A diagram showing a few types of floating wind turbine platforms. © NREL - National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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:: Fukushima to get offshore wind
+ 23.01.2013 + Japan announced the construction of a gigantic offshore wind farm off the coast of Fukushima. The platforms to be used will be able to withstand earthquakes.
Japan plans to build the world's largest offshore wind farm according to a report by the UPI this week. Though the project is still just a proposal, 143 wind turbines with a total capacity of one gigawatt would be installed 10 miles off the coast of Fukushima. Each turbine would therefore have a capacity of around six megawatts, meaning that some of the largest turbines currently made would be used.
The project will obviously not only draw interest for its size, but also its location – close to where the earthquake occurred that destroyed the Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011. But despite the offshore wind farm's size, it will not come close to replacing the capacity of the six reactors at Daiichi, which had a cumulative capacity of 4.7 gigawatts.
Offshore wind farms can be expected to run with a capacity factor of around 40 percent in good locations, so a one gigawatt offshore wind farm would produce around 400 megawatts of power on the average around the clock – equivalent to the output of a midsized coal plant. Nuclear plants generally have a capacity factor in the 90s when they are running, which would put the average output from Daiichi above 4,000 megawatts – 10 times the output that can be expected from the upcoming wind farm.
On the other hand, nuclear plants need to be shut down regularly for maintenance – scheduled or unscheduled. When the tsunami hit the coast in March 2011, three of the six Daiichi reactors were off-line. Likewise, the San Onofre nuclear plant in California, which also lies directly on the coast in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, has been off-line since the beginning of January 2012 for unscheduled maintenance, which has been extended indefinitely.
According to Annette Bossler of Main(e) International Consulting, the turbines off the coast of Fukushima will have floating platforms because the water depths make conventional foundations impossible. A pilot wind farm will be built to study how these floating platforms react to earthquakes.
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