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By Anne Pyburn Craig
New Jersey’s leadership role in the development of offshore wind energy was established five years ago, with the creation of the Jersey Atlantic Wind Farm, the first coastal wind farm in the United States. Located in Atlantic City at the Absacon Island wastewater treatment facility, the five turbines of the 7.5 megawatt installation generate 60 percent of the power needed to process 30 million gallons of wastewater each day.
“In 2009, we saved $750,000 in avoided electricity costs,” says Paul Gallagher, general counsel for the Atlantic County Utilities Authority. “We lease the land and buy energy from Jersey Atlantic Wind for 7.9 cents a kilowatt hour. Other energy sources cost about 12 cents a kilowatt hour.”
Initial proposals for the wind farm were met with some skepticism, both from neighbors with noise concerns and from the Audubon Society, which challenged the developers in court and won the right to maintain an on-site presence to monitor the turbines’ effect on the bird population. The report has not been released yet, but Gallagher has heard that the turbines have claimed about 30 avian lives over four years—less than anticipated.
And the neighbors? “We took them to a wind farm in Pennsylvania to see and hear turbines in operation,” says Gallagher. “It made all the difference in the world. Now the community has embraced this project. For the [Atlantic County Utilities] Authority, it was a bit of a leap of faith, but it’s proven to be our entrée into a lot of green energy projects. We’re transitioning our fleet vehicles to natural gas, doing methane recovery, and getting some of our energy from solar, too.”
Taking that leap of faith, where wind power is concerned, may become easier and more commonplace. Despite high upfront costs (costs for a commercial scale wind turbine in 2007 ranged from $1.2 million to $2.6 million, per megawatt of nameplate capacity installed), the advantages of well-planned wind (zero emissions and operating costs unaffected by the vagaries of politics, to name two) are proving to be huge, and a Department of Energy study estimates that the nation could be getting 20 percent of its energy needs met by the wind by 2030. In 2007, wind power contributed 35 percent of all new U.S. electrical generation capacity.
In New Jersey, three companies—Fisherman’s Energy, NRG Bluewater Wind, and Deepwater Wind—have interim leases from the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior to create 350-megawatt facilities in a state-designated swath of ocean about 20 miles offshore, stretching south from Seaside Heights to Stone Harbor in Cape May County. The race is on, and the very real chance exists that a New Jersey offshore wind project may come to fruition before Cape Wind, the controversial decade-old proposal being fought by powerful interests in Cape Cod, ever becomes more than a dream.
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