October 12, 2010
The forecast for the East Coast is windy with a chance of 6,000 megawatts — or enough electricity to power 1.9 million homes. That's what a $5 billion offshore transmission line proposal unveiled yesterday could make possible along the Atlantic Coast, and it's an exciting prospect for the nation's energy future.
Atlantic Wind Connection, the planned 350-mile underwater line located 15 to 20 miles off the coast, would provide a connection for multiple offshore wind power projects including Delaware's proposed Bluewater Wind. In theory, it should make creation of offshore wind farms easier and cheaper.
It's an ambitious plan and faces any number of hurdles from federal regulators and PJM Interconnection, which manages the electricity grid in a 13-state region that includes Maryland. But the potential boost it could provide for renewal energy is too game-changing to ignore.
Construction on the project, as envisioned by Chevy Chase-based transmission line developer Trans-Elect Development Co. and with financial backing from Google and others, could begin as early as 2013. The first phase would extend from New Jersey to Southern Delaware.
Offshore wind turbines are not without controversy. The Cape Wind project off Cape Cod faced harsh criticism from local residents who feared the towers would ruin their oceanfront views. But locating the turbines far from shore — as the Trans-Elect project would allow — should lessen that kind of opposition, as the towers would barely be discernible on the horizon.
The proposal only underscores the failure of Congress to approve an energy bill to promote renewable energy and address climate change. Without a change in federal policy, the cost differential between wind-power electricity and that produced by traditional fossil fuel-powered generation plants may be too great to sustain needed private investment.
Today, wind provides only about 2 percent of U.S. electricity needs, but turbines are going up at a record pace (although not as fast as in Europe and China). It could potentially provide 20 percent of this country's electricity in 20 years.
Connecting so many turbines together could also lessen the effects of variable weather on power generation and therefore address the technology's chief problem, its lack of reliability. At the very least, the project could help reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants by hundreds of thousands of tons annually.
That alone should spur the next Congress to deliver a bipartisan energy bill that adequately addresses the threat posed by global warming. Or, if the Congress is unable, it should not interfere with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to do so under existing Clean Air Act authority. A transmission line may significantly improve the economics of wind power but not as much as a sensible, if overdue, national carbon policy.
