The Japanese Plan Offshore Wind Farm

September 16th, 2011 by Nicholas Brown

Middelgruden Offshore Wind Farm in Denmark.

Off the coast of Fukushima, the Japanese Agency for Natural Resources and Energy plans to construct a wind farm. An official from the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy said: “Building wind power turbines on land would be more difficult, because of the problems of noise pollution and city planning regulations”. That actually surprised me a little, due to the fact that setting up wind turbines offshore is more difficult technically.

The $261 million USD funding for this will be earmarked from a special extra budget which is to help rebuild the disaster stricken area, and the Japanese Agency for Natural Resources and Energy says that this wind farm is part of the reconstruction. The wind farm is envisioned as six 2-MW turbines that float offshore and it is hoped to be commissioned in 2015.

The Fukushima disaster has sparked widespread fear of nuclear power plants in Japan. (Plus, wind turbines did quite well throughout the earthquakes and tsunami.)

The government expects the country’s major wind turbine makers (such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Fuji Heavy Industries, and Japan Steel Works) will take part, he added.

The Fukushima power plant that was shut down due to the disaster had a generation capacity of 4.7 GW, which is enough to power 1,424,000 homes. In other words, that many homes relied on it if it operated at full capacity, so now that has to be replaced with other types of power plants because Japan does not plan to construct any more nuclear power plants for now.

Electricity has to be conserved due to a lack of electricity generation capacity and solar power plants are being constructed to compensate for this. One example of these efforts is a 7,000 kW photovoltaic solar power plant that was constructed last month by TEPCO.

The person from the Agency for Natural Resources and energy said that he hopes Mitsubishi Heavy, Fuji Heavy, and Japan Steel Works will take part in the project.

h/t: Times Live

Image Credit: Some rights reserved by United Nations Photo

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Tags: japan wind farm, offshore wind farm, renewable energy japan, repowering fukushima

About the Author

Nicholas Brown writes on CleanTechnica, Gas2, Kleef&Co, and Green Building Elements. He has a keen interest in physics-intensive topics such as electricity generation, refrigeration and air conditioning technology, energy storage, and geography. His website is: Kompulsa.com.

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http://www.facebook.com/people/Eric-de-Haan/1126607781 Eric de Haan

Japan can’t afford its self to lose four years on an experiment with six times 2 MW floating wind-turbines.

It needs its wind manufacturers, assuming they are not on that level yet, to hook up with manufacturers that produce 5 to 7 MW offshore turbines.

In the USA and in Europe there is development and experiments in floating wind.
Japan should be invited to join those projects, go thru a learning curve, boost the projects with their knowledge and expertise and bring home the lessons learned. From there they have apply in big on GW scale (or not at all)

At home in Japan, they need to look now at where to locate these offshore parks and how to reinforce the E-Grid, from backbone to the chosen locations. Plan out gas peakers or storage to deal with winds intermittancy. Than with that homework done they can skip our implementation hassles an directly achieve wind penetration values of 60% or more.

That kind of help is needed and not the few dime from the US for a micky mouse project. (Although it seems to be their decision to spent a part of the fund on that project.)