The July 9, 2009 edition of Wind Energy Update, addresses the capital-intensive costs of offshore wind development and argues for government and private sector collaboration as a solution. In the article, IN-DEPTH: Call for government-industry collaboration, AWS Truewind President and CEO, Bruce Bailey, explains that the barriers to entry and risks for offshore wind are much too high for industry conglomerates to take on by themselves, but with assistance from the government, offshore wind in the United States can be successful.

The energy industry needs to have confidence in offshore wind’s technical approaches and hardware before it can reach commercial scale with sustainability. Therefore government support for R&D is necessary, Bailey said. There need to be targeted incentives for offshore wind, added Bailey.

Advances in technology have made offshore wind power a feasible option with abundant amounts of resource waiting to be harnessed. The potential has only been limited by high entry costs; however, with renewable energy standards being mandated across the United States, governments are taking a more active role in renewable energy. A partnership between the private sector and government could lead to the boom in offshore wind growth the industry has been waiting for.

AWS Truewind has been actively promoting and supporting domestic offshore development for many years. Dr. Bailey is frequently called upon to share his expertise at conferences and workshops throughout the United States and is scheduled to present at the Wind Energy Update Conference: Offshore Wind Energy in Coastal North America and the Great Lakes on October 21, 2009 in Toronto, Canada.

AWS Truewind’s suite of integrated services and innovative product support the full project lifecycle. Specialized services for the offshore environment include resource monitoring campaign design and execution, advanced met-ocean modeling techniques, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to visualize and quantify the nature of flow distortions around offshore monitoring towers. In the spring of this year, AWS Truewind added wind resource maps of the Great Lakes to its web-based wind prospecting and initial resource analysis application windNavigator providing easy access to high-resolution wind data.

To view wind resource maps and purchase data online, explore windNavigator.

To view a full copy of the article, IN-DEPTH: Call for government-industry collaboration please visit Wind Energy Update‘s website.