South Fork Wind Offers Tremendous Opportunities To Lower CO2 Emissions – CleanTechnica

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Offshore wind holds “massive promise” for the economy, for home-grown energy, and for the planet,” according to a Conservation Law Foundation attorney working on clean energy.

Look at the recently completed South Fork Wind Farm, situated between Block Island, Rhode Island, and Long Island, New York, as a bright example. Completed in spring 2024, South Fork Wind is the first fully operational commercial-scale offshore wind project in the US. With turbines twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, Nick Krakoff describes in an editorial how “one single spin of the turbine generates enough electricity to power a whole house for 24 hours or more.”

The waters off New England’s coast are some of the best in the United States for the production of reliable clean wind energy. Spinning in the strong Atlantic wind, South Fork’s dozen turbines generate enough clean, renewable energy to power 70,000 homes and businesses in New York. Together, the 12 turbines that make up South Fork Wind can generate 132 MW of clean energy.

As our CleanTechnica colleague Tina Casey explains, offshore wind turbines can reach extreme proportions because of easier capacity for transport — land-based turbine blades and tower components can only grow so big before they get stuck in tunnels or under bridges or tied up trying to navigate a sharp curve in the road. The open ocean offers seaports already equipped to handle supersized construction projects, bridge height that is generally not an obstacle, and tunnels that are irrelevant to water routes.

Offshore wind farms like South Fork Wind are connected to the electrical grid using submarine transmission cables that are attached to offshore wind turbines. Energy passes through the cables to an offshore substation and is then transported to shore via subsea cables. These cables run deep beneath the beach, remaining buried along the entire length of the coastal zone, avoiding impacts on sensitive habitats. From there, the South Fork Wind buried cable runs along existing roadways and rights of ways, alongside other utility infrastructure, to an inland substation in East Hampton, where energy is delivered to the electrical grid.

Offshore Wind Can Transcend Unsupported Challenges to Safety

Shifting electricity production away from fossil generation sources to renewable sources has a significant impact on lowering CO2 emissions from the power sector.

The US Department of Energy outlines that, when looking at CO2 emissions, it is best to look at lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, which reflect all CO2 emissions over the entire lifespan of the technology — from equipment manufacturing and construction to operations and maintenance activities to plant decommissioning. Keep in mind that no CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere during wind-powered electricity generation.

In general, lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from renewable sources are considerably lower than emissions from natural gas and coal. Wind energy produces around 11 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (g CO2/kWh) of electricity generated, compared with about 980 g CO2/kWh for coal and roughly 465 g CO2/kWh for natural gas. That makes coal’s carbon footprint almost 90 times larger than that of wind energy and the footprint of natural gas more than 40 times larger.

The South Fork Wind website further explains that depending on its size, the lifecycle emissions of an offshore wind turbine max out around 15 grams of carbon CO2 equivalent (i.e., carbon emissions compared to fossil fuel sources) per kilowatt-hour. The majority of these emissions occur during the production and construction phases of development. This is no more than 3.5% of the lifetime emissions produced by common fossil fuels. Power plants burning natural gas can emit between 430 and 760 grams of CO2e per kilowatt-hour. Coal-fired plants fare even worse, producing up to 1,700 grams of CO2e per kilowatt-hour.

Recently many media outlets have perseverated over offshore wind minutia and have missed the big picture promise of offshore wind, according to Krakoff.

“We’ve become preoccupied with discussions over costs, over unsupported claims regarding threats to marine life, and over a single construction accident – the fracture of a turbine blade at Vineyard Wind. That incident took no lives, resulted in no known reports of injured marine life, has been cleaned up and – unlike oils spills – has not coated thousands of miles of coast in pollutants for years to come and killed millions of fish and birds.”

Repeat exposure to false claims like these about offshore wind makes them appear more credible and persuasive, even for those who report being worried about the climate crisis. Such narratives are becoming even more mainstream, more violent, and more impactful through repetition.

Safeguarding the environment and human rights, consumer interests, and investor interests requires a threshold of duty of care standard that is at jeopardy in the US due to the pressure of Big Oil to retain its power and profitability. Such discourse threatens to spawn a retreat from renewables in favor of continued burning of fossil fuels, which are having far-reaching, devastating effects on our climate and ecosystems. It is time to hold fossil fuel businesses accountable for their part in the deterioration of the environment.

Final Thoughts About South Fork Wind & Other Offshore Wind Projects

“Being on the ocean, seeing South Fork Wind Farm’s turbines churning away in person, was a truly inspiring experience,” says Krakoff, who adds that the push for offshore wind continues on with a number of other offshore wind installations in the development stage or already under construction.

• Revolution Wind will create 704 megawatts of power for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and replace filthy oil, gas, and coal power in more than 350,000 homes.
• Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, when complete, will power 400,000 homes and remove from our atmosphere pollution equivalent to 325,000 cars.
• Two energy companies recently were provisionally awarded federal offshore wind leases and are planning offshore wind projects in the Gulf of Maine — an area including all of the Massachusetts coast between Cape Cod and the New Hampshire border.
• Under a tri-state agreement, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have agreed to purchase more than 2,800 megawatts of offshore wind power from projects being planned in southern New England, with Connecticut potentially adding to that total.
• The Biden-Harris administration has introduced more than 15 GW of clean energy from ten offshore wind projects, enough to power nearly 5.25 million homes.