The Japanese Plan Offshore Wind Farm

September 16th, 2011 by Nicholas Brown

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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