The facility is slated to come online in fiscal 2024. Forty to 50 wind turbines, each with double the capacity of standard models, will be erected across a 2,700-hectare area. The farm will have an output capacity of over 200,000kW, or enough to power as many as 170,000 households.
The total cost of the project is estimated to be more than 841 million. The companies will begin a feasibility study in fiscal 2015, and plan to start construction in fiscal 2020.
Offshore wind farms have limited impact on the environment, and are more efficient than solar plants. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is encouraging companies to enter the market, and has set the price for purchasing power generated at offshore facilities at 0.31 a kilowatt since April - about 60% higher than the price for wind farms on land.
Of late, there has been a lot of research and development going on in the field of offshore wind energy. In September last year, a technology was developed that makes laying foundations of turbines in deeper waters easier and cheaper.
The innovative new foundation consists of three legs welded together in a jacket structure, standing on three giant suction buckets that anchor the foundation to the seabed. The "suction bucket jacket" technology, derived from the oil and gas industry, uses pressurized chambers to drive the foundation 7m into the seabed and hold it in place, rather than hammering the pile to depths of up to 40m into the soil.
Moreover, the lightweight structure can be installed offshore in a single operation, reducing the time of the installation.
In December last year, researchers from University of Wollongong (UOW) revealed that they are developing technologies for next generation offshore wind turbines that are one-third the price and 1,000 times more efficient than conventional turbines.
Dr Shahriar Hossain from UOW's Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials is developing a magnesium diboride superconducting coil, made from magnesium and boron, which is very cheap and easy to manufacture. Up to 200 km of coil is needed to generate electricity in wind turbines and with current technologies, that coil would cost between 3-5 million to manufacture. The same length of magnesium diboride superconducting coil costs 180,000 and that figure could reduce dramatically as magnesium diboride becomes less and less expensive.
"Originally published by Nikkei Asian Review. Image credits: Alan O Neill/Charles Hodge Photograph/Statoil ASA"
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