PROVIDENCE – New federal standards for the design, fabrication and installation of offshore wind turbines may be in place by the time Deepwater Wind LLC starts constructing its wind farm in state waters off Block Island, officials said Friday.
That would allow the company to follow the same practices in building both the smaller project in state waters and the larger development it plans to construct in federal waters later in the decade, said Grover Fugate, executive director of the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council. Fugate is serving as project manager for the Ocean Special Area Management Plan, or SAMP, which will be a blueprint for the use of state waters.
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To help ensure that the state and federal governments remain on the same page, Fugate this week attended a two-day, invitation-only workshop in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Marine Board on behalf of the U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. Also attending was Jennifer McCann, manager of the Coastal Resources Center at the University of Rhode Island.
Fugate and McCann discussed the outcome of the workshop with reporters in a conference call on Friday afternoon.
“Currently, there are no U.S. standards for wind power platforms,” Fugate said. While there are European standards for oil platform construction to draw upon, the differences in extreme weather conditions, such as hurricanes, and in wind turbines’ load structure requires specific U.S. standards.
“Wind turbines have a very dynamic load; you’re dealing with totally different forces,” he said.
Another important difference between wind farms and oil rigs is the transient nature of ownership in the wind industry today, Fugate said.
“If [Exxon Mobil] builds an oil platform, it will be the one operating it for 20 years,” he said. By contrast, renewable energy projects “may change hands one, two three times” in that same time period, he said, and U.S. engineering standards will reflect that.
More than 1,000 people attended the federal wind workshop, including representatives from other states involved in potential state-water offshore wind development such as Maine, Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York and Massachusetts. Deepwater was also one of many companies in attendance.
Fugate said the next step is for the Marine Board, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to put together a panel of experts to write the report for the new standards. “We have put in a request to have a Rhode Island participant on the panel,” he said.
Federal regulators are relying heavily on the input from researchers in Rhode Island, said Chip Young, senior communications fellow at the Coastal Institute at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. He likened the process to “building the airplane while it is in flight.”
URI was the only academic institution formally asked to participate in the workshop, Young said.
