Kind: captions
Language: en
this giant tube is part of the first big
offshore wind farm in the U.S now under
construction off the coast of
Massachusetts the company behind the
project Vineyard wind says a single spin
of one of the turbines could power a
home for a day and 62 of these each more
than twice as tall as the Statue of
Liberty are being installed about 34
miles from this beach when complete
Vineyard wind says the project will be
barely visible from nearby islands and
will power over 400 000 homes and
businesses but there are now a number of
offshore wind projects in development in
fact by 2030 the U.S aims for offshore
wind to generate 30 gigawatts of energy
enough to power about 10 million homes
still offshore wind has been slow to
spin up in the U.S compared to Europe
where there are thousands of wind
turbines
so why offshore wind what kind of impact
will it have and why now a lot has
evolved it's taken a lot of time to
develop the regulatory situation to get
various stakeholders comfortable the
economic environment the prospects for
abundant clean energy from wind becomes
pretty obvious when you look at a map of
where the Wind Blows the most
that's the dark blue there's a lot of it
in the center of the country where many
onshore wind farms have sprung up but
most of the population lives closer to
the coasts and it's hard to transmit
energy that far it's extremely
challenging to build long transmission
lines when it comes to getting permanent
rights across multiple States but just
offshore there's a whole lot more dark
blue and that wind is close to the large
population centers in the U.S the trick
is getting it to shore to build out a
grid that can take the power from this
location to where the load centers are
that is a huge part of ensuring that
this industry is successful so how do
they do it for Vineyard wind cables
carrying the electricity are buried
under the sea floor and come ashore
under this beach from here they continue
underground over four miles to this
place whoa that's kind of cool looking a
substation that converts the electricity
to a voltage that then feeds into the
electrical grid every Big Win project
will have to make landfall somewhere
that requires construction and a
substation both of which can be
disruptive and the effects of
construction extend offshore too like on
the fishing industry and marine animals
these are some of the reasons why
offshore wind has faced a lot of
opposition in the U.S
during construction
that will probably be the time when they
are the most significant impacts for
example on Commercial Fishing so even if
you could fish there there probably
wouldn't be many fish to catch that's
because noise can be disruptive to
marine animals and driving a pile for a
wind turbine is pretty loud sound
travels exceptionally well underwater
because sound is conducted very well by
sea water but the travel path of that
sound is disrupted when the sound wave
hits an air pocket in the water because
air is not as good a conductor of sound
as water is one solution that Vineyard
wind is using is as simple as it is
clever create a curtain of bubbles yeah
bubbles the idea of the bubble curtains
is to put hoses on the seabed around the
turbine Tower and force pressurized air
out of small holes in those hoses the
idea is that that air bubble curtain
will impede the transmission of the
sound it won't stop it but it will make
the signal much less loud once
construction is over the fishes and
fishing should return there may be some
changes in the distribution of species
as a result of the presence of the wind
farm for example the additional
structure that's now in the water there
may attract certain species of fish that
wouldn't have been there in that
abundance previously
wind developers will need to take a
number of precautions to protect the
marine environment but nothing can fully
protect it from all harm and global
warming itself could cause far more
damage than wind farms to the ocean
ecosystems my personal view is that the
change is worth pursuing in the interest
of slowing the negative effects on our
ocean ecosystem that global warming and
climate change is having right now it's
not free it comes at a cost and that's a
trade-off that we have to consider when
we decide to put wind farms into the
ocean some think that we should be
focusing more on developing different
carbon-free Energy Technologies like
solar and nuclear they too come with
trade-offs
it's still early days for the U.S
offshore wind industry and there are a
lot of complexities to navigate from the
marine environment to the fishing and
shipping Industries to Residents we
really are in a situation where we have
to decide what changes and sacrifices in
some instances we are prepared to make
to ensure that our grandchildren have a
workable and livable planet
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