Technical basis for wind opposition

Editor,

As an engineer with more than 40 years of experience in the development, construction, operation, and maintenance of power plants including wind farms, I need to express my concerns regarding Maryland offshore wind turbine development. There is clearly a lack of electric power generation understanding from our Maryland State representatives who appear to be hell bent on achieving their offshore wind goals with little understanding of the technologies.

Wind turbines are very expensive to construct and maintain on land. These machines will be orders of magnitude more costly to build and maintain in a saltwater environment, and the ratepayers will be burdened with absorbing these exorbitant costs.  Furthermore, wind speeds in Maryland are not ideal for wind turbine development which is why one sees so few wind turbines in this State. Rather, the mid-section of the lower 48 is most favorable for wind farms as one can see from wind maps provided by the government at windexchange.energy.gov. Moreover, wind energy is often not available when the electric grid most needs it (i.e. hot/humid summer days), yet it’s often available during periods of low electricity demand which wreaks havoc on electric grid operations due to excessive power being pumped into the grid with nowhere to send it.

So what low emission energy alternatives are there to wind turbines?  There’s a false narrative that most electricity in this nation is produced from dirty, high CO2 emitting coal fired power plants. Indeed, this was the case a decade ago, but these old coal plants are rapidly being replaced with clean natural gas fired combined cycle power plants that utilize advanced jet engine technology and approach 60% efficiency which all translates to low emissions. An 1,100 MW combined cycle power plant generates about 8000 metric tons of CO2 per day. In comparison, global commercial airline traffic generates about 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 per day.  Hence, the tons of CO2 generated from a large combined cycle power plant is insignificant when compared to commercial airline traffic alone. Furthermore, one combined cycle plant can almost entirely meet Delmarva’s customers electric power consumption which averages about 1300MW.

There is a need to reduce CO2 emissions across our planet, but we are decades away from having the next generation of nuclear reactors that can safely generate zero carbon power. Very efficient combined cycle power plants burning clean natural gas is the bridge to get us to this future technology along with carbon capture technologies which are advancing quickly.

That said, I am hopeful the Trump administration will install roadblocks that will prevent Maryland offshore wind development as these wind farms will do little to reduce CO2 emissions yet forever ruin our beautiful Ocean City landscape with an endless array of blinking red lights and burden our ratepayers with excessive energy costs.

David Cook, PE
Ocean Pines