zen owned, ruling out use of vessels and experienced crews from Europe.
Building the entire offshore wind generation and transmission system remains a significant undertaking, something the Stanford researchers also noted in the California study. "We haven't calculated the amount of steel that would be required," Kempton said, "but we have calculated in terms of production capability, and it's on the order of 10 or 15 full-size automobile production facilities."
That industrial capacity doesn't require an equivalent intellectual ramp-up, since the transmission technology is readily accessible. "There are undersea cables exactly like the one's we're describing that connect New Jersey to New York," Kempton said, in addition, "[t]here is a long run in Europe connecting Norway to Belgium" with a 580 km cable. "It's not that we're requiring some kind of new technology."
However, Kempton concedes an offshore interconnection would be costly and that "there is no agreed upon mechanism for the company that builds it to recover their costs."
An interstate offshore interconnect might prove a bit of a conceptual stretch for electric utilities and their regulators, who have been traditionally confined to arranging their affairs state by state. But Kempton believes existing power distribution by "independent system operators" that operate on a regional basis (take California's ISO, for example) could implement the "early phases of this without any new organizations or new structures." That, he believes, would achieve some of the desired "smoothing."
Even so, caveats remain.
"If you want to go the long distances that we show in our article, then you would need some authority that would have the ability to regulate and recover costs and determine who's got the right to use and how much they should charge." He has even proposed a name for this entity: the Atlantic Independent System Operator. "It's creating a whole new institution, although it would be similar to those that operate regional power distribution systems on land."
An 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."