How many times must a fisherman look up before he can see the sky?

How much oil can the state of Maine burn before the price goes too high?

In the next 20 years, as power costs soar, how in the world will we get by?

One answer may literally be blowing in the steady offshore winds in the Gulf of Maine. After an initial burst of construction, wind power in Maine has recently run into a spate of criticism. Neighbors don’t like the noise, environmentalists decry the spoiling of mountain views, and energy experts question the costs of construction and maintenance versus projected, but as yet unrealized, long-term benefits.

But the next generation of wind turbines—if a consortium of companies led by the new Offshore Wind Center at the University of Maine has its way—will be over the horizon, where no one will hear them, and few people will see them at all. The dream of abundant offshore wind energy in Maine is rapidly moving from poetry to pragmatism. In the next two years, it will be put to the test.

Humans have been using the wind for energy since the Phoenicians sailed out of the eastern Mediterranean and down the coast of Africa. Wind energy is solar energy, a result of the Earth’s spherical shape and the uneven heating of its surface by the sun. As Scott Huler, author of Defining the Wind, puts it, wind “accounts for the major energy transfer of the planet, the cooler and warmer areas of the atmosphere roiling around like cream in coffee.”

In coastal areas like the Gulf of Maine, the difference in air temperature above land and water creates regular afternoon “sea breezes.” The land heats up faster than the water, the air above expands and rises, and the cooler, denser air over the ocean rushes toward it.

This daily exchange of energy is a powerful engine that, if harnessed, could bring Mainers inexpensive, reliable, and clean electricity for many years to come. Though the initial investment is high, so is the potential payoff. Governor John Baldacci has made wind power a centerpiece of his administration, and investors are hovering like seabirds around offshore ledges, looking for a piece of the action.

Two island communities have already committed to wind power. Three turbines went up in September 2009 on a small hill on Vinalhaven, amid great fanfare. They are visible from many parts of Penobscot Bay: convenient landmarks for boaters, a stable source of electricity for the few thousand residents of Vinalhaven and North Haven, and annoyances for nearby homeowners.

The project, overwhelmingly approved by island voters, remains popular. The turbines are working as advertised, and colorful bumper stickers that read “Spin, Baby, Spin!” have popped up on island cars. Rates are down. But the noise problems recently made the front page of The Boston Globe.

Wind turbines aren’t that noisy. At a distance of a few hundred yards, their decibel level is barely above that of normal human conversation. But imagine someone yakking away on your front porch all night while you’re inside with the window open trying to sleep.

So, how do you get “talkative” wind turbines away from the neighbors? Put ’em offshore.

The University of Maine has received an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to fund the DeepCwind Consortium National Research Program. The Consortium has over 30 members, including academic institutions, industry leaders, utility companies, and nonprofit organizations. Its mission is to develop and test what would be the first floating offshore wind turbine in the country, and only the second in the world (the first belongs to Norway). Funds are now in place to solicit designs, build and test small prototypes in tanks, and build and test a one-third-size model in the waters off Monhegan Island.

Dr. Habib Dagher, director of the Advanced Engineering Wood Composites (AEWC) Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine, is the leader of the Consortium and has become the public face of offshore wind. In the past year, AEWC has been awarded nearly $40 million in funding to pursue research in deepwater offshore wind energy technology.

“We’ve got some of the best winds in the world in the Gulf of Maine,” Dagher says. “But how can we maximize the benefit to the average Maine family? The key is to develop a long-term plan, rather than piecemeal projects.”

The Monhegan project is part of such a plan. “Our goal in Maine is to be the world leader in deepwater wind technology,” Dagher says. “We know that [wind power] works, but there’s a big difference between what works and what is cost-effective. The goal is to get it to the point where it’s cost-effective when you compare it to other solutions. Unless you do the work and do the research, you’re not going to find out.”

“Offshore wind,” in the popular perception, is something of a misnomer. There are no floating wind farms operating in the world today. The “offshore wind” operations in Europe are all in shallow water, close to shore, with the towers embedded in the sea floor. The recently-approved, often-delayed, and still controversial Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, billed on its website as “America’s first offshore wind farm,” will site 130 turbines on the Horsehoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound, where the water is less than 50 feet deep. By contrast, the Gulf of Maine drops off rapidly to depths of 300 feet or more.

The Cape Wind turbines will be six miles from the nearest land, but will still be visible from many locations along the shores of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard.

According to the website, the farm will produce three quarters of the electricity needs of the Cape and islands in average winds.

“We decided many years ago in Maine that we’re not going to be another Cape Wind,” Dagher says. “We would like to go farther out. Because of the curvature of the Earth, you won’t see these turbines at all.”

He lists three reasons for going farther offshore. “One, we want to protect the scenic views. Two, the farther out you get, the better the wind gets. You can generate a lot more energy. And three, the project has a smaller environmental footprint. It’s a lot easier to manufacture and deploy the turbines if we float them. If you think about what it takes to put a 14-foot-diameter steel pile 50 or 60 feet into the seabed, that’s a lot of large equipment, and it’s very invasive.”

The biggest technological hurdle is stabilizing the platforms in heavy weather. “We know how to stabilize them,” Dagher says. “The question is, what’s the least expensive way to do it?”

The only working example is anchored in the ocean six miles off Norway, a single floating turbine built by Siemens and StatoilHydro, Norway’s national energy company. The Norwegians are testing it for two years. Designed to generate 2.3 megawatts of electricity, it’s larger than the 1.5-megawatt units on Vinalhaven and Mars Hill. Its dimensions are truly staggering. “It’s bigger than the Washington Monument,” Dagher says, chuckling in semi-amazement. The hub of the blades rises 213 feet above the ocean surface. An underwater ballast section draws a depth of 300 feet. It is held to the sea floor by three anchors in approximately 720 feet of water.

Dagher and the Consortium have been soliciting designs for alternative ways to float and stabilize wind turbines at sea. Later this year, they’ll evaluate the 11 designs submitted to them, and choose the two or three best, or perhaps combine features from several of the top contenders. The turbines must be able to withstand the most severe weather the Gulf of Maine can throw at them. “We’re designing for the Perfect Storm,” Dagher says. “There are different ways to do that, and that’s what we’re testing.”

Much of that work will be done at the new 37,000-square-foot offshore wind laboratory being built at the University of Maine adjacent to the AEWC building. It’s the only lab of its kind in the United States, and it will be the first proving ground for the kind of deep-sea wind turbines Dagher wants to build.

“In the first phase of our work, we’re going to build 1/50th-scale units. They will be about 12 feet long. They’ll be built at our center, using at least three different designs. Then we’ll test them in wave-wind tanks, the same way the Navy tests ship designs.”

This requires at least 50 feet of water, and as there are only a few facilities like that in the United States, that part of the project will be put out to bid.

The second phase of the project will take place in 2012 in the waters off Monhegan Island.
It’s an interesting choice of venue, in that Monhegan’s electric rates are some of the highest in the United States. Unlike Vinalhaven and most of the other inhabited islands, Monhegan is not connected via electrical cable to the mainland. Its power comes from a diesel generator, and the fuel has to be periodically hauled out to the island. Monhegan’s year-round population hovers around 50, but swells in the summer with visitors and a famous seasonal art community.

The island has also been exploring the possibility of building its own small-scale wind energy project. Longtime resident Katy Boegel, who owns the island store and writes about island life, chairs the Monhegan Wind Committee. “I would say that most people out here are in favor of wind power in general,” she says. “You’ve got a lot of people who are enthusiastic, and a few who are suspicious.”

But wind power is problematic on Monhegan because of the small scale and the seasonal differences in energy use. Power use on the island peaks in the summer, when more people are there, and a wind turbine would produce most of its power in the winter. Unlike Vinalhaven, unconnected Monhegan could not sell the excess power back to the grid.

Connection to an offshore wind farm, perhaps as a midpoint for an undersea cable that would connect it to the mainland, could provide a long-term solution to the island’s energy problems, though Dagher cautions that no one yet knows exactly where the first full-scale offshore wind development will take place. Right now, islanders are waiting to assist researchers with data collection, accommodations, and transportation. Boegel describes the relationship between DeepCwind and the community as friendly and cooperative.

“There are literally too many possibilities floating out there for anyone to know what’s going to happen,” Boegel says. “If you have the potential for Monhegan to tap into an offshore wind farm five to 10 years from now, that makes our little project really unfeasible.”

Suzanne Pude, community wind director for the Rockland-based Island Institute, says that some islanders see potential benefits beyond reduced electric rates. “There’s certainly an interest in finding additional work,” she says, particularly in the off-season on tourist-dependent Monhegan. Boat captains have already been hired to take researchers out to the site for environmental modeling, and inns on the island will see additional business during the testing period.

As far as long-term benefits go, Pude says “a lot of significant questions” need to be answered. Perhaps there will be permanent jobs available to islanders, who will, after all, be closest to the eventual offshore wind farm. Perhaps islands can be tied in to an offshore grid, as is planned for Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, which, though larger than Monhegan, supplies expensive electricity to a small population with diesel generators.

“Our goal is to help make year-round island communities more sustainable and more viable,” Pude says. “Islanders are extremely dependent on those waters. We’d like to see the wind industry develop in a way that prioritizes benefits to that community, because it’s going to be in their backyard.”

The Consortium’s plan for Monhegan is to build a one-third-scale turbine, which will be deployed in 2012. Though only a third the size of the working turbines Dagher envisions eventually floating offshore, it will still be huge—as tall as a 10-story building. “We’re going to learn a lot from that unit. It’s going to be heavily instrumented. Once we complete that test, in November or December, we’re going to get it out of the water. The next step is to learn from that experience and build a full-size unit.”

That unit will rise 300 feet above the water and generate five megawatts, in an offshore location yet to be determined, though the request for proposals specifies that it must be at least 10 miles from the nearest inhabited land. The next step after that will be the construction of a 25-megawatt (MW) wind farm—the first floating wind farm in the world.

“What we’re promoting in the long run are farms in the 500 to 1,000 megawatt range,” Dagher says. “When you’re 20 miles offshore, you don’t want to build a small farm. You have to build at scale. That’s when the cost is going to come down.”

For comparison purposes, the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant produced approximately 800 MW.

In late 2009, Governor Baldacci’s Ocean Energy Task Force selected three sites for the testing of offshore wind technologies. The other two sites, off Damariscove Island near the mouth of the Kennebec River and Boon Island off the southern coast, are intended for testing by commercial developers, though none have yet applied. The Monhegan site, roughly two miles from the island’s southern end, is likewise permitted for testing only. It’s reserved for academic use, and the University of Maine has the funding to do the research.

But not everyone on the Midcoast is happy about it. Ron Huber is a longtime environmental activist in the Rockland area. He’s filed suit against the state Bureau of Parks and Lands over the selection of the Monhegan site, contending that it threatens bird life and spoils an unobstructed ocean view looking south from the island. “They should not be monkeying around with a viewshed of state and national significance,” he says.

“I am not convinced that this will be a one-time thing. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favor of what Dr. Dagher and his colleagues are proposing for the long term. I hope that he can be the Pied Piper leading the windies offshore, not to drown, but to bring us juice. But beginnings are very important,” Huber says.

The University of Maine has a buoy at the test site to observe conditions on and under the water, and a radar installation on Monhegan to monitor the flight patterns of birds. But Huber says this is insufficient. “They need to have a barge out there on the site, not point at it from a couple miles away,” he says.

Maine’s lobster industry has been generally, if cautiously, receptive to the concept of floating wind turbines 20 miles out to sea, because almost all fishing happens closer to shore. “I’m fine with it, as long as it’s offshore,” says David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “A few people fish out there, but it’s a totally different ballgame—they should be able to work around each other. We’re for offshore wind. As soon as they get the technology, they should go for it.”

Cousens also supports the Monhegan test site. “They’ve got to test it,” he says. “Those guys [Monhegan lobstermen] are all for it, and they’re the only ones who fish out there, so why not?”

Monhegan’s lobstering season runs from October to June, and much of the testing will be done in the three and a half “off” months. The test site is approximately one by two miles; the effect on the lobster season is expected to be minimal.

“Nothing we do as human beings on Earth is going to have zero impact,” Dagher says. “The goal here is to minimize the impact, while reducing our dangerous reliance on foreign oil.”