Block Island -- This Historic Community Is Pushing the Nation Toward a Wind Power Revolution

Smithsonian mag ^ | APRIL 2022 | By Elizabeth Royte

[dennisw]

This Historic Community Is Pushing the Nation Toward a Wind Power Revolution Block Island, off the New England coast, overcame political strife to lead the way on energy independence

15 miles off the coast at its farthest point, has always been at the mercy of the four winds. Raging winter gusts have been known to rip porches off houses and knock stones off the rock walls that lattice the island’s meadows and pastures. More regularly, breezes delivered to residents the drone of enormous diesel-burning generators, the Rhode Island community’s sole source of power. No one liked it, “but that was just part of island life,” a local real estate agent tells me. People got used to the noise, and those who lived near the power plant—less than half a mile from downtown—resigned themselves to frequently scrubbing soot from their windows and sills.

But then, at precisely 5:30 a.m. on the first of May, 2017, a great silence fell upon the land. The generators, after roaring for 89 years, shut down. And yet electrons continued to flow.

“Suddenly you could hear the leaves rustling, the waves breaking, and the birds”—Henry duPont, a local engineer who attended the diesel shutdown, breaks off, allowing the twitter and squawk of spring migrants to speak in his stead. Residents have been marveling at the quietude ever since.

Since that day, Block Island has been the only community in the United States fully powered by offshore wind: in this case, five 6-megawatt turbines pounded into the seafloor just south of the island’s Mohegan Bluffs. Over the next several years the Block Island venture will be joined by many more towns and cities, as up to 2,000 new turbines begin to populate utility-scale wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard. These projects were fast-tracked a year ago when

[dennisw]

President Biden set a national goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy on both coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico by 2030. That’s enough juice to run ten million homes while avoiding the production of 78 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

“The loudest people against the wind farm considered the island their little paradise.”

From its inception, the Block Island Wind Farm, launched by a Providence-based company called Deepwater Wind, was meant to be a demonstration project. Not of the technology—European nations nailed that decades ago and now operate more than 5,000 offshore turbines—but of the knotty permitting process that allows a commercially financed power generator to plug into an established electrical grid. And smoothing the regulatory path will be essential if the nation is going to quit fossil fuels. According to a recent Princeton University study, total installed wind power must grow more than sixfold from today’s capacity for the nation to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.

While tens of thousands of smaller wind turbines, rated at less than two megawatts, have stippled the American landscape since the 1970s, truly widespread wind power will depend on much larger devices. Wind speed tends to increase with altitude, and the taller the tower is, the larger the blades and the turbine can be, dramatically increasing energy production. For example, one of the tallest turbines in operation, General Electric’s Haliade-X, a 13-megawatt behemoth installed in Rotterdam, reaches about 80 stories high, and each blade is 351 feet long. In just seven seconds it generates enough power to serve the average American home for a day.

These giants will almost certainly be planted primarily at sea, where it’s easier to transport enormous blades and tower sections, there’s more space for arrays, and permitting hassles with property owners are reduced. “You’re not dealing with people’s backyards or other kinds of challenges over hundreds of miles,” says Matt Morrissey, a former vice president of Orsted, the Danish company that acquired the Block Island Wind Farm in 2018.

[dennisw]

ARCHIVED HERE - ALT. URL —— https://archive.ph/1to3x

[dennisw]

We took a family vacation there, at Block Island, back about 1970

[Seruzawa]

Putting windmills in a place where the wind is guaranteed to blow 365/24/7 is hardly proof of concept.

[1Old Pro]

These giants will almost certainly be planted primarily at sea, where it’s easier to transport enormous blades and tower sections, there’s more space for arrays,

Plus when they are decommissioned, you just sink the plastic into the sea, the equivalent of 483 trillion plastic bags, which of course we eliminated because we didn't want to pollute the sea with plastic.

[PGR88]

If that’s what the local community selects - and pays for -themselves, then who am I to complain? That’s usually never the case though....

I am also quite sure - in 20 years, they will be squabbling about how expensive their electricity is, and who will pay to remove or refurbish the rusting hulks of disused wind-turbine shafts that remain dotted along their shoreline.

[Paladin2]

The BI system has no batteries?

The Diesels have never been fired up for backup situations?

[V_TWIN]

Because the wind ALWAYS blows

SMH

[redcatcherb412]

Raging winter gusts have been known to rip porches off houses and knock stones off the rock walls

Of course they will need alternate generation at times since windmills have to feather the blades if the wind exceeds about 50mph.

[cdcdawg]

Population 1400. SALUTE!!!

[packagingguy]

Renewables are very sensitive to energy density. So for places that have a lot of wind, windmills are great. Have sun all year long? Solar is great.

The big problem is that where there is a lot of strong wind there usually are not a whole lot of people. And where there is sun all year long there is not enough water.

[dennisw]

PRICE — In that year Deepwater signed an agreement with National Grid to sell the power from the wind farm off Block Island, at an initial price of 24.4¢/kW·h,[17] with a guaranteed[18] 3.5% annual increase.[19]

Wikipedia

[PAR35]

Save the birds. Ban windmills.

For the environment. And the Chilllllldren.

[cuz1961]

Block Head Island —

This Historic Community Is Pushing the Nation Toward a Wind Power Revolution

.

No pushing ! ,,

, ,bunch of groomers no doubt.

[cuz1961]

Block Head Island —

This Historic Community Is Pushing the Nation Toward a Wind Power Revolution

.

No pushing ! ,,

, ,bunch of groomers no doubt.

[Terry L Smith]

wait till thst buurivane comrd....then we will see

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Many decades ago, people in Southern California complained loudly, vociferously and incessantly about the vistas spoiled by the offshore oil rigs. Now they are perfectly happy with these view-ruining wind rigs only 2.9 miles offshore.

The article says that these were installed five years ago.

I wonder how bad the flickering is at dawn when long shadows are cast on the island.

I like David Lewis' thinking:

“Seascapes are sacred and immutable and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. One of the irreplaceable features of many outward-looking seascapes is that...one sees an expansive view to an open horizon that has looked just the same for longer than man can contemplate....Only the arrogance of man allows him to choose a point in time to say, ‘Here and now, I have the right to permanently alter the way something has always been, into something else of my choosing.’”

Conspicuously absent from this article are the words "storage" and "battery." Wind is not constant enough anywhere to do without storage.

Notice any corrosion? Is this why the wind turbine in Europe blew apart?

[hinckley buzzard]

What they don’t tell you is that a part of the deal was to connect the block island wind farm to the mainland grid, which pays the owners a handsome premium for electricity generated by the turbines. If the wind is calm, they will just get fossil fuel-generated power from the mainland until the breeze picks up again. Not exactly a freestanding independent green setup. The old diesel generating system was not connected to the mainland. Story is not honest in that regard, implying that the island is now self sufficient with wind. It is not.

[BluH2o]

"Suddenly you could hear the leaves rustling, the waves breaking, and the birds”

I've visited Block Island (a favorite sailing destination of mine when I lived in CT) numerous times spread out over 15 years. Don't recall hearing generators at any point ... or, if I did, they were so unobtrusive that they didn't interfere with my hearing waves breaking on the shoreline, birds chirping, or wind rustling leaves in trees or shrubbery. In fact in general it was very quiet ... except for 4th of July or maybe Labor Day... when the Great Salt Pond would be chock full of power & sail boats.