The Block Island wind farm will be a 30-megawatt wind energy farm being developed by Deepwater Wind, construction is set to start in 2013. It will be located three miles southeast of Block Island and will be barely visible to the naked eye on a clear day. It will consist of five turbines and deepwater claims it will generate over 100,000 megawatts hours annually.
The wind farm will supply Block Island with the bloke of it electricity. National grid has agreed to distributive the electricity to the citizens at a set price using a feed-in tariff.
Feed-in Tariffs are policy mechanisms designed to help renewable energy technologies get started. They do this by providing a contract with the renewable to buy a certain amount of energy at a certain price for a number of years. This way there is defiantly a market for the product the renewable to producing and there is almost no uncertainty of its success. This will help companies get investors to start the renewable energy technologies going. An example of this would be the wind turbine in Portsmouth. If a feed-in tariffs were not in place then the wind turbine would be selling it’s energy at market price which would be to low for the turbine to make back it’s initial investment.
Block Island is currently getting their electricity from a dirty and very expense diesel plant. This will reduce the pressure on Block Island citizens and give them a clean energy supply.
In addition to the wind farm being built, there will also be a transmission line build from the island to the main land to serve as a bidirectional electricity flow. Excess energy from the wind farm will be transmitted to the main land and in times of low winds energy will be able to be transferred to the island from the mainland. This will provide Block Island with a steady supply of energy. The project it’s self is positioned to be a demonstration wind farm for future investors in wind energy.
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