LIPA, ConEd Look to Wind

The Long Island Power Authority and Consolidated Edison Inc. will form a working group to study the potential to build a wind farm on platforms at least 10 miles off New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula, New York Gov. David Paterson announced last week.

The group will likely meet next month and release a report in the first quarter of 2009, said LIPA spokesman Ed Dumas. The project originated from the governor’s Renewable Energy Task Force.

If the working group is able to find a suitable location with the appropriate wind velocity that doesn’t interfere with shipping lanes, fishing, or birds, it could then issue a request for proposals for the project, Dumas said. The size of the proposed wind farm has yet to be determined.

“Given the costs associated with projects of this ilk they’d have to be fairly large to be economically viable, at least double the size of the FPL project that was proposed off the Jones Beach shore,” Dumas said, referring to a proposed wind farm that was killed last year after cost estimates rose.

Under that proposal, FPL Energy LLC was to build 40 turbines off Jones Beach on Long Island. An independent study released by LIPA put the cost of the project, which would have generated 140 megawatts of electricity, at $811 million. There was local opposition to that wind farm over its impact on the view, noise, and other concerns.

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