Finnish Offshore Wind Project Digs Deep | Offshore Wind - Offshore WIND
Finnish Offshore Wind Project Digs Deep | Offshore Wind
Finnish Offshore Wind Project Digs Deep
Suomen Hyötytuuli has made seabed test excavations at a depth of 43 metres, deeper than ever before in Finland, at the Tahkoluoto offshore wind farm expansion project site, said the developer.
The Tahkoluoto demonstration project wind turbines will be placed in waters deeper than ever before in Finland, according to the developer.
The dense moraine of the seabed was excavated deeper than ever before in the country and the test excavations were carried out in cooperation between Dutch-Finnish Boskalis-Terramare and the Finish Hyötytuuli.
Boskalis-Terramar’s Meri-Pekka dredging vessel was fitted with equipment tailored to the needs of Suomen Hyötytuuli, which made it possible to modify the seabed and take samples at a depth of more than 40 meters, according to the press release.
In the test excavations carried out at the beginning of September, loose soil and hard moraine from the area of the demo project’s wind turbines were lifted with Meri-Peka‘s bucket for examination.
Built in 2017, Tahkoluoto, which features eleven wind turbines, is Finland’s first offshore wind farm and the world’s first offshore wind farm built for freezing conditions.
The expansion project will comprise a total of 40 power plants of over 15 MW, and the project’s estimated completion date is 2027. The annual production of the expansion is estimated to reach 2,000 gigawatt-hours.
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Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.