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Wind Farm Powers Up in Gulf
Developing offshore energy sources could be a breeze
By Pam Radtke Russell
On a clear day this summer, visitors to Galveston might be able to look into the Gulf of Mexico and see the future of the region’s power-an 80-ft-high wind turbine about 8 mi out in the Gulf.
The test wind turbine would be the first offshore wind turbine in the United States. Within a year, more wind towers and turbines could be going up along the Texas coast, the first of what may eventually be hundreds of turbines providing up to 1,500 megawats of power, enough electricity for 1.2 million homes.
The historic project is being developed by Wind Energy Systems Technologies LLC of New Iberia, La. One of the company’s founders, a longtime oilfield engineer, says it’s not such a leap from offshore oil platforms to offshore wind platforms.
“It’s the same engineering work,” says Herman Schellstede, one of the company principals and the project’s primary engineer.
But others are impressed with the way Schellstede and his partner, Harold Schoeffler, have been able move forward with their offshore wind power venture when other projects such as Cape Wind off Nantucket, Mass., have spent years stuck in neutral.
“It takes people with some vision and some daring to try this because it hasn’t been tried before in the U.S.,” says Walter Chapman, director of the Energy & Environmental Systems Institute at Rice University. Rice professors have been working informally with the WEST group.
Schoeffler and Schellstede say offshore winds blow consistently during the day when demand for power is greatest. Onshore winds, by comparison, often blow at night and are more intermittent.
Growing in the wind But the costs and difficulties of putting turbines in offshore waters have kept those in the United States from moving offshore. Offshore wind is even still in its infancy in Europe, with just 1,100 megawatts of installed wind power off Europe’s shores. But the European Wind Energy Association expects that between 20 gigawatts and 40 gigawatts will be operating off European Union countries by 2020.
Schoeffler and Schellstede say the decades of knowledge about the Gulf of Mexico’s geography, geology and weather will help them manage any problems in installing and operating the wind farms and will help them keep the costs under control.
Schellstede and environmentalist and Cadillac salesman Schoeffler started pursuing the possibility of tapping the Gulf of Mexico’s winds about five years ago after a Stanford University wind study showed some of the best offshore winds in the nation were in the Gulf of Mexico.
The men hoped to develop spots off the coast of Louisiana, but the state’s public service commission wasn’t receptive to the idea. So, WEST turned westward.
Wind-friendly Texas Texas, with its de-regulated power market and history with wind power, welcomed the prospect. Unlike most other states, Texas has the rights to the water bottoms 10 mi off its shore, so turbines and towers can be put up farther offshore and without having to go through federal bureaucratic red tape.
By comparison, the proposed Cape Wind project is in federal water, about 5 mi off the Massachusetts coast. Cape Wind was initially proposed in 2001, but rules for federal offshore wind leasing weren’t released until 2007. The Minerals Management Service, which manages federal offshore leases, isn’t expected to decide whether to lease the land until 2009.
“WEST found that Texas was a much more amenable place to do business,” says Jim Sudyman, a spokesman for the Texas General Land Office, which handles offshore leases.
WEST hasn’t given up on Louisiana, however. In February, Louisiana issued rules for leasing offshore land for wind farms, and WEST plans to apply for two leases, one off Grand Isle and a second at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The company hopes to install test towers at those sites and then work toward an agreement with some coastal Louisiana communities to supply them with power directly and avoid dealing with the state’s utility commission, Schellstede says.
But the company’s primary focus, for now, remains Texas.
In 2005, WEST leased 11,630 acres off Galveston and received a permit to install a test tower and a test turbine. A year ago, the company put up a test tower 8 mi off the coast with sensors that are testing several variables, including wind velocity, water currents and water temperature as well as the potential impact on birds and other wildlife.
This summer, the company intends to install an adjacent tower with a turbine. The turbine will test the amount of power that the Galveston wind can produce, a vital step to determining what types of turbines will be used.
Schoeffler, a longtime environmentalist and head of his local Sierra Club, has taken great pains to make sure that the local environmental community is engaged and that the wind turbines won’t negatively affect bird populations. Sensors on the test turbine and tower will measure bird hits and falls into the water.
“The wind is excellent is at Galveston,” Schellstede says. “That’s important - we can serve the public on a constant basis.”
The results of the test tower were so convincing that in October, WEST leased four more tracts off Freeport, Brownsville, Port Arthur and Corpus Christi. Preliminary tests in Brownsville and Corpus show that the winds are even better than in Galveston, Schellstede says.
Later this year, the company will seek a permit to construct the turbine towers for its first wind farm. After the permit is issued, the company should be producing power within 18 months, Schellstede says. Wind farms on the other sites will follow shortly, the men say.
Fanning the finances Financing is not yet in place for the project, though the company has been negotiating for months with various banks and financial institutions. There’s been international interest in financing all five wind farms, which would cost more than $1 billion to develop, Schoeffler says. Schoeffler and Schellstede have invested more than $8 million of their own money and have estimated that the first 150-megawatt phase of the wind farm will cost between $250 million and $275 million.
Until it has a financing partner and the wind tests are complete, the company can’t order equipment, formalize agreements with contractors or enter into power purchase agreements.
Schellstede says the company has tentative agreements with a Louisiana contractor to prepare the first few platforms, as well as for three turbines. The components for the first wind farm off Galveston will likely be built in Louisiana and trucked to Texas.
The company, though, has its eyes on a 219-acre site in Corpus Christi. There, Schellstede says the company plans to assemble the remaining 650 or so towers and turbines and barge them to the other lease sites for installation.
The company is also in discussions with blade manufacturers to manufacture blades at the site. Transpiration can add more than 15% to the cost of the project, Schellstede says.
Initially, Schellstede and Schoeffler intended to use recycled oil platforms as bases for all of the towers and turbines. They believe the multilegged oil platform design provides a more stable base for the heavy turbine load as opposed to the single-leg bases used in offshore wind farms in Europe.
But because it would be difficult to come up with so many recycled platforms at once, WEST plans to build many of the platforms needed. Recycled platforms will be used for gathering platforms at the Galveston wind farm. From each gathering platform, a copper-armored stainless steel cable, 8-in. to 9-in. in diameter, will be placed 16-ft below the seafloor and will go into Galveston and directly into the power grid.
“The points that they are selecting – or being discussed – are areas where there is more population and consumers and in general will require less transmission investments in proximity to load centers,” says Bill Bojorquez, vice president of system planning for Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the electric grid in much of Texas.
Though WEST is relying on its knowledge and experience in the Gulf of Mexico oil patch, the company is also seeking out innovations to make the wind farms economical and efficient.
The men have been talking to Rice University professors about the possibility of using nanotechnology being developed there that would help reduce corrosion on the platform and provide more efficient transmission to shore.
And Schellstede says the company has discovered that gearboxes in the power trains of wind turbines are failing regularly, so the company plans to use a turbine that doesn’t have a gearbox. The men are also talking to a company about blades that are up to 18% more efficient than standard wind blade
“From a design standpoint, we can do what’s best for the design,” Schellstede adds. “It’s like a blank sheet of paper.”
Useful Sources
The State Energy Conservation Office:
http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind.htm
Texas Land Commission
http://www.glo.state.tx.us/
WEST:
http://www.windenergypartners.biz/contacts.html
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