Transcript: The Future of Wind Energy
CLARICE: Good morning. And welcome to this week’s episode of Environmentally Speaking.
MARISA: Hi, everybody. I’m Marisa Desautel, an environmental attorney.
CLARICE: And I’m Clarice. I’m coming in with our questions, topics, comments. And before we do that, I think, Marisa, you have an announcement.
MARISA: I do have an announcement. Thank you for that prompt. As of August 1st Desautel Law became Desautel Browning Law. The name reflects the addition of a partner, Kerin Browning. She has been with the firm for two years or so and we just finished the new partnership process, so you will see updates to the website, social media, and importantly our e-mail address has updated. Clarice will be sure to provide that information for you at the end of the episode.
CLARICE: Listeners, I didn’t get the e-mail right before. I’m not going to get it right now. I’m going to try my best. But, also, congrats to everybody. Love this change. Very excited.
MARISA: Thank you.
CLARICE: So this week we are talking once again — hold onto your hats — about wind farms.
MARISA: Very popular topic. I mean, they’re in the news almost every day.
CLARICE: And we are not going to become a wind farm podcast, but we are getting real close to it..
MARISA: It’s true.
CLARICE: But earlier this week I had seen on YouTube, actually — it was just a quick little thumbnail of a floating wind turbine and I had never seen that before, so.
MARISA: I have a question.
CLARICE: Yes.
MARISA: Why were you on YouTube? Just curious.
CLARICE: Oh, what we were — oh, we were watching — we were watching a funny video compilation.
MARISA: Oh, I was going to say —
CLARICE: It was some good background noise.
MARISA: — that’s really the only reason I go on YouTube is for like cats that are trying to jump on something and they don’t quite make it. People falling down are also very popular in my household. All right.
CLARICE: That’s what it was.
MARISA: Okay. Good.
CLARICE: But because of our podcast, YouTube loves to suggest environmental topics —
MARISA: Oh, nice.
CLARICE: — thinking that that’s what — yeah. It skews our, you know, for you and our likes and it starts to suggest this which selfishly works out because it —
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: — brings more topics.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: And I had never seen a floating platform or heard of the idea of a floating platform, so I started to read a couple articles and was wondering what the — how it’s made, what it looks like, is it more beneficial, how does it change, does it alleviate our concerns. And I don’t think it fully alleviates our concerns, but I will say the concerns are still there but maybe slightly less. There’s slightly less construction.
[0:02:57] MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: So these floating wind turbines, picture them in terms of above the water looking very similar to what you would imagine. It is still that sort of pinwheel design, typically, but the base, instead of being a solid mounted base above water going below water is oftentimes either a triangle floating above water or a rectangle floating above water and then goes into a series of, from what I’m reading, cables that anchor to the ocean floor.
So it’s less of a solid platform of the ocean floor, so it’s less sort of direct construction. It’s less surface area being dug up on the ocean floor. And now with the triangle, obviously it’s several cables at each of the three, you know, platform points or a rectangle [inaudible] platform points. But there is still some digging and there is still some anchoring to that, but think almost like the anchor on a boat. There’s a solid point to the top of the boat. There’s a solid point to the anchor at the bottom and then there’s that cable or chain connecting the two.
MARISA: The typical wind turbine infrastructure is — I mean, that I’ve seen, that I’m familiar with are the monopiles where you’ve got a platform and the single column that is smashed into the seabed floor in a very destructive fashion. But what you’re talking about is a floating structure that is anchored to the seafloor by — it looks like — I’m just looking at some photos here that I’ve pulled up. It looks like a tripod. So you’ve got three cables that are anchored to the seabed and makes a lot of sense. These types of floating structures can be installed in deeper water..
CLARICE: Yes. That was going to be my next point is —
MARISA: Sorry. Didn’t mean to steal your thunder.
CLARICE: No. No. I love it. It’s a good segue. So what’s interesting is these monopiles, because they’re fixed they need to absorb a lot of the tension and energy coming from just —
MARISA: The wave action.
CLARICE: Yeah. Just wave action. So they can’t be as far out into the ocean.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: These floating platforms, because they’re kind of moving with the wave action can be further out into the ocean, so they can go into deeper water. And what I found in my reading is the wind turbines themselves can be taller, as well, which is interesting. They can be out deeper and can be bigger.
[0:06:02] MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: One thing, a CNN article — we’ll link all of the articles in our show notes, of course. But out in Maine they are working on constructing a wind turbine that is taller than the 30 Rock in New York. That is gigantic.
MARISA: That’s huge, yeah.
CLARICE: This wind turbine will be 850 feet.
MARISA: Wow.
CLARICE: I can’t even actualize how big that is in my mind.
MARISA: Yeah. Yeah. I started out a little bit optimistic about this particular technology, but now that I’m thinking about it and reading about it a little more I don’t know that it’s any better because, okay, great, you can put a floating structure further out into the ocean, but then you’ve got to bury these huge transmission cables to take the electricity back to land. And the further out you go, obviously the longer that cable needs to be and the cables are usually buried with something called a jet plow and, you know, that destroys habitat.
CLARICE: That was going to be — yeah. That was another thing that I wanted to mention. So from what I keep seeing in all of the diagrams, it’s interesting. A lot of the articles that I read focus a lot on how the floating platforms would be anchored, but there’s not a lot of discussion about what’s happening with those sort of electrical cables. Where are they going? Are they also floating? Are they semi submerged? Are they completely buried? Only one article had a diagram showing that there was a — it looked like a generator box. I’m probably using the wrong term there, but it looked like some sort of box that was floating in its own platform further away, so that cable between the two was flee floating between them and then it was buried.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: But otherwise the cable is still buried which is a huge part of the issue.
MARISA: It’s a huge disruption.
CLARICE: Yeah. I mean, these big pylons being buried is massive destruction, but then there’s that miles and miles of cable.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: And now being further out, you’ve got miles and miles and more miles of these cables, so I’m just — I would love to see what the plan is for how they’re going to get those cables buried, if there is an option for maybe semi-submerged cables where they’re not buried, but they’re not floating at the surface, but I don’t see anything talking about that.
MARISA: And it looks like the — shocking — the federal government is now part of the conversation and initiative for floating offshore wind, so that means we’re likely to actually see them built. There’s been some recent discussion and news about the offshore wind industry struggling to make these projects occur because of things like supply chain, procuring financing, and the initial timeline that some of the developers anticipated is now an impossibility and I wonder if these floating offshore wind projects might be the response to that situation.
[0:09:50] CLARICE: It could be. I also saw in a Wired article that pressure from the war in Ukraine could be another unforeseen factor in wanting to speed this up. How they connect, I’m not smart enough.
MARISA: Yeah. I’m not either, but I am apoplectic. I don’t think it’s actually true. Yeah. Whatever. I’ll keep my cynicism to a minimum today. All right. What else?
CLARICE: Yeah. Another interesting design I saw — and I’m saying interesting, but I have to say it looks like something out of a mad scientist’s creations. This was from a Norwegian wind energy company. Folks, we’re going to — I have to attach this article for you all to see because I can’t adequately describe it. It’s a large floating rectangular platform and it almost looks like a series of scaffolding with just fans on fans on fans. It just looks like a wall of the actual turbine like pinwheel fans going straight up.
MARISA: Oh, I’m looking at it.
CLARICE: Can you see it? I have never seen anything like that.
MARISA: Wow. Yeah. Definitely include this in the show notes. This is the wired article, right?
CLARICE: Yes.
MARISA: That is wild.
CLARICE: From what I understand this is all conceptualized at this point. This hasn’t been constructed yet, but this is an intended plan. I’ve never seen anything like this. It just looks like — it looks like a shredder, actually, right? Like it kind of looks like you could flow a vegetable at it and then just get like julienned on the other side.
MARISA: It looks like a mess. And then what happens at the end of its useful life? Can it be recycled?
CLARICE: I’m not sure.
MARISA: Oh, let’s not get these questions answered, everyone. Let’s just plow forward.
CLARICE: And I don’t know if you know this or if you have any kind of anything to expand on this, but from what I found out most wind turbines have a 30-year lifespan, round about.
MARISA: Yeah. Uh-huh.
CLARICE: And I’m not sure what happens to those materials after or if there’s maintenance or things that can be done to extend the longevity. Like when we talked about solar panels how there were maintenance and things and parts you can swap out to try to extend, I’m not sure if that applies here. I don’t know.
MARISA: Yeah. I don’t know either. This looks like a mess. And the other topic I wanted to touch on today — excuse me. I also hopefully did this correct, Clarice. I copied the article.
CLARICE: Oh, God. I just opened up the article.
MARISA: Initially from Fox Business News but it’s also been picked up by the New York Post, so for those of you that are going to criticize the media outlet that covered this there are other media outlets also covering it. There was an interview conducted by a client of — or excuse me — an interview conducted of a client of mine. His name is Chris Brown. He is a commercial fisherman out of Point Judith and he did a five-minute interview on Fox Business News to talk about the recent whale deaths and other issues associated with environmental impacts from wind farms. So it’s related. It’s not a floating wind farm issue, but I figured since we’re talking about this topic —
[0:13:38] CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: — makes sense to add it.
CLARICE: All interesting stuff. Yeah. Folks, you have to go see all of these different types of wind farms. Some of them look like those kind of floating docks that people used to swim out to as kids. Some of them look like something you throw a potato into and get French fries on the other side. They look crazy. These are wild.
MARISA: Oh, boy. Yeah.
CLARICE: I think the big takeaway after all of the reading is there are lots of ideas floating around and —
MARISA: Oh, pun intended.
CLARICE: Yes, ma’am. And people are just really eager to go from idea to construction, so.
MARISA: Without a lot of or any studying of environmental impacts associated therewith.
CLARICE: Oh, yeah. That was the full sentence, just idea, construction. So if you have any questions, comments — please, tell us what you think about what all of these look like. Give us your first reactions. Reach out to us. We are as of right now still on the socials as Desautel Law. Keep your eye out for that. You can send us an e-mail to the new e-mail info@DesautelBrowning.com.
MARISA: Nice job, Clarice.
CLARICE: Thank you.
MARISA: Excellent.
CLARICE: I had to write it down. Thank you, everybody. And have a wonderful week.
MARISA: Bye.
