Fishermen's Energy, an Offshore Wind Development Company, submitted a plan to the state of New Jersey to install five wind turbines off the coast of Atlantic City. The 25 megawatt windfarm would have cost $188 million, with the hopes of becoming the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

However, in March 2014, the Board of Public Utilities determined that the price of electricity from the wind farm ($263 per MWh) was too high for people to pay, and therefore, the plan was rejected. Fishermen's energy attempted to appeal this decision, but in April 2014, regulators rejected the appeal.

At the AWEA Conference in May, however, the DOE announced that Fishermen's energy had been chosen as the winner of a grant of $46.7 million to support offshore wind energy, bringing new life to the project. Fishermen's is still trying to get an appeal to from the Utilities, and we will update you as soon as we've heard a decision

 

 

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Source: http://www.nawindpower.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.13278

 

The Cape Wind project in Massachusetts , which has been in development for over a decade, is the closest that the US is to developing Offshore Wind Energy. Although many states have put bids in for offshore development, the Cape Wind Project still stands as the only project in later stages of development.

The U.S Government announced on June 17th that they are allowing for a new area of wind to be auctioned for developed: 742,000 acres of it. For comparison, that's larger that Rhode Island. This more than doubles the current area for Offshore Wind development in Massachusetts. The new area is shown in green in the figure below.

RI_and_MA0730

The public will have 60 days to comment on the proposal.

This is really exciting news for the Offshore Wind Energy industry. Honestly, it's been a little disheartening how slowly the industry has developed in the United States, especially compared to other countries such as Denmark and the UK who rapidly developed offshore wind. This additional lease area, as well as a few others that have been designated this past year, show that there is a slightly more positive outlook by the state and federal governments to develop offshore wind. We can only hope that one of these projects will finally move past the permitting phase.

 

Sources:

http://www.boem.gov/State-Activities-Massachusetts/

http://www.industryleadersmagazine.com/u-s-unveils-massive-auction-for-offshore-wind-development/

We're the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) Student Chapter at the University of Delaware, and we're here to share our love (and knowledge) of wind energy with the world!

So what kind of things can you expect to see on this site?

  1. General information about wind energy! Have you always had a pressing question about wind energy that you've just never been able to ask? This website is the perfect place to find out more information! If you're question isn't answered in our FAQ section, you can contact any of us directly (see the "About Us" page, and we'd be more than willing to answer your pressing wind questions!
  2. Postings and opinions about the latest developments in the wind energy world.
  3. The latest research on wind energy! Every other week at UD we hold brown bag lunch seminars to talk about the research we're doing on wind energy. That means that every week, there will be a new blog post talking about new findings in wind!

We're just a bunch of graduate students trying to save the world, one wind turbine at a time.

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