This past Halloween, the U.S. Department of the Interior approved the largest single wind farm project in United States history. With trick or treating, fall striper and redfish runs and the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show, you’d be forgiven if that news escaped your attention, but as a boater, it shouldn’t have. When Dominion Energy’s $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is completed in 2026, 176 titanic turbines spinning a mile apart 27 miles offshore from Virginia Beach, will generate an astonishing 2.6 gigawatts of electricity. That’s not only enough to power 900,000 homes, but the price comes in at around a third of the cost of the pair of new reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle Nuclear plant that will generate roughly the equivalent flow of electrons. When these turbines are online, some of those electrons will reach your home’s air conditioner or the batteries that run your Tesla, iPhone or trolling motor.
Wherever it’s flowing, in the United States, we love our juice, and that juice has to come from somewhere. Regardless of whether you subscribe to the science of fossil fuel carbon-dioxide induced global warming, government and industry worldwide are making massive investments in non-carbon power sources, and over the last couple of decades, wind has quietly grown to supply over nine percent of all the United States’ electricity. Up to now, most of the huge turbine generators have been built in the West and Midwest, and unlike northern Europe, where countries like England can get up to half of their total energy from oceanic turbines on a windy day, North America currently has few (as in, only seven) operational oceanic turbines. But that’s about to change dramatically. And that fact has some
