Page 40 - North American Clean Energy September/October 2019 Issue

wind power
New York’s Predevelopment
Activities Advance Offshore Wind
by Kate McClellan Press and Gregory Lampman
IN JULY 2019, GOVERNOR CUOMO
announced the winners of New York’s first comprehensive offshore wind solicitation – the Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects – totaling nearly 1,700 megawatts. As the single largest renewable energy procurement made by a state in U.S. history, these two projects are expected to produce enough offshore wind energy to power more than one million homes, and support more than 1,600 jobs with a combined economic activity of $3.2 billion statewide. This will help jump start progress towards New York’s unprecedented offshore wind goal: 9,000 megawatts by 2035.
To accomplish this, the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has been leading the coordination of offshore wind opportunities, seeking to advance New York State’s goals in a way that is both responsible and cost- effective. As a result of this philosophy, the State is continuing its proactive approach to investing in predevelopment activities.
As part of the New York State Offshore Wind Master Plan1 released in January 2018, the State invested in bringing together existing data, new research, and feedback from stakeholders
to inform the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in the identification of new lease areas in the New York Bight. New lease areas that are in proximity to New York City, the State’s “load center,” are critical in advancing the State’s goals.
As BOEM reviews the draft Wind Energy Areas2, the State
is investing in predevelopment activities to gain a better understanding of the physical and environmental conditions in these areas. This will reduce developer risk, which will enable developers to submit more competitive bid prices into New York’s offshore wind solicitations. These activities are expected to provide a starting point for project development, but not to displace the work developers will need to undertake to design, permit, and construct their projects.
Accurate meteorological and oceanographic — metocean — data is essential to understanding project productivity and profitability. It is used to inform optimal site layout, design, and, perhaps most importantly, to understand the wind resource and expected generation from an offshore wind project installed in the area.
With this in mind, NYSERDA deployed two metocean buoys in
August. The buoys are located more than 20 miles off New York’s coast (in BOEM’s designated Draft Wind Energy Areas) and each buoy will collect data for two years. These (LiDAR) buoy systems are fitted with remote sensing equipment that uses pulsed laser light to determine wind speeds and direction at turbine height, along with wave and current measurements. The two made-to- order buoys were deployed in the North Sea for validation against a meteorological measurement tower – metmast – in accordance with Carbon Trust OWA Stage 2 standard and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard 61400-12-1 CDV. The buoys represent a $4.5 million investment by New York that is expected to bring a nearly half billion dollar return on investment through lower offshore wind developer bids.
For example, an improvement in data quality sufficient to reduce a developer’s uncertainty in modeled base-case wind speed for an 800-megawatt offshore wind project - from an annual average of 9.0 meters per second (m/s) to 9.1 m/s - could result in approximately $130 million in additional energy production (over the 25-year life of the project). If this information was collected by the developer that submitted a bid into a State solicitation, the savings would accrue exclusively to the developer. If this data was available prior to a State’s offshore wind solicitation, the savings accrued would
be expected to be shared by both the State and developer, via
lower developer bids. If we further assume that four 800 megawatt projects could benefit
from similar data
refinement, then the
aggregate benefit would
jump to almost $530
million over 25 years.
In addition to collecting traditional Metocean data, the buoys will feature other environmental sensors that will collect information about birds, bats,
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