Giant Leap Forward for Renewable Energy

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Offshore Wind Power Line Wins Praise, and Backing,” describes a giant leap forward for renewable energy. Finally, there is major financial support from Google and a top investment firm for a project to build a transmission backbone for winds farms up and down the Eastern seaboard.

In addition, the backbone would provide benefits before the winds farms are even built by enabling the transmission of cheaper electricity in Virginia to New Jersey where a more congested system currently makes electricity more expensive.

The dual nature of the project must have attracted Google and Good Energies because it makes it financially profitable from the inception. The 350-mile backbone also addresses another crucial element of wind energy, its variability, because the backbone could pick up winds in say, Virginia, when they are strong there or further north as a storm shifts.

The backbone also addresses several key bureaucratic elements that have held up projects like this in the past. It focuses on four major hubs, reducing the number of state governments required for approval, and only involves four property owners unlike a system on the land that would involve hundreds.

Finally, from an aesthetic standpoint, the turbines would be barely visible from the land unlike another controversial project currently under consideration for Cape Cod.

Google and Good Energy have each underwritten a 37.5 percent stake in the project, with another foreign organization considering 10 percent.