SeaEnergy Renewables: building offshore deep water wind farms
By Susan Wilson
Offshore wind farms can be an eye sore. Just ask Massachusetts coastal residents. But what if you could build wind farms far enough offshore, that the wind turbines were barely visible. SeaEnergy Renewables is doing just that as part of the DOWNVInD (Distant Offshore Wind Farms With No Visual Impact In Deepwater) initiative.
SeaEnergy Renewables has taken the EU DOWNVInD initiative seriously. The company combines traditional offshore oil rig infrastructure with large wind turbines to create large wind farms. In order to do this, the company needed to find a way to assemble the turbine, rotor, blades and tower on shore and then transport them to the jacket subsea structures. Luckily SeaEnergy management has years of experience with offshore oil and gas rigs.
The company showed off its expertise by building the Beatrice Wind Farm as a demonstration project off the shore of Scotland in the North Sea. The wind farm is next to the Beatrice oil field, 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) off the coast of Scotland and 45 meters (147.6 feet) deep. Large five megawatt wind turbines are now in place and generating electricity.
With the European Union (EU) requirement that 20 percent of all energy used will be renewable energy by 2020, SeaEnergy expects to get much more offshore wind business from other EU countries. Since the EU contributed six million euros towards the successful Beatrice project, naturally, SeaEnergy expects to pick up more business with offshore deep water wind farms from further EU countries.
With all of the flack that wind farm projects have generated from coastal residents, DOWNVinD projects look to be the answer to using sea winds to generate renewable energy.
SeaEnergy’s vision is to create deep offshore wind farms world wide. Projects placed offshore from North and South America would go a long way towards providing clean renewable energy in place of coal fired power plants. Similar wind farms off the coast of China would cut down on air pollution while wind farms off the coast of Africa would conceivably provide electricity to areas currently without power.
SeaEnergy has created the necessary technology and infrastructure to build, transport and install large offshore deep water wind farms. Now we need more companies to take advantage of SeaEnergy’s expertise.
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Stumble It!
February 15th, 2009
One caveat though. It is not very practical to transmit the power from very far off shore. So these wind farms will encroach on existing close in sea lanes and prime fisheries?
February 16th, 2009
Between these off-shore wind farms and tidal/wave generation there’s enough guaranteed energy to satisfy if not all of our needs then a significant chunk of them.
AFAIK no-one is talking about ‘farms’ that are “very far off”.
Just a few miles off-shore seems to be common.
I suppose building the piers would upset the environment for the fish for as long as they take to make but after that (just like with sunken wrecks) I would expect nature would soon enough take it all over again.