The Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) recently invited Expressions of Interest (EoI) for the country's first 1 GW offshore wind project in Gulf of Khambat.

Advantages of offshore wind power over the onshore wind power

• Greater area available for setting up large projects: one of the primary reasons for moving towards off-shore projects is the lack of suitable wind turbine sites on land.
• Higher wind speed: Therefore, the offshore wind power’s electricity generation is higher per amount of capacity installed.
• Consistent wind speed: the effective use of wind turbine generating capacity will be higher at sea than on land.
• Less visual impact: As these sites are located far from land they have less visual impact which helps with public acceptance issues.
• Close to load centres: The offshore wind farms are usually located near to the cities and load centres thus transmission losses are minimised.
• Environmental impact: low global warming potential per unit of electricity generated, comparable to that of onshore wind farms.

Challenges

• Cost: Costs for foundations, installation, electrical connections and operation and maintenance (O&M) are a large share of the total for offshore installations compared to onshore wind farms.
  • Sustained high-speed wind, high humidity and salt water make every aspect of installation and operation much more difficult, time-consuming, more dangerous and far more expensive than sites on land.
  • The offshore wind industry is not yet fully industrialized, so cost of per unit energy is not economical.
• Data: the data required for the calculation of off- shore wind potential and identication of suitable sites is not adequately available. The data can be divided into 2 parts:
  • Wind resource map: consists of the wind speed and wind density at certain levels above the sea.
  • Bathymetric data: gives the information about the sea depth at various positions. At present there is no such data available for the Indian sub-continent.
• Environmental impact: physical presence of offshore wind farms and underwater noise associated with the turbines may alter the behavior of marine mammals, fish, and seabirds with attraction or avoidance.

Way forward

• India has more than 7600 Kilometres of coast and associated Exclusive Economic Zone, hence the prospects of development of offshore wind power are very bright.
• The Wind resorce map and bathymetric map should be prepared along the coast to adequately map the potential of offshore wind power. Research and development should be done to deal with other concerns specially the environmental concerns.
• Government should provide adequate support to realise the potential as per the “National Offshore Wind Energy Policy –2015”.
• The government should take the feed-in-tariff (FiT) route to support off-shore wind power (FiT enables anyone who generates electricity from renewable energy source – be it a home owner, small business or a large electricity utility - to sell it to the grid and receive guaranteed long-term payments at a predetermined rate for energy transferred.)