UMaine, MMA set to deploy prototype floating wind turbine in Castine

Jan 31 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Mario Moretto Bangor Daily News, Maine

  

Jan 31 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Mario Moretto Bangor Daily News, Maine

Starting this spring, Castine Harbor will be the temporary home to cutting-edge wind energy technology created here in Maine.

A one-eighth scale prototype of a floating deep-sea wind turbine developed at the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine will be placed in the harbor, just off Dyce Head, sometime in April.

The floating turbine tower has a total height of 57 feet, according to documents from the U.S. Department of Energy. Its floating radius will leave it 500 to 1,000 feet west of Dyce Head, attached to three mooring lines and anchored in 100-foot-deep water.

The windmill will be outfitted with a 20 kilowatt or 27 horsepower turbine, one of professor Habib Dagher's "VolturnUS" turbines. It's a smaller version of the 300-foot-tall floating turbines that will be tested later in the water off Monhegan Island.

Castine Harbor was the only location in the state, Dagher said, where the water and wind conditions were scaled down to offer meaningful testing at a smaller scale.

"We need to match the wave environment to the size of the unit, so it could match the scale of the unit the way the larger ones will in Monhegan," Dagher said Wednesday. "So, basically we shrunk the unit, and so we needed to shrink the waves."

The windmill and floating base are all being built at UMaine by Dagher and engineering students, the professor said. It will be shipped to Cianbro's facility in Brewer where it will be reconstructed in the Penobscot River. From there, a tugboat from Maine Maritime Academy -- one of UMaine's partners in the DeepCwind Consortium -- will tow the device to its moorings in Castine Harbor.