From E&P magazine
HOUSTON—Technology used by the oil and natural gas industry including jackets and tension-leg platforms (TLPs) have benefited the offshore wind industry, which could provide a power source that could help fill electrical generation gaps in the U.S.
Alana Duerr, the lead for offshore wind within the Wind Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), said the DOE’s goal is to build a business case for the resource, address challenges and help reduce costs, enabling development in all coastal regions and optimizing grid integration and transmission.
The gap between current energy generation from existing U.S. wind facilities—land-based and offshore—and growing electricity demand is about 2,400 terawatt hours per year by 2050, Duerr said at OTC 2017. “While offshore wind has the resource to fill all of that, we’re not suggesting that it will. We’re suggesting that we want offshore wind to be part of the mix that actually fills that gap by 2050.”
Duerr noted there would need to be a “significant amount of upgrades to transport electricity from the middle portion of the country where there’s a lot of really good land-based wind resource, out to the coast where there’s the energy demand. So that’s why we’re looking at places off the East Coast that have the population density, the electricity demand and also the offshore wind resource.”
Much potential lies on the nation’s coasts, where about 80% of the electricity demand is centered, she said. “Off of those regions there [are] approximately 2,000 gigawatts [GW] of offshore wind energy that could be accessed and exploited with the technology that we have today,” she said.