EDITORIALS
Wind worth exploring
Lake power proposal offers no details, but the concept deserves evaluation
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A proposal to plant a water-borne wind farm miles off the shores of Western New York’s Great Lakes opens an intriguing new possibility for power generation in the region that pioneered the production of inexpensive hydropower. Whether it will work is another question. So is how it will look. There are many potential pitfalls between conception and completion, but the project is plainly worth pursuing.
The plan belongs to New York Power Authority President Richard M. Kessel, whose ambitious vision is to see 25 to 40 windmills operating in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario—or both —within five years. Much of the manufacturing and assembly could occur in Western New York and the new electricity would be reserved for use here, he said. The installation would cost as much as $1 billion to develop and would have a minimum capacity of 120 megawatts of power.
But the pitfalls: As anyone who has followed the interminable Peace Bridge saga knows, tall structures can run afoul of environmental laws protecting birds, while water-based ones can present problems for fish. A long-gestating design for the Peace Bridge was scuttled for fear that untold numbers of the common tern would crash into it.
Design issues could also arise, and in a couple of ways. One of the reasons to plant the farm miles out into the lake is to avoid the aesthetic concerns of Western New Yorkers who might object to construction of a pod of 40 windmills in their line of vision.
But to avoid that problem, designers need to figure out how to build windmills that are protected from Lake Erie’s winter icing. (That problem likely would not occur in Lake Ontario, which doesn’t freeze because of its great depth—a factor that might cause its own problem in placing windmills there.)
And there is the cost of the electricity, itself. Kessel estimated it would cost more than power produced at the authority’s hydroelectric plant on the Niagara River, but less than the cost of electricity from utilities such as New York State Electric and Gas and National Grid. But how those costs will stack up once the wind farm was producing power is unknowable today.
Kessel is proceeding smartly—expeditiously but carefully. He has issued a “request for an expression of interest,” seeking responses from potential developers, several of whom have already expressed “a great deal of interest,” he said. He hopes to issue a request for proposals before the end of the year and, if all goes well, to identify a developer by the end of 2010.
Input or support also is coming from some utilities, University at Buffalo researchers, environmental organizations and state energy and environmental agencies.
Kessel is bullish on the project. “This is going to happen,” he said. “This is workable. This is feasible.” There’s only one way to find out, and he has undertaken it. Given the Obama administration’s interest in wind power and the potential to use federal stimulus dollars to advance the project, it is important to move now, carefully—even skeptically—evaluating its chances for success before deciding how, if at all, to proceed.
Western New Yorkers won’t know for sure how all of this might look and work, or even where it might be, until the proposals come in. Neither will the Power Authority, for that matter. But that’s the whole point of launching this exploration. The offshore wind power idea might not work at all. But it sure is intriguing.
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