 ever-growing circle
While two offshore wind projects in the United States, Cape Wind and one off the Delaware coast, appear to be nearing the construction stage, both currently plan to cable their electricity directly ashore to utilities in their abutting localities.
Kempton says when completed, the two projects would tap no more than 0.01 percent of the region's wind energy potential, and he is hopeful that in the long run his ideas will be of some help. (Cape Wind says its 130 turbines could produce up to 468 megawatts, but acknowledged the more likely figure would be 170 megawatts, which it said is 70 percent of demand for the Cape Cod/Martha's Vineyard/Nantucket area.)
"People always think of wind as a highly fluctuating resource and therefore not very useful. Not true. Because at low levels of wind, which is all we're going to see for years anyway, it's very easily managed within the power system," Kempton suggested. "This study shows that you can cheaply bring in large amounts of wind without getting the kinds of fluctuations that individual wind farms are known for."
Kempton's science and policy proposals make sense to David H. Matthiesen, associate professor at Case Western Reserve, who leads a group of researchers studying the potential of offshore wind power on the Great Lakes.
"As you draw a circle, as the circle gets bigger, the odds become better that the wind is blowing somewhere in that circle," he said from the offices of the Great Lakes Energy Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, "I can see this playing out very nicely in the Great Lakes. The weather that Chicago's getting, we'll get in two days; if you could have a regional network like that, it would make balancing that base load from wind energy a lot better."