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posted by janrinok on Friday May 25 2018, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the blowing-hot-and-cold dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Massachusetts and Rhode Island both awarded major offshore wind contracts on Wednesday, underscoring the increasing economic viability of a kind of renewable energy that has been long considered too expensive.

The Massachusetts installation will have a capacity of 800MW. Situated 14 miles off Martha's Vineyard, the wind farm will be called "Vineyard Wind," and it has an accelerated timetable: it's due to start sending electricity back to the grid as soon as 2021. According to Greentech Media, the contract was won by Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, both companies with headquarters in Europe. The two share 50/50 ownership of the project and beat Deepwater Wind and Bay State Wind in the bidding.

Massachusetts recently approved an ambitious goal to build 1.6GW of wind energy capacity off its coast by 2027. This new contract gets the state half of the way there. According to a press release from Vineyard Wind, the owners of the project will now begin negotiations for transmission services and power purchase agreements. The press release added that the project "will reduce Massachusetts' carbon emissions by over 1.6 million tons per year, the equivalent of removing 325,000 cars from state roads."

[...] The second major contract awarded on Wednesday came from the state of Rhode Island, and it went to Deepwater Wind. Deepwater Wind built the US' first offshore wind installation ever, a six-turbine, 30MW installation off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/america-your-offshore-wind-is-coming-1-2-gw-in-contracts-awarded/


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  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Friday May 25 2018, @10:11PM (1 child)

    by NewNic (6420) on Friday May 25 2018, @10:11PM (#684238) Journal

    Modern windmills spin significantly faster than the old ones did.

    By "modern" I assume you are including windmills built over 20 years ago? Because the newest windmills turn quite slowly. The tips of the blades move fast because of the massive size of the blades, but the rotational speed is quite low.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 25 2018, @11:46PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday May 25 2018, @11:46PM (#684266)

    You could have pointed out that his second setence was also incorrect, since a 5MW turbine is going to feed the next town and not much else.
    A park of 800MW capacity may feed from itself to the next metropolis, like a coal plant or a nuke does, but without the ugly.