[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll look at the pros and cons of offshore wind.

- Offshore, they're looking at 12 megawatt turbines.

And the issue too, is that they're not that far offshore.

People are noticing them, they're not happy about it.

And we're not talking about five, six, seven turbines, it's the size of Rhode Island.

- It may look new to all of us, but we've been doing this in Europe for close to 20 years.

And if we sort of zoom out and go long term, I don't know what the alternative is.

Is the alternative to put more nuclear up?

Is the alternative to put more coal fire power plants up?

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," part one of our discussion on offshore wind.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

The U.S. is contemplating massive new offshore wind projects.

Proponents see these as part of decarbonizing our electricity system, but opponents worry that there may be impacts to fisheries, marine mammals, tourism, and property values that we don't fully appreciate or yet understand.

They're also worried about onshoring of that electricity and that all the stakeholders that share the use of coastal waters have a voice.

We'll discuss both sides with Lisa Linowes.

For almost 20 years, she's been the executive director of Industrial Wind Action, which provides nonpartisan information about renewable energy projects to all stakeholders.

Peder Hansen is the president of PH Consulting, with 30 years of wind experience in many companies across the industry.

His father and grandfather worked in the wind industry as well.

Next on "Energy Switch," part one of this episode, we'll hear different perspectives on offshore wind.

Wind is the subject of the day, particularly offshore is what we're thinking about.

You know, why would our viewers even care?

Let's start with you, Peder.

- We're all looking for new ways to create our power, clean ways to produce power.

Offshore has gained a lot of press lately, so I think we owe it to your viewers and to everyone out there to sort of get the facts on the table on what is it, what does it look like, who's involved, what does it cost to do it, and what's the investments involved?

- Yeah, I totally agree.

And then there's another aspect that the decisions around what energy we use to power our country, and our economy, and our homes are not now being made necessarily by engineers or grid operators.

Those decisions are being made at the legislative level, and that means that the public has to get involved.

They need to understand the impacts and the opportunities.

- Yeah, that's a great point.

So where are we?

Physically, where are we considering putting offshore wind in the U.S. today?

- Northeast waters off of New York.

Martha's Vineyard, New Jersey, off the coasts.

But also, believe it or not, the Great Lakes.

Even in the Gulf of Mexico, there is some, I would say engineering exploration.

And then, in California as well.

- Yeah, so the Biden administration has established a policy that it wants to see 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind built in the country off our coastlines between now and 2030.

It's an enormous amount of generation that we're talking about.

Roughly thousands of wind turbines that will be situated predominantly on the east coast from Maine down to North Carolina.

That's the main area.

And currently the federal agency, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is overseeing the permitting of these projects, has leased out two million acres.

Quite frankly, I think it's impossible to get to 30,000 megawatts, but currently 22,000 megawatts have been proposed.

- Okay, let's put that in kind of tangible terms.

Thirty thousand megawatts, a typical offshore wind turbine is three megawatts, plus or minus?

- Correct.

Onshore.

Offshore, they're looking at 12 megawatt turbines.

So they're four times the size.

Off the coast of New England, that area, they're using turbines that are just shy of 900 feet.

And off the coast of New Jersey, they are over a thousand feet.

- So 10 megawatts, 30,000, that'd be 3,000 turbines if we were to do 3,000 turbines.

- You know, California just proposed another 58 gigawatts.

So 58,000 megawatts off the California coast to be built by 2035.

- Wow.

Okay.

Thousand feet is tall.

These are very tall.

[Lisa] Very tall.

- Big structures.

- Absolutely.

And the issue too, is that they're not that far off shore.

When Peder was mentioning Martha's Vineyard, also Nantucket Island, two islands off the coast of Massachusetts, these turbines are gonna be situated, at closest, around 12 miles away.

They gonna be very visible.

- We have to take into consideration though, and I understand where you're getting at.

As you can hear in my accent, I'm from Denmark, and we have hundreds and hundreds of offshore wind turbines.

They're obviously big, and you can see them.

But I also think the novelty will wear off fairly quickly.

- That would be interesting, because currently they are under construction off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.

But they haven't been completed yet.

And they're very visible.

People are noticing 'em.

They're not happy about it.

And so the industry often says, oh, they're on the horizon, there's haze, you can't see past that.

But that's not all the time.

And we're not talking about five, six, seven turbines, we're talking about 10 projects.

The concentrated area in Southern New England is the size of Rhode Island.

The state of Rhode Island.

- I know on land I've seen the rebar and the concrete to pour a big base and anchor it in so the thing doesn't tip over.

What do we do offshore?

How are they installed?

And then how do we maintain them?

- In shallower water, where water depth are 50, 60 feet, we take a monopile and basically hammer it into the ground, into the subsurface and it gets down, you know, 60 to 90 feet into the seabed.

And then you have a tube going underneath the water, and on top of that tube, you have a little leveling mechanism, and then on top of that leveling mechanism, you mount a wind turbine.

The cool thing about offshore is that equipment is there to lift heavy things, because of it was born by the oil industry.

Now, for water depth more than sort of these, what should we say, 45, 50, 60 feet.

We use either a tripod or a lattice structure with three or four legs that sit down on the ocean floor and has a much larger width at the bottom so that the turbine doesn't fall over.

And those are anchored into the sea bed as well.

Once the turbine is set on that platform, it is not really that different from an onshore turbine.

It's a little more expensive.

There's waves to contend with.

It's of course a little more dangerous, 'cause if you fall, you end up in the water.

You have to be very, very careful with what kind of chemicals, greases, oils and so forth you're using.

These are all approved for ocean usage.

So the maintenance part of it has evolved tremendously.

It may look new to all of us over here on this side of the Atlantic, but we've been doing this in Europe for close to 20 years.

- Yes, one of the issues that I find very frustrating about the wind industry is that there's very little information regarding the actual maintenance and failure rates on these turbines.

'Cause we are talking about turbines that are being put in salty conditions, very rough weather conditions.

The nor'easters that we get here in the New England area could be quite intense, so we need more information about that.

There are only seven operating wind turbines offshore in the United States.

Five off the coast of Block Island and Rhode Island.

Those are six megawatt turbines.

A 30 megawatt project total.

So it's small.

And then the other two are off the coast of Virginia.

That was a pilot project, also six megawatts each, 12 megawatt turbines.

Those five turbines off Block Island had to be shut down for upwards of six months because of fractures that were identified in the turbines.

The same situation showed up in a project using the same turbines in Germany.

So, if we're gonna start building thousands of turbines offshore, we need to have a better sense of what the maintenance will be and a better sense of the ability of these turbines to sustain the environmental conditions.

- That seems like it'd be everybody's.

Is there some downside to that, or what's the- - The industry is not actively trying to hide anything.

In the early days in Europe, every single wind turbine owner reported in and everything was logged.

We still do that, but it's just not public.

I don't know how many people are actually interested in sitting and reading that.

- I think a lot of people would like to know that.

Because we're talking about projects that could potentially be rebuilt, these are very expensive projects to begin with, and then you have to rebuild significant components of them because of failure.

- The other big offshore stuff, of course, is oil and gas, and there's a pretty rigorous reporting structure for that.

And one quick thing, I'm just getting a feel for scale.

Everybody knows, they've heard it a million times, wind doesn't always blow.

So that kind of speaks to what's called the capacity factor.

So if I have a 10 megawatt turbine offshore, what are we looking at?

- We're looking offshore in that area.

We're looking at 40ish percent.

It doesn't drop below 40 in many places there, and it doesn't really get above 45.

- So if I do the math in my head, which is dangerous, 30,000 megawatts, let's say, all that's put in.

Quickly, if I just do 33% to do the math easy, that'd be 10,000 megawatt, which would be about like 10 nuclear reactors.

Ten one gigawatt nuclear reactors.

- Correct.

- Or 20 coal plants, you know.

Okay.

So that kind of gets us set up.

So let's talk about these things now from a kind of a little more granular, each of these areas.

Let's start with our marine stakeholders, if you will, impacts and benefits on the fisheries.

What are they and how might we address them?

- Regarding one project, it's called Revolution Wind.

It's a 704 megawatt project off the coast of Rhode Island right in an area called Coxes Ledge that is prime cod fishing.

And they're building turbines right on top of it.

We know from the Virginia project that I mentioned, there are two turbines.

We know the fishermen avoid going over there because of the risks of being close to the turbines.

And that's two turbines.

- What risk are the fishermen seeing?

- They've been telling us they need more space to get in and actually fish.

They've also been told from their insurance companies that the risks of fishing in these areas could jeopardize their ability to get insurance.

That's one thing.

The other part of it is when, 'cause we often hear that the debate, oh, it's gonna create these artificial reefs.

These new areas, this new habitat.

But we don't really know what that will be.

And then the worry there, also, is that the new life may not be marketable.

And so the worry is right now, that those industries may not survive.

And all of the people that supply the fishermen with equipment, all of the people that consume their product will all be impacted.

And we're talking a many billion dollar industry just in New England.

- We heard the same thing when we started putting up wind turbines in the Great Plains.

"Oh my gosh.

Cows won't live here anymore.

They don't like 'em.

They'll hear the wind turbines and they won't produce milk or produce calves or anything like that."

And no such thing is true.

The other thing is, is that with all of these questions, we actually do have the answers.

Go over and talk to the fishermen in Denmark, in Germany, in Holland and England, and see what was the actual impact for their livelihood.

There isn't one.

They live, maybe not happily ever after, because there's always the open ocean and now there's a turbine in that open ocean you may have to go around.

But in general, there hasn't been any negative interaction between the two.

And if we sort of zoom out to 200,000 feet level and go long term, I don't know what the alternative is.

Is the alternative to put more nuclear up?

Is the alternative to put more coal fire power plants up?

Right now, we're burning millions and millions of tons of coal, and coming out the smoke stacks of that is mercury, lead, what have you, and CO2.

And that ends up in the ocean.

Wind power may not be the answer to everything, but it certainly is an answer to some things.

[Scott] Impact on whales.

How do we address that?

- We have a critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

There are roughly 340 individuals left on the planet today.

And where do they live?

They spend most of their time in the southern New England waters.

And since December, 2022 till the end of 2023, 85 whales have beached themselves in the area from Virginia up to the main area.

- In a year?

- In a year.

And when you looked at the correlation between the whale dots and the state, it was those states that had the activity of offshore wind work being done.

- Are they colliding with the boats or what?

- Many of these whales that died in 2023 did not show any blunt force trauma.

They didn't have entanglements.

And the only thing that changed was the development of offshore wind.

- I'll add a little bit to that.

And that is that in order to map the seabed, sonar is used.

That could be done by dragging a sonar unit behind the boat and sending small pings down towards the surface.

But you can also use what's called a seismic air gun, which is a very large boom.

It's clear that there's some impact on these large marine mammals out there during this period of time.

- You would agree with that then?

- I would, yes, yes.

Just because those are the facts, right?

I can't run away from the facts.

That's why we're here.

I do think that you have to map these places.

- This I think you'll find interesting and you may recall that the Trump administration tried to open the continental shelf on the East Coast to oil and gas, and the process that the wind developers have to go through, and the process that the oil and gas guys had to go through was they had to secure what are called incidental harassment authorizations from NOAA.

And that means that you are asking permission to make loud noise in the water, and you know that it's going to have some impact.

You have to be able to mitigate that impact down to negligible.

If you look at the incidental harassment authorizations that have been issued to the wind companies, it's many more than 300,000 individual mammals that are being impacted.

In fact, it's a thousand impacts on the North Atlantic right whale.

We went out and actually measured the noise coming off this sonar.

It's not quite as loud as an air gun.

which is up around 240, 250 decibels in the water.

But it's around 226 decibels.

Very, very loud noise if you're right at the source when this thing fires off.

It fires off twice a second.

Goes on for hours at a time.

And the issue that we found with that was that the wind companies have informed NOAA that the actual noise level that they're producing is much quieter than that.

- If it is that harmful, really to marine life, we need to come to the table and talk about it, right?

Because I do think, and this is not an excuse for the wind industry, I do think that a lot of wind power guys will go to the industries that have supplied these services before and said, dear Mr.

Such And Such, can you provide the service for us?

And the answer is yes.

And then the work product comes back and we have a map of the seabed.

It's not an excuse, don't get me wrong, it isn't.

We're maybe not 100% aware what impact that has as the wind industry, but the industry of making these maps and so forth, right, should also be held responsible for these types of things.

It's certainly something I'm gonna take with me to talk to my guys.

- Let's just talk about tourism.

You mentioned it, Peder, as a benefit in some places, there are impacts as well to this.

- In Denmark, offshore wind turbines were put up and people were fearing that their summer house values were gonna go down.

That never happened.

People feared that people wouldn't come to the beach for an ice cream after work on the weekends with their kids.

No impact whatsoever.

Like in Copenhagen, it became a tourist attraction.

And there are actually boat tours out to show them.

- Interesting.

- Orsted's own data showed that there will be a 15% reduction in revenue as a result of this project off New Jersey being built.

- Tourism revenue?

[Lisa] Tourism revenue.

- That was their estimate?

- That was their estimate.

And when you translated that to Nantucket Island, they were looking at roughly $800 million over the life of the project being lost as a result of tourism.

That's going to be a significant impact.

It's not enough to say no issue.

- Transmission.

Some people may not know the electricity's actually generated by the turbine itself, copper coils, and makes electricity, it has to come in on shore from offshore somehow.

How does that work?

How do we bring the transmission ashore, and are there issues with that that we need to think about, or?

- It's an interesting issue.

You put a cable under the seabed, you bring it onto shore, underneath these, typically, dunes.

And then you come out on the other side with the cable where all the power comes from.

We have typically tried to land these cables where there is other infrastructure because we are going to have to build a collecting station, a substation on the shore, so that that power can then be distributed out to the grid.

- How many, let's say 10 megawatt turbines, just pick a big decent number.

How many can you collect in a single substation?

A lot?

- Yeah, hundreds.

- Oh, okay, so you're not limited by voltage or, okay.

Any issues you've seen with the cable?

You don't have enough turbines yet, I guess, to know.

- So there are a couple of issues.

A big one being that the communities onshore are not fans of having these massive high voltage lines coming through.

But the other issue that we're looking at is that there's not necessarily enough transmission onshore to handle this amount of generation.

So in the case of New York state, right now there's the South Fork Wind Project, it's a small project, 132 megawatts, it's pretty much capped at how much it run through.

[Scott] So you have to build new lines?

- A lot of new transmission onshore.

- I mean, everybody I think has talked about that.

Again, for wind and solar broadly, you'd have to build a lot more transmission.

- I think we have to build a lot more transmission anyway, just for power security in this country.

- But the demand for this kind of transmission, there really is not any, we haven't had a need for this.

- You're correct.

- I just wanted to comment first that the other issue with all of these projects is that, let's say right now there are six active projects that have been permitted, but all of these projects are putting their own transmission line from the project substation to onshore.

There are plans out there to see if we could be smarter about that, where we can collect multiple projects and bring them on shore in areas where they'd be more better utilized.

But the projects are being built so fast, the movement is happening so fast, no one project's going to wanna wait to coordinate with another project.

There are different developers involved and no plan has really been adopted.

- Well, let's kind of wrap this section up a little bit.

You've talked a bit about it, Lisa and Peder as well, the rural communities, the minority stakeholders, native indigenous peoples.

How do they get a voice in all this?

- Yeah, well, I would think we need to do more work.

Onshore, what we've been used to dealing with is a private landholder, landowner, and we have leased or bought the land to put the wind turbine on, and we pay him every year for the power that that turbine has either produced, or percentage thereof, or a flat fee.

We will then have a town hall meeting.

We are putting up wind turbines on this guy's land.

You guys are all gonna be neighbors to it.

Do you have any questions?

We have to put certain things into the newspaper, into online media and so forth where people can then object to it, and then it goes out for public hearing where we then address people's questions and maybe have to move certain things around.

We don't want enemies.

We want everybody to be happy.

Similar things we have been through for offshore.

A lot of times the rules have not been as strict as they are onshore.

So we're sort of feeling our way a little bit, and sometimes we hit the mark and sometimes we don't.

But we try to adopt the same sort of, hey everybody, this is what's gonna happen 10 miles from here.

Why don't you come tell us what your thoughts are.

- So good there's some practices in place, but we could do better.

- I think we could do a lot better.

- Yeah, just commenting in terms of Native Americans, indigenous people, they've been invited to be at the table.

It's generally around cultural resource impacts.

They have a lot of, actually, the land under the water is important to them.

So the views of the sun rising are very important to them.

We get mixed reports as to whether or not they've had enough of a say with regard to this offshore wind development.

- We consume so much energy, whether it's a nuclear power plant, a gas plant, a coal plant, wind turbine, solar panels.

It's gonna be a lot of stuff.

And it's gonna come through your neighborhoods.

- It is.

- And I think we just have to get our heads around this a little bit better.

There's nothing free.

- There are also radical solutions to some of these.

If you just demand that everybody that builds a house actually lives up to the current insulation standards, we don't have to build any of these.

Right, because we have enough power.

- Right.

- Problem is we all want to have that thermostat set at 72 whether come summer or winter and energy's cheap, so we just use it.

- Yeah, no, we waste a tremendous amount.

[Peder] We do.

- Good point.

[Peder] We do.

- Well, let's take a break.

Been a great discussion, and next time we will come back and talk about cost of these things and look out there a little bit.

The government has approved a plan to develop 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind farms along the U.S. Eastern seaboard.

Though less than a hundred megawatts have now been built.

Fishermen are worried they could cause billions of dollars of losses in the industry.

But developers of European offshore wind say their fishermen were able to adapt.

The proposed U.S. wind farms are in the habitat of endangered whales, and my guest agreed that sonar impacts must be addressed.

Coastal landowners worry about their viewsheds, industrial boat traffic, decommissioning turbines, and impacts to tourism and property values.

But Peder says, in Europe, they found little impact in these areas.

Locals also worry about new substations and powerlines, which are not adequate to handle this new electricity.

However, no matter what energy we use, we need to prepare for more electricity infrastructure.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.