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The Internet is abuzz with the news that Google is investing in a 350-mile, $5 Billion, Wind Power ‘Backbone’. Brooklyn Treehugger Brian Merchant reports that Google is taking 37.5% of the equity in future offshore wind farms along the East Coast, from New York City to southern Virginia, with 6,000 megawatts electrical capacity.
As in much of the coastal areas of the world, the large wind power resource along the Eastern Seaboard is over ocean not over land. Scientists call this wind power resource, which extends as far as 20 miles offshore, the Mid-Atlantic Bight.
Before construction of the wind farms that will plug into this “smart grid’, a first goal of the project is to carry electricity from Virginia, where it’s relatively cheap, to places like New York and New Jersey, where it’s far more expensive. Google has committed $200 million to the transmission backbone, which will include “on-ramps for wind farms.”
The hope is that the Trans Elect superhighway will vitalize off-shore wind power construction. As noted before, researchers project that electricity from wind power could average 33 percent and a maximum of 47 percent of yearly-averaged, US Eastern electric power consumption.
HuffPoz Chris Kahn noted that Scott Jennings, president of PSEG Global, criticized the project. Jennings questioned the project’s high cost and whether the region needed that big of a transmission network.
“It would be better to focus our resources on actually building wind turbines and generating renewable wind energy,” Jennings said in a statement.
As this blog reported before, PSEG Global has been working to build wind facilities off the New Jersey coast, which hopefully would fulfill New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s vision of off-shore wind power for New York City, despite the faint hope of wind turbines constructed in coastal New York.
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