Text-Only Version
Habib Dagher, Director,
Advanced Engineered Wood Composites: "So, what's the solution?
You've heard about T. Boone Pickens wonderful plan. But we sit in the
corner of the country and we're not very close to the wind belt that
runs up and down from Kansas to Texas. So, what do we do? And we've
actually been working very hard on solutions for our state. If you
look at page four of the testimony, according to NREL, the National
Energy Lab, the off-shore wind potential, the off-shore wind
energy--the energy that blows off the oceans, if you wish--is a
tremendous natural resource, a resource we didn't really understand
until recently. That resource is equal to the U.S. electric
production today--the off-shore wind is about equal to U.S. electric
production today. You look at the other ocean energy
resources--we've heard about tidal energy--tidal energy and wave
energy are actually a very small fraction of the off-shore wind
resource. If you take a look at the second sketch on the right-hand
side, it shows another very powerful point about the off-shore wind
resource--it sits very close to where the need is. If you look at
the U.S. population densities shown in dark red right over there,
and you look at the off-shore wind resource, it is where the people
are. So, we don't need to build a large transportation
infrastructure to get the wind energy to the people where they need
it. That's one major advantage of that resource. Maine, of course,
has a tremendous off-shore wind resource. The Gulf of Maine has been
called the Saudi Arabia of wind in many ways--there's over 100
gigawatts of wind power in the Gulf of Maine. That's about 10% of
the total U.S. electric power production.
"So, how do we go get it? One major advantage of that resource is
that it's also a seasonal resource--it's actually high when we need
it. We need to heat ourselves in the state of Maine, in the
northeast, and the heating costs are our biggest issues, but in the
wintertime the wind blows twice as fast as in the summertime, and
the power generated from the wind goes by the cube of the wind's
speed. So, in the wintertime, per month, we can generate eight times
as much power as we do in the summertime. You can think of the wind
off the coast of Maine as a seasonal crop that can help us heat the
state of Maine.
"Now I'd like to talk more about what we're proposing for the Gulf
of Maine and how it fits in with T. Boone Pickens' vision. Actually,
it fits in very well with his vision. If you look at the left-hand
drawing that we have, T. Boone Pickens essentially is talking about
the U.S. wind corridor--you see, up and down from Kansas down to
Texas. That's a wonderful resource that can generate 200 to 400
gigawatts depending on how much of it you think you could use. We're
talking about adding three more wind regions to the Pickens plan.
And the three wind regions are the Atlantic Ocean wind region, which
can generate between 120 and 240 gigawatts, and then we have the
Pacific Ocean wind corridor, which can generate 75 to 150 gigawatts,
and then the Great Lakes corridor, which can generate 110 to 220
gigawatts. So rather than go to 20 percent, as T. Boone's saying,
maybe we can go to 40 percent with this additional resource, and
it's very close to where people actually need it.
"The other major advantage of having this distributed corridor is
the fact that the geography allows averaging of the uncertainty in
the winds and the intermittency of the winds, so we have less
intermittency as the wind moves from the West to the East--there's
always going to be some bad weather somewhere, you're always going
to pick up some wind--and that reduces the uncertainty in the wind
profiles."
