The Maine Aqua Ventus program reached a critical milestone on Tuesday, Jan. 14 when the Maine Public Utilities Commission approved the term sheet for a pilot offshore wind farm. The commission voted 2-1 to support the term sheet, which means that Maine Aqua Ventus is one step closer to receiving electric ratepayer support for its experimental offshore wind turbines.
Maine Aqua Ventus represents a group of local companies who have come together to support the Advanced Structures and Composites Center and its goal of creating floating offshore wind turbines to harness the colossal amount of energy created from offshore wind. The consortium is made up of Emera, Cianbro and Maine Prime Technologies and is currently competing with seven other groups for funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) in a race to harness the energy offshore wind can provide.
Dr. Habib Dagher, director of the ASC Center, is optimistic about Maine Aqua Ventus’ chances.
“As far as I know, we’re the only project of the seven that is competing that has a term sheet that’s been approved,” Dagher said in an interview with the Maine Campus. “It’s a big project. I think $130 million is the latest estimate, so it’s a big, big deal.”
Dagher, along with representatives from Cianbro and Emera, will present to the DOE on April 7 and 8 in the hopes of receiving $46.6 million to fund the pilot project. If the DOE approves the project, work will begin on building two full scale VolturnUS wind turbines that will float two miles south of Monhegan Island.
“The information from the success of the 1:8 scale [VolturnUS] will be going into our proposal to the Department of Energy,” Dagher said. “We can tell them we built one. It survived the winter months; it did everything it was supposed to [do] according to our calculations. We have evidence to show that we have this technology and that it does work.”
These turbines will be eight times larger than the floating turbine launched off the coast of Castine in June 2013 and will be connected to the Maine electrical grid, costing taxpayers 23 cents per kilowatt hour, which is roughly equivalent to an extra $0.75 per month per person.
The test site off the coast of Monhegan Island was chosen due to its lack of interference with coastal communities and ecosystems. If all goes to plan, the two windmills will be launched in 2017 and will be monitored until 2022, at which point the Maine Aqua Ventus will apply for more money from the DOE to pursue the next step in the plan.
“It’s a 20-year plan that we have. The end goal is to have five gigawatts of offshore wind [harnessed from] the Gulf of Maine by the year 2030. That’s five nuclear power plants worth of wind,” Dagher said. “When you have such a big project, what you do is break it up into pieces. So we broke it up into phases … By breaking it up into phases — crawl before you walk, walk before you run, so to speak — [we are] minimizing the engineering risk.”
It is this careful approach to the project planning that netted the approval of MPUC Chairman Thomas Welch and Commissioner David Littell. However, Commissioner Mark Vannoy voted against the term sheet approval, citing the potential future costs of electricity. With the commercial-scale project estimated to cost around $1.8 billion, Vannoy questioned the economic feasibility of the project.
Dagher still believes the project is more than worth the risk.
“This is yet another natural resource, a huge natural resource that we have that we haven’t taken advantage of,” Dr. Dagher said. “If you were to build floating VolturnUS wind turbines using the same amount of concrete we have in the Hoover Dam, we could harness four times the amount of electricity of the Hoover Dam.”
Vannoy is not the only person who is critical of the proposed wind farm. James LaBrecque is the owner of Flexware Control Technologies in Bangor, which deals with advanced refrigeration units and heat pumps. LaBrecque also acts as a part time capstone advisor to students in the college of engineering and is a technical advisor for Gov. LePage on energy. LaBrecque also believes that wind energy is not the right route for Maine.
“You need 47 Mars Hill Mountains in each of Maine’s counties to heat [434,000] homes on a cold winter night,” LaBrecque said in an interview with the Maine Campus.
“I don’t get involved in policy, just the nuts and bolts of the matter,” LaBrecque said. “There could be a situation where we say ‘this is a bad energy deal,’ but on the political front it could bring millions [of dollars] to the state.”
LaBrecque argues that although there is a lot of energy to be harnessed from offshore wind, it is highly inefficient compared to heat pumps and smart grid technology, particularly when considering Maine winters.
According to LaBrecque, the only time having offshore wind would be beneficial would be during the winter months when houses need far more electricity for heat. During the rest of the year homes don’t use as much electricity, meaning that excess electrical energy created by the turbines would have to be stored. Because electrical energy doesn’t store as well as natural gas or oil it would be far less efficient.
“You still need oil for those cold days, the coldest parts of the year because the liquid fuel in your cellar is equivalent to seven Maine Yankee nuclear power plant running for 30 days,” LaBrecque said. “One gallon of gasoline has 36 kilowatt hours of energy whereas one Nissan Leaf has 660 pounds of batteries that only stores electrical energy for 24 kilowatt hours. So you get less energy storage from 100 times the weight.”
Instead of focusing on wind, LaBrecque believes that there are far better alternatives. Heat pumps are refrigeration units that take air from outside and energize it so that it can heat homes. These pumps operate at 300 percent efficiency, meaning that, without disobeying the laws of physics, they can electrically convert the cold air coming into the pump and release it as hot air n the other side. According to LaBrecque, some heat pump units developed within the last couple of years have been capable of pulling heat out of air as cold as -400 degrees fahrenheit.
“Four hundred thirty four thousand [households] in Maine have oil,” LaBrecque said. “If a plant goes down in the winter, with a smart grid you can shut down a bunch of heat pumps and the house reverts back to oil. So now, all of the electrical generators can be utilized which will drop the cost of electricity below what it is today.
“You can draw 40 percent more electricity across power lines in the winter than you can in the summer because the lines are refrigerated,” LaBrecque said. “If you have twice the amount of kilowatts going over the lines, your distribution cost is going to be halved because the [energy] cost is fixed.”
One other alternative that has been explored in the past is large scale hydropower from Canada. Hydro-Quebec is a government owned hydroelectric facility that is capable of producing up to 36,000 megawatts of electricity, 98 percent of which is created through use of water. Also, their export price for electricity would be the same as natural gas, which is lower than the 23 cents per kilowatt hour offered by offshore wind.
“The people of this state … all think windmills are going to replace oil. It’s coming from an uninformed public,” LaBrecque said. “Everybody wants a simple solution. Just build this great big mammoth thing and our problems are gone. People don’t have a perspective of what they’re buying here. People don’t understand that they aren’t going to get off oil by building these windmills.”
With so much money on the line, it is important to proceed with caution with projects such as this. A failure could leave Maine in worse condition than it is now. However, if this venture into offshore wind is successful, it could revolutionize the alternative energy industry on a global level and create an entirely new market with thousands of new jobs here in Maine, catapulting the state to the forefront of global alternative energy: a truly exciting prospect.