
(I realize you weren't responding to me, but I figured I'd give a shot at clearing some things up)
@bjsguess
I'm not American. I'm German. But I want to give you a perspective of what's the situation here so that you can decide. For long Germany was the major wind market in the world because the government gave it a kick start by passing a law that bound the providers to buy the energy at a certain higher price than average. So the wind sector flourished. There was no tax money involved.
The consumer has the choice to buy the electricity from the source he wants. The standard energy mix from fossil fuels and nuclear or green. And many many people and businesses chose green. In 2006 the monthly electricity bill of an average household purchasing green power was only €0,50 higher. Projections are that with the rise of costs in fossil fuels and the pace of technological improvements in green technology, wind energy will be the cheapest energy source in Germany within the next 5-10 years.
The state where I live in already produces more than 30% of it's energy needs with wind power. Now you know the situation here. I let you make up your mind. :-)
@SeeKo
I will add a source link for what I wrote above about the german energy market. Didn't know that 'google translate' also works with PDF files. Cool. This is a translation from a survey by an independent clean energy organization from 2006. Also interesting, the paragraph about nuclear energy subsidies compared to green energy on page 3.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wind-energie.de%2Ffileadmin%2Fdokumente%2FHintergrundpapiere%2FWirtschaft_und_Strompreise%2FHG_Subventionen.pdf&sl=de&tl=en
@Rebel6381 you contradict yourself in this statement - also youre fucking WRONG. Nuclear microfusion cells.
@SeeKo Sure it is, albeit more of a glowing neon green.
@coley501
Oh, shit. If we're not going to see a benefit for 15 years, it ain't worth doing.
How about talking to the folks in Vegas who run a ridiculous amount of lighting 24/7 thanks to the cheap electricity provided by Hoover dam. Maybe they regret the up-front investment and wish they would have spent the money elsewhere.
15 years for break-even on the construction cost is very attractive. The aformentioned Hoover Dam was a 50-year construction loan. Hoover Dam generates 2080 Megawatts and was fantastically more expensive to build and operate than these windmills. Not to mention that hydroelectric requires specific geographical arrangements and in many cases poses a negative environmental impact.
@maattp You are so dumb. wind power is useless - remember how life is perpetuated - the sun, aka a big ball of nuclear fusion - DUH
@SeeKo too bad we can build ion drive space vessels and send our waste practically anywhere.
@zerodb 1.21 Gigawatts!! Ohio wants to go back in time! lol
@SeeKo That nuclear waste can be recycled. France recycles 90% of their nuclear waste. We don't because of some stupid laws that need to be removed, laws put in be greenpeace lobbyist types. Who would've thought people who push the green movement so much are actually some of the most regressive people towards the green movement.
@Luffy Cheering nuclear energy because it's cost efficient is ridiculous considering the fact that, in all likelihood, 50,000 years down the road there aren't gonna be the same American congresspeople and voters wrestling over costs. Nuclear energy is a short-term solution that creates a big problem, indefinitely. Besides, in the short term, what are the waste management costs? The level of security and caution that has to be taken with every load of waste, including low-level waste, costs a fortune, not to mention the risks to any civilians living along the transportation route.
@HotDog
Modern nuclear power plants can supply in the Giga-Watt range.
That is GW...
Doc Brown calls it a Jiga-Watt
@coley501 And would you mind if that taxi was parked in your garage?
@blland This combine with bloom energy is the future of any energy-related services. http://bit.ly/bloom-energy-will-change-the-world
@realar They are going to be 5 miles off shore. If a wind turbine makes noise in the middle of the lake and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? :)
Really late post but..
In the estimates about how bad wind and solar are, there's never any mention of our methods constant and exponential pace of improvement. Every perspective offered seems as though the current statistics are set in stone and will continue perpetually.
All of the talk about maintaining expensive photovoltaics? I think I read HERE ON ENGADGET that there's work being done RIGHT NOW to make cheaper organic photovoltaics. I read that some lady discovered how to separate hydrogen out of water using a virus! Talk about poor wind returns? I read that changing the configuration from straight lines to patterns can increase yield ten-fold!
This is all very nascent technology. It's too soon for the foolhardy to start digging a grave.
1 JIGAWATT!!!!11!! with another 210 gigawatts we could use it to travel back to 1985
@EdR 210 megawatts
@EdR 210 megawatts
@EdR
Now we just need a delorean and a flux capacitor...
@EdR
1.21 juggawats is, by definition, enough to travel forward in time until the inauguration of the first Insane Clown Posse president.