Developer proposes 1.4GW offshore wind in Great Lakes

Written by GTD Editor

Monday, 22 February 2010 08:57

SouthPoint Wind, an Ontario, Canada, company, is proposing a major offshore wind development for the Great Lakes. In regulatory filings, the company outlines both a 30 megawatt (MW) project it had proposed earlier and a new 1.4 gigawatt project in Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair.

SouthPoint, filed draft applications with provincial authorities earlier this month.

“The SouthPoint Wind Project will be one of many new offshore generation plants in the Great Lakes region supplying the increasing demand for electrical power in Canada and the United States,” the company writes in its application.

Ontario last year enacted a feed-in tariff (FIT) programme that has attracted droves of renewable energy developers to the province. The FIT pays a premium price for offshore wind power of C$0.19 per kilowatt hour, among the highest for any non-solar renewable technology.

Each project is referred to as “SouthPoint Wind Project”. A 30MW pilot project, which SouthPoint says was proposed in 2004, would consist of three wind farm sites, each with five 2MW turbines. The larger project would entail an initial phase of ten sites with five, 2MW turbines each. An additional 50 turbines would be added at all 13 sites in a second phase.

SouthWind says it has selected the DeWind D8.2 2MW turbine for both projects, which would include 715 turbines if fully built out.

The projects would be located relatively near to the shore, off the townships of Leamington, Kingsville and Wheatley, among others. The application says the larger project “has an approximately 2km transmission distance offshore for each wind farm excluding the inter-array transmission cable distance inside a wind farm”. This favourable location, SouthWind continues, features shallow water, strong winds, proximity to grid connection points and “and can create great savings in capital requirements”.

SouthPoint acknowledges in its application the dearth of North American offshore wind development experience.

“Currently, a lack of precedence in the Great lakes leaves no established technical guidelines for the selection, design and construction of [turbine support] structures,” the company writes. (It intends to use monopile foundations). “In addition, the established European practices may not be applicable to the environmental conditions in the Great Lakes.”

Opposition has emerged, with the deputy mayor of Leamington asking in a local paper this week, “Why should we be the guinea pigs?"

An earlier SouthPoint project off Leamington was rejected in 2006 after vocal opposition. An Ontario moratorium on offshore development followed. The province took steps to lift the moratorium in January 2008.

SouthPoint announced several public meetings on the projects in the coming weeks.

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