The company is considering laying off about 40 Norway-based offshore wind employees and has suspended plans to build a manufacturing plant in the UK, according to the report.

Forbes reported that the company is focusing on deep-water offshore wind development, with a potential 10-15 MW turbine.

LEEDCo Considers “Gravity-Based” Foundations

An official from Lake Erie Energy Development Corp — the organization that is pushing for a pilot offshore wind project near Cleveland — said the project might use gravity-based foundations that would be built on land and floated out to the site, the Ashtabula (Ohio) Star-Beacon reported last week.

The foundations would reportedly be 10 to 12 stories high and built on land, according to LEEDCo President Lorry Wagner.

“The Ashtabula port is ideally suited,” he said.

Senior Deepwater Official Leaves Company

Deepwater Wind Chief Development Officer Paul Rich has left the company, the Providence Journal reported on Saturday.

The report said that he was leaving to pursue other interests in the offshore wind industry. Jeffrey Grybowski, the company’s chief administrative officer, said that Rich would not be replaced.

“From our view, it’s a natural progression for a project, from an early-development stage to a late-development stage, where we’re getting ready to execute permits and go into preconstruction,” he said, while complimenting Rich’s work on the company’s Block Island project. “He’s been a big part of the project’s success to date.”

“The city of Cleveland fully supports the creation of this offshore wind farm. We have signed a memorandum of understanding to help move the project forward, and Cleveland Public Power is geared up to purchase 20 percent of the energy created by the wind farm,” Jackson wrote.

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo) is developing a pilot project near the city.

“For this vision to become a reality, our entire community needs to rally behind LEEDCo and the offshore wind farm,” according to Jackson. “This will require that both the private sector and the public sector set aside their own, short-term self-interests and focus on the long-term benefits to our economy, our work force and our community.”

MA Court Will Hear Cape Wind Appeal

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will hear an appeal of the approved Cape Wind power purchase agreement, the Worcester Business Journal reported yesterday.

The Associated Industries of Massachusetts has appealed the agreement because of the projected additional costs of electricity from Cape Wind. The power purchase agreement was approved late last year. The group expects a ruling from the court in late 2011 or early 2012, according to the report.

Winds are shifting over the Great Lakes, with offshore wind development in Ohio’s lake waters moving forward while projects in New York languish.

The United States Department of Energy has identified 742.5 gigawatts of potential developable capacity in the lakes. However, differences in state and local regulatory environments and in development structures may lead to uneven development of this potential.

In positive news for Great Lakes offshore wind, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has signed a lease option giving the Lake Erie Energy Development Co. development rights to part of Ohio’s lakebed holdings. Founded in 2009, LEEDCo is a private nonprofit economic development corporation which grew out of a local and state-level task force. LEEDCo’s current goals include building a 20 MW pilot project, then using the pilot project to develop a permitting process designed to scale up to 1000 MW of offshore wind by 2020. LEEDCO distinguishes its project through both extensive engagement with the local communities – whose manufacturing base has been hit hard by the economic downturn – and by a relatively modest initial project size of 5 to 7 turbines.

At the same time, things are not going as smoothly for offshore wind development in New York’s Lake Ontario waters. A shakeup at the New York Power Authority may spell trouble for the NYPA’s Great Lakes Offshore Wind (GLOW) program. This Tuesday, NYPA president and CEO Richard Kessel gave the Authority’s board notice of his resignation.

Within NYPA, Kessel championed the prospects of developing New York’s Great Lakes offshore wind resource. Unveiled on Earth Day 2009, NYPA’s GLOW Project featured a competitive process to award power purchase agreements to prospective developers of offshore wind projects in New York’s lake waters. Things looked rosy at first: five developers responded to NYPA’s request for proposals by the summer of 2010; NYPA appeared to be reviewing the proposals, with a winner to be announced no later than January 2011.

This year brought a shift in the winds for the NYPA GLOW project. First the developer selection date slipped to late March, then it slipped to “second quarter”. In May, the chairman of NYPA’s board publicly questioned the viability of the GLOW program. NYPA has been relatively secretive about the status of GLOW over the past year – drawing public criticism and scrutiny as recently as this week – so it is hard for outsiders to gauge the full import of Kessel’s resignation on NYPA’s offshore wind program. Nevertheless, it is clear that Kessel’s departure comes as another blow to the GLOW program. This reading is consistent with suspicions that the NYPA board will announce that none of the proposals under review meet economic criteria in terms of the return on NYPA’s investment of publicly controlled dollars.

Meanwhile, proposed federal legislation would give a boost to all U.S. offshore wind projects, whether in Great Lakes waters or our oceans. S. 1397, the Incentivizing Offshore Wind Power Act, would extend an existing federal tax incentive for developing new renewable projects. The U.S. tax code allows developers to offset their federal income tax liabilities through an investment tax credit (ITC) equal to 30% of the eligible costs of developing a renewable energy project. This tax credit, like other federal energy tax incentives, tends to receive Congressional authorization for several years, only to be renewed in the face of impending expiration.

Current law requires developers of wind projects to place their projects in service by the end of 2012 in order to qualify for the ITC. Between the novel nature of offshore wind technology, the challenges of the regulatory and permitting processes, and the multi-year nature of any project’s construction effort, it is not clear that any projects could meet the deadline to qualify for the ITC. S. 1397 would amend that incentive to allow offshore wind developers give years after receiving the ITC to complete project development. This would not only help conform the ITC to the needs of real offshore wind projects, but would offer developers greater certainty about the future availability of this incentive.

Todd J. Griset practices energy law with Preti Flaherty Beliveau & Pachios in Maine. He also writes a blog on offshore wind, renewable energy and policy issues.

“We’ve always made it clear that we are not only willing but also capable of helping to support the whole project,” Siemens Chief Financial Officer Josef Kaeser told Bloomberg in an interview.

Kaeser said that he does not “have any doubt” that Cape Wind will be built.

NPR Says Cleveland Could Have First Offshore Wind

Developers plan to start building a pilot offshore wind farm near Cleveland next year and believe that the project will be the first offshore wind in the country, National Public Radio reported today.

The actual development of the five-turbine project will be completed by Freshwater Wind, a company backed by General Electric, Bechtel and Cavallo Energy.

“The Great Lakes will really be home to offshore wind long before we see it in the Atlantic,” said Chris Wissemann of Freshwater Wind.

During a hearing on renewable energy development on public lands and waters, Chairman Doc. Hasting called on the White House to end “bureaucratic delays, unnecessary lawsuits and burdensome environmental regulations [that] impede our ability to harness wind and solar energy on public lands.”

The witness list included Cape Wind chief Jim Gordon and Jim Lanard, president of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition. Ed Markey, the Democratic ranking member, asked the hearing witnesses if their industries needed more predictability. Every witness answered yes.

“As the chairman said, certainty is very important,” Lanard said.

Leasing Agreement Sets Precedent For Lake Erie Offshore Wind

A revenue sharing agreement struck last week by the local governments surrounding the proposed Lake Erie offshore wind project will set a precedent for revenue from future offshore wind development, Cleveland.com reported today.

“When other land leases are reached for turbines that may be built in the future, this sets an example for the other projects that may not be located in Cuyahoga County,” said John Kohlstrand, a spokesperson for Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald. “The benefit here is by everyone working together, these multiple counties wouldn’t be feuding over the wind turbines.”

Cleveland Conference Will Focus On Offshore Wind Supply Chain

Cleveland will host a conference on July 13 and 14 that will focus on developing an offshore wind supply chain.

The event, organized by the Great Lakes Wind Network, will feature sessions such as “Achieving Global Manufacturing Competitiveness” and “Inventing It Here: Lowering Costs Through New Design.”

Senior Massachusetts political leaders, state energy officials and offshore wind industry representatives gathered Wednesday to open the $38 million facility — which is the nation’s largest blade testing operation. Engineers will soon will test a blade from TPI Composites, which has a facility in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts.

“We are booked for the next 18 months,” said Patrick Cloney, director of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

Craig Christenson of Clipper Windpower told the audience that the facility is a ”field of dreams” for engineers.

“Thank you all for building it,” he said. “We have come.”

Nearby Counties Will Share In Cleveland Offshore Wind Lease Payment

Three counties near Cleveland will share the lease payment from a planned offshore wind development in Lake Erie, the Ashtabula Star Beacon reported yesterday.

Cuyahoga County and its Port Authority will receive 40 percent of the lease payment according to the report. The three other counties in the Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. — Ashtabula, Lake and Lorain Counties — will share the remaining money.

Richmond Op-Ed Calls For Offshore Wind Instead of Oil Drilling

The Richmond Times Dispatch published a sharp critique of Virginia’s energy policy yesterday by Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, who called for offshore wind development instead of offshore oil drilling.

“Pushing for dangerous offshore drilling just a few miles from Virginia Beach in 2011 is the technological equivalent of building canals during the early days of railroad. Or investing in manual typewriters in, say, 1985,” Tidwell wrote. “For a modern solution to our energy woes, Virginia should join New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland in developing offshore wind power, not oil.”

Tidwell called on Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell to promote “policies that move wind power forward, including appropriate incentives for Dominion Virginia Power to begin building its own turbines and blades for deployment off the coast.”

Sen. Alexander Questions Tax Incentives For “Big Wind”

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander questioned tax incentives for “Big Wind” and said that the money might be better spent on research, The Hill reported yesterday.

Alexander’s comments came a day after the Senate rejected a bill that would have cut subsidies for oil companies but he suggested that he would be open to reducing energy subsidies across a range of industries.

“My colleagues want to talk about ‘Big Oil’ all week. I think we ought to be talking about ‘Big Wind,’” Alexander said during a Senate Appropriations hearing.

The electricity would come from a planned 1,000 megawatt wind farm that the developer has planned for Rhode Island Sound and would be transmitted by undersea cable. The company’s existing power purchase agreement — for its much smaller pilot offshore wind farm near Block Island — calls for National Grid to buy the electricity at 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour in the first year of operations. The difference in this most current bid, company officials said, was the larger scale and the dramatically improved economies of scale.

“The best chance that we see of getting to large projects in the U.S. is to start off with small projects,” said Jeffrey Grybowski, Deepwater’s chief administrative officer.

LEEDCo Wants Offshore Wind Farm Operational By 2013

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation, the non-profit organization seeking to develop a pilot offshore wind project near Cleveland, wants to begin construction next year and have the project operational in 2013, Reuters reported on Friday.

Freshwater Wind — a consortium of developers formed to build the project — could reach a power purchase agreement with utilities in the next month, according to the Reuters report.

“We think there is great value in being first, because our goal is not just to generate electricity,” said Dennis Eckart, a strategic adviser to LEEDCo. “One of our main goals is to create a supply chain industry that will support the building and deployment of these turbines.”

Atlantic City Project Receives Permits

Fishermen’s Energy has received its final state permits to build its six-turbine pilot project near Atlantic City, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

The company received an electric-line easement as well as permission to build on the particular site, according to the report. Before it can move forward, the project still needs a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers as well as financing, according to company officials.

Bloomberg reported that the work to lay electrical cables could begin in December and wind farm construction could begin as early as May 2012.

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. — a nonprofit that represents several government entities and organizations — is developing a $140 million pilot project with as many as eight turbines.

Chris Wissemann, managing director of Great Lakes Wind Energy LLC, one of three companies that would develop and own the project, said the fate of the legislation could “make or break” the offshore wind project.

Developers Seek Same Site Near MA, RI

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement revealed Tuesday that two offshore wind developers have applied for the same area of ocean between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Providence Business Journal reported.

Rhode Island-based Deepwater Wind and Massachusetts-based Neptune Wind are seeking leases in the same 45 square mile area in the “Area of Mutual Interest” between the two states, according to the report. There are also portions of both applications which do not conflict.

Deepwater Wind Chief Development Officer Paul Rich said that he had not seen the proposed Neptune area before Tuesday, but that the competition would not change the company’s plans.

“It’s part of the process,” he said. “I don’t see any surprises.”

“From my perspective, I don’t think that project is very viable at this time, politically or economically,” Townsend said.

The NYPA, an independent state agency, is reviewing proposals to build an offshore wind farm in state waters of Lakes Ontario or Lake Erie. A decision is expected by June, according to the Democrat and Chronicle. NYPA spokeswoman Connie Cullen said that the review process is continuing.

“While we greatly respect the opinions of our trustees, NYPA hasn’t yet completed its review of the bids,” she said. “We hope to present the full results of the review to our trustees in the next couple of months.”

PJM Official Says Grid Can Handle Offshore Wind

Michael Kormos, a senior vice president of PJM Interconnection, said this week that offshore wind projects can be successfully integrated into the electrical grid, NJSpotlight.com reported.

PJM is the grid operator for an area that stretches from the Atlantic Coast to Illinois. Kormos said that the amount of offshore wind that will need to be integrated is dwarfed by the amount of onshore wind soon to come online. Kormos predicted transmission upgrades would be needed after 10,000 megawatts of offshore wind have been installed.

“It’s going to be very unlikely we’re going to see any problems with offshore wind to create potential reliability problems,” he said.

Maine Floating Turbine Model Being Tested In Europe

A team from the University of Maine is in the third week of testing scale models of deep water floating offshore wind platforms in Europe, Physorg.com reported.

The tests of three different 1/50th-scale models are being conducted in a simulation basin owned by Dutch company Marin.

“It was difficult at first but we made it through, and the testing results we’re getting right now are what we expected,” said Heather Martin, a graduate research assistant at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center.

The past week has dealt setbacks to plans to develop offshore wind energy resources in the Great Lakes.

While the winds over the Great Lakes hold great potential to provide usable power, state and provincial programs around the lakes are running into delays and snags.

Two years ago, on Earth Day 2009, the New York Power Authority announced the Great Lakes Offshore Wind (GLOW) Project: a competitive process to award power purchase agreements to prospective developers of offshore wind projects in New York’s lake waters.  Last summer, five developers responded to NYPA’s request for proposals.  NYPA has taken since then to evaluate the proposals and select a winner. NYPA initially aimed to do this by January 2011, but then slipped the selection date to late March 2011.

Just last week, Offshore Wind Wire reported that NYPA may still require several months more to evaluate the proposals before it.

Despite this delay, NYPA’s GLOW process is moving forward with more certainty than are other offshore wind programs around the Great Lakes. The Michigan legislature is considering a bill that would place an outright ban on the development of offshore wind projects in Michigan waters. State representative Ray Franz has sponsored House Bill No. 4499, which would modify Michigan law allowing the state Department of Environmental Quality to lease state-held portions of the bottom of the Great Lakes for a variety of purposes, excluding only oil and gas drilling.

If enacted, Representative Franz’s bill would add another category of prohibited purposes for which site leasing is banned: HB 4499 would prohibit the Michigan DEQ from permitting or leasing a site for a broad array of infrastructure associated with wind energy development.  The ban would apply to everything from commercial projects to wind-oriented scientific research facilities, as well as transmission lines or any other infrastructure “related to a wind turbine”.  This would appear to rule out a Michigan landing site for a transmission line from a wind project elsewhere on the lakes, or even such a line crossing Michigan’s extensive lake bottoms.  The bill doesn’t just target offshore wind, but wind in general; thus it might even rule out a more conventional underwater transmission line across Michigan’s lake bottom if the line were deemed “related to a wind turbine” just because electricity from a terrestrial wind project makes the line.

If Michigan bans offshore wind in its waters, it may outdo its northern neighbor. The Canadian province of Ontario developed an ambitious program for the pursuit of its Great Lakes offshore wind potential, only to suspend its efforts in February 2011. Ontario’s stated reasons for suspending the program include some of the usual suspects: concerns over local siting issues, environmental impacts, and fundamental questions over the value of offshore wind in the Province’s energy mix. Some observers also point to political pressures and this fall’s provincial election cycle as playing a part in the province’s about-face. Ontario is formally taking a “wait and see” approach to its offshore wind resources.

While making statements to reassure the public that New York’s Great Lakes offshore wind program is moving forward, NYPA is being relatively tight-lipped about its ongoing evaluation process and the need for more time. It remains to be seen whether NYPA is merely wrestling with the five proposals to select one as the winner, or rather whether NYPA’s repeated delay in announcing a winner represents a change in that authority’s commitment level to offshore wind projects given the current political and economic picture. Developers around the Great Lakes are hoping that NYPA will follow through with its GLOW Project.

Todd J. Griset practices energy law with Preti Flaherty Beliveau & Pachios in Maine.  He also writes a blog on offshore wind, renewable energy and policy issues.