Businesses interested in developing North Carolina’s offshore wind energy potential will soon be able to test available resources, but officials leading New Hanover County’s three beach municipalities wonder if serious investors will step up to the table.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an environmental assessment in January that, after public comment, will allow companies to install meteorological towers and deploy buoys affixed with lasers to measure wind speeds, the last step before the federal government holds a lease sale for more than 300,000 acres of wind energy areas near Kitty Hawk and Wilmington.
Yet while the process moves forward to allow it, Carolina Beach Mayor Dan Wilcox wondered if businesses would be willing to invest in what he describes as one of the least cost-effective ways to generate energy.
“Will private industry invest in something that costs substantially more per Btu than another type of energy? I don’t know. They haven’t traditionally,” Wilcox said.
Kure Beach Mayor Dean Lambeth said offshore wind development would be “ungodly expensive,” and is not currently practical.
“They’ve got to get a better game going,” Lambeth said. Maintenance would be especially tricky, he continued, because of the caustic marine environment.
“I really don’t think it’s a good thing because they’re going to take a lot of abuse out there,” Lambeth said, listing nor’easters and hurricanes as threats to equipment.
The turbines could be built to endure the harsh environment, Wilcox said, but it would further drive up the price.
“Can they build it so it withstands a hurricane? Sure they can,” Wilcox said. “But at what cost?”
Already hesitant about how the numbers would crunch for wind development, Wrightsville Beach Mayor Bill Blair agreed the engineering required for offshore turbines would probably make the projects less feasible than their terrestrial counterparts.
“The fact that you have to build those things to specs that withstand category 3, 4, 5 hurricanes, because they are definitely in the glide path of most of the hurricanes that come up the Eastern Seaboard — I can’t even imagine the engineering it would take to get that done,” Blair said. “And I don’t know what the payback is. Does it make sense? My sense would be that if the economics did work, we’d have already seen windmills,” Blair said.
Questions about cost aside, Wilcox said offshore wind energy development would be easier to support than offshore drilling, and he would like to know more about how the projects would be constructed, implemented and maintained.
“I think it would be a no-brainer to say it’s more environmentally friendly, with less opportunity for any type of catastrophic failure, like an oil spill or that type of thing. It certainly would go a long way to make some people feel better, especially us on the coast,” Wilcox said.
Blair acknowledged the benefits of wind energy and the importance of continuing to look at new technologies and pursue innovative solutions to problems, but returned to practicality as a measure of whether to support something.
“Coolness is not something that really enters my realm. I look at things from a practical standpoint. If it costs twice as much, I don’t think that’s cool. There are a lot of things that are cool that aren’t cost-effective,” Blair said.
Carolina Beach Councilman Steve Shuttleworth agreed that offshore wind development would be complicated, with construction and infrastructure development bearing hefty price tags. But because southeastern North Carolina offers some of the largest potential for wind energy development, Shuttleworth said he would consider a small-scale, land-based operation on Pleasure Island, with one or two small turbines, no more than 100- or 150-feet tall, because it could provide direct benefit to local residents.
“We could erect one or two wind turbines and generate enough power locally to sell back to the grid, which could be used to reduce electric bills for our residents, or we could put it back into the general coffers,” Shuttleworth said. “… I think it could be energy well-spent for Carolina Beach and Kure Beach, for our little island.”
If offshore wind development could yield direct benefits for Carolina Beach or the county through, for example, lower electricity costs, Shuttleworth said he might be more willing to personally support the projects.
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