Monhegan's viewshed and soundshed will change for the first time in some time, as the University of Maine and its DeepCwind Consortium finally get their multimillion dollar check cut by the US Dept of Energy to build the various components of America's first offshore wind turbine and tow them out to a site 2 miles south of the island.
Happily UMaine has chosen to build a prototype for floating deepwater floating windpower extracting structures (see image), rather than the stick-in-the-mud steel & concrete thickets that other states have envisioned off their coasts.
Key dimensions
* Blade length 13m (42.7ft)
* Rotor Diameter 27 m (88ft)
* Tower height: 13.7 m (44.9)
* Upper hull hgt: 23.4m ( 77ft)
Key Materials
Blades: fiber reinforced polyester resin
Tower: Steel
Hull: Steel
Mooring Lines: HMPE Polyethylene
Anchors: Steel boxes filled w/ copper slag
It is the belief of the developers of the DeepCwind prototype, that they will learn sufficiently from this test bed over a two to three year period, to build and safely and cost-effectively deploy a great armada of floating deepwater turbines 25 and more miles off Maine. Time will tell if they are right.
Below are links to all the documents used in the Department of Energy's decisionmaking process that has finally approved University of Maine’s "Deepwater Offshore Floating Wind Turbine Testing and Demonstration Project, Gulf of Maine" aka DOE/EA 1792 (pdf)
Happily UMaine has chosen to build a prototype for floating deepwater floating windpower extracting structures (see image), rather than the stick-in-the-mud steel & concrete thickets that other states have envisioned off their coasts. Key dimensions
* Blade length 13m (42.7ft)
* Rotor Diameter 27 m (88ft)
* Tower height: 13.7 m (44.9)
* Upper hull hgt: 23.4m ( 77ft)
Key Materials
Blades: fiber reinforced polyester resin
Tower: Steel
Hull: Steel
Mooring Lines: HMPE Polyethylene
Anchors: Steel boxes filled w/ copper slag
It is the belief of the developers of the DeepCwind prototype, that they will learn sufficiently from this test bed over a two to three year period, to build and safely and cost-effectively deploy a great armada of floating deepwater turbines 25 and more miles off Maine. Time will tell if they are right.
Below are links to all the documents used in the Department of Energy's decisionmaking process that has finally approved University of Maine’s "Deepwater Offshore Floating Wind Turbine Testing and Demonstration Project, Gulf of Maine" aka DOE/EA 1792 (pdf)
- Notice of Availability (PDF 78 KB)
- Scoping Letters (PDF 1.7 MB)
- Agency Correspondence (PDF 7.4 MB)
- Draft EA Comment Matrix and other Draft and Final EA Material (PDF 303 KB)
- Design Changes Between the Draft EA and Final EA (PDF 489 KB)
- Final Environmental Assessment (PDF 3.8 MB)
- Finding of No Significant Impacts (FONSI) (PDF 478 KB)
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