Opinion: Offshore wind versus CO2 emissions

The United States and countries around the world are moving toward “clean energy” sources. Solar energy and, more notably, offshore wind are being celebrated nationally with the idea that these solutions will allow us to decrease the country’s dependence on fossil fuels leading to a decrease in carbon emissions. With the idea of a sustainable future in mind, government officials along each coast have been pushing for offshore wind projects to move forward, offering optimism to the public as we embark on that clean energy journey.However, this optimistic vision is far from the reality. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when adding wind farms to existing energy grids, their intermittent and varying output forces the pre-existing fossil fuel plants to work much harder, producing more carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions. Thus, the more offshore wind farms that are constructed, the harder the fossil fuel plants must work making the CO2 emissions as high, if not higher, than they would be if the wind turbines did not exist.Think of carbon emissions and offshore wind as a person running. When a person is training sprints, constantly stopping and moving forward, they burn their energy faster than jogging at a steady pace for a longer distance. The fuel efficiency of a fossil-fuel electrical generating plant varies in the same way. The plant has high efficiency levels when it is operating at a steady pace, much like the person jogging for a longer period of time.When it comes to compensating for wind energy production, fossil fuel energy plants on the grid will have to rapidly adjust their output, changing the more efficient way they operate to supplement for varied output from the turbines (based on the weather). It will force these systems to consume nearly double the amount of fossil fuel and thus release a proportionately increased amount of CO2 to compensate for the wind turbines on the grid.On the New England grid, Combined Cycle Gas Turbines plants are the most prevalent type of energy generation facilities. These plants can only change their output slowly and when they are forced to change output quickly, they must adjust from their efficient cycle to operate as Single Cycle Gas Turbines. In that alternate configuration, they consume almost twice the fuel to produce the same amount of electricity.These efficient plants dominate electricity systems because energy consumption is typically very predictable, and the energy generation can be efficient given this predictability. When a wind farm is added, its unpredictable variable output disrupts the efficiency between predicted generation and predicted consumption. Because the wind is inherently unpredictable and intermittent, fossil fuel plants are forced to constantly vary their output to compensate for the varying amount of energy produced by the wind farm. This rapidly varying output is a function that most fossil plants are not designed for, and, as discussed above, increases the amount of fuel consumed, inevitably increasing the CO2 emissions. Even the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal permitting agency for wind farms off the coast of Rhode Island, states that “overall, it is anticipated that there would be no collective impact on global warming as a result of offshore wind projects.”When taking a step back and looking into the construction of wind turbines, the production of materials and parts, including the production of fiberglass, concrete, steel, and the construction and decommissioning, are all carbon-intensive companions of offshore wind.The time to act is now. The air we breathe and the oceans we depend upon are being damaged by the rush to meet clean energy goals. The fishing industry is being decimated, sea beds are being seriously impacted or destroyed, and much more. It is imperative that government officials understand the total environmental impact of this rush to build wind farms before it is too late. We need to take a step back and understand the true environmental impacts of these “clean” energy decisions before we inflict significant, and perhaps permanent, injury to our planet.Dr. Miles O. Bidwell, a member of Rhode Island-based Green Oceans, holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. As an economist, he has spent the last 30 years designing electricity generation markets and pricing in the US and in Europe. He was a major architect of the current New England capacity market.

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