Today, wind turbines are known as an minor power source, with unreliable output and high maintenance costs.

They are often associated with huge, unsightly towers that kill birds and bats with their blades and tourism with their looks. That is because to attain maximum airflow on land, the wind turbines are usually placed in bird migration routes, on shorelines or near mountains.

But one man is trying to change all that.

Paul Sclavounos, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing plans to construct water-based wind turbines capable of generating nearly five times the output of current land-based turbines.

According to Sclavounos, building wind turbines on floating platforms in the open ocean will allow larger turbines to access more constant winds at higher speeds.
And because the towers would be located 10 to 20 miles offshore, people would not be bothered by their presence, either.

More incentives, more demand

In 1908, there were only 72 wind turbines worldwide with a range of five to 25 kilowatts output. At maximum capacity, wind power could have accounted for just 1,800 kilowatts of the world’s electricity.

Today, more than 17 billion kilowatts of power is generated in the U.S. alone. But that only accounts for approximately 0.37 percent of total domestic energy consumption.
In contrast, approximately 6 percent of total energy produced in the United States is lost when raw material is converted to the energy in a light bulb.

One of the Department of Energy’s major goals is to have at least 5 percent of all domestic energy use come from wind power by 2020.

Perhaps that’s why, for more than 10 years, the U.S. government has tried to increase the supply of renewable energy sources by offering a tax credit. According to Paul Hesse, information specialist for the Energy Information Administration in the Department of Energy, the current tax credit is 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour
purchased from renewable energy.

More Research

Because of more incentives and more demand, universities and industry increasingly research renewable energy.

In 2004, Sclavounos received grant money from the National Renewable Energy Laboratories to begin plans for floating wind turbines. The design was based off design work on oil platforms, Sclavounos said.

He proposes a wind turbine field of approximately 2 by 5 miles consisting of 400 individual turbines located between 10 and 20 miles off the shore of Cape Cod.

A previous attempt to install wind turbines much closer to Cape Cod was met with resistance, led by the non-profit organization Save Our Sound.

The earlier project was based in Nantucket Sound, an area surrounded by dense populations dependent on tourism and fishing for its economy, said Audra Parker, Save Our Sound’s director of strategic planning.

According to Parker, it’s not just a bunch of rich people complaining about their view. There are potentially harmful environmental consequences in installing the turbines.
Construction of the wind turbines involves digging trenches for cables from each turbine to a power hub on shore and securing the turbines by mooring lines to the ocean floor. Although neither MIT nor the government have conducted environmental impact assessments, possible environmental impacts posed by the wind turbines include the disruption of fish migration, the disturbance of microhabitat on the ocean floor and the interruption of currents.

That’s not to mention the secondary impact caused by the installation and maintenance vessels.

“We would be happy to have the floating turbines deep in the ocean and out of the way, but the environmental impact needs to be evaluated,” Parker said.
Sclavounos’ conceptual floating windmills will undergo an environmental assessment before he begins seeking financial support for construction.

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Matthew Hund and Andrew Price are first-year master's students in the environmental journalism program at MSU. This is their first contribution to EJ. Reach Matt at hundmatt@msu.edu; reach Andrew at pricean1@msu.edu.