Blowin' in the wind

Sandy has me inspired this morning as I nibble my nails and nervously watch over my east coast friends in a virtual sense. A monster storm for Halloween is as scary as you can get.

In addition to great aunts and uncles, future potential in-laws, overseas visitors, friends who are moving, and cousins galore, I've been worried about something else too - windmills. To be specific, off-shore windfarms along the Eastern US seaboard, one of the most recent energy deus ex machinas widely hailed in the popular media as potentially generating enough power to satisfy all coastal demand and generate even more economic benefit. (Whether single source generation of the entire demand is wise is another discussion, and generally one where researchers and policy wonks take a more conservative view than the pundits.)

In fact, a huge consortium of 47 organizations, led by the National Wildlife Federation, recently issued the The Turning Point for Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy: Time for Action to Create Jobs, Reduce Pollution, Protect Wildlife & Secure America's Energy Future report, backing up the media hype to a large extent, and the DOI has set aside a large swath of US territorial waters for a large scale project.

The talking heads seem to agree that government support for off-shore wind development is key to overcoming obstacles, and this makes a great deal of intuitive sense as we are talking about activity occurring in US territorial waters rather than within the landscape of individual states. Contending with international law of the sea regulations and conventions could pose additional challenges, while from an economic standpoint, backing development of 140,000+ large scale wind turbines requires identifying both buyers and investors, and a lot of them.

Domestic regulations pose challenges as well, with overlapping jurisdictions and complex permitting requirements posing potential obstacles as the nation seeks to balance protection of coastal and marine wildlife with economic and energy security. Indeed, some might argue that the very complexity of the system and the delays this causes acts as a caution-signal, slowing development and allowing time to protect these resources, albeit also grinding some projects to a complete halt. In turn, speeding up the process in the interests of economic efficiency and predictable outcomes for investors could cause such concerns to be bypassed without sufficient scrutiny. The Cape Wind project, which has overcome many of these regulatory hurdles, could be an interesting demonstration of how these challenges play out.

In terms of existing examples, many of the potential obstacles and rewards have already been demonstrated by European offshore wind farm projects, well-developed and rapidly expanding to-date.

Getting back to the weather for a moment though, hurricanes and other monster storms pose a real technological hurdle to offshore wind farming, although Sandy itself is assumed not to be a potentially big risk due to its path. Analysts intentionally seek project locations that minimize the risk of loss posed by storms like Sandy. Traditionally, these would have been areas along the northeastern US seaboard, as the southern seaboard tended in the past to be most heavily hit by hurricanes. Sandy may represent a new breed of large, strong storms systems impacting coastal region further north, however, and if such storms are trending towards greater frequency, this could shift the assumptions underlying the economic models green-lighting these northern locations. There is an interplay between risk and reward inherent in any investment, and increased frequency and severity of storms shifts that burden onto the investors in potentially unattractive ways.

Of course, large scale shift in climate, generating larger, more dangerous storms, pose risks for existing energy infrastructure and production facilities already, and to some measure, a greater risk to human health and welfare when interacting with older technologies like natural gas or nuclear power. The relative health neutrality of offshore wind development once developed (manufacturing of turbines posing, perhaps, a different set of considerations) circumvents some of these obvious health and safety concerns, removing at least one potential obstacle.

Ultimately, I should probably be a lot more concerned about my friends and family who live close to on-shore power hazards than about the safety of some cold steel structures in the Atlantic.