To Expand Offshore Power, Japan Builds Floating Windmills

OFF THE COAST OF FUKUSHIMA, Japan — Twelve miles out to sea from the severely damaged and leaking nuclear reactors at Fukushima, a giant floating wind turbine signals the start of Japan's most ambitious bet yet on clean energy.
When this 350-foot-tall windmill is switched on next month, it will generate enough electricity to power 1,700 homes. Unremarkable, perhaps, but consider the goal of this offshore project: to generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity from 140 wind turbines by 2020. That is equivalent to the power generated by a nuclear reactor.
The project's backers say that offshore windmills could be a breakthrough for this energy-poor nation. They would enable Japan to use a resource it possesses in abundance: its coastline, which is longer than that of the United States.
With an exclusive economic zone — an area up to 200 miles from its shores where Japan has first dibs on any resources — that ranks it among the world's top 10 largest maritime countries, Japan has millions of square miles to position windmills.
The project is also a bid to seize the initiative in an industry expected to double over the next five years to a global capacity of 536 gigawatts, according to the industry trade group Global Wind Energy Council. The Japanese have lagged at wind turbine manufacturing, which is dominated by European and Chinese makers.
The project's turbines, and even the substation and electrical transformer equipment, float on giant platforms anchored to the seabed.
The Japanese government is paying the 22 billion yen, or $226 million, cost of building the first three wind turbines off Fukushima, part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's push to make renewable energy a pillar of his economic growth program. After that, a consortium of 11 companies, including Hitachi, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Shimizu and Marubeni, plan to commercialize the project.
The biggest challenge for the Fukushima project comes from local fishermen, who have not been able to fish since the disaster and who fear that the project will take away their fishing grounds. Trawlers, in particular, would no longer be able to operate around the farm. On the other hand, there are hopes that the giant chains that anchor the turbines to the seabed will eventually encourage colonies of fish and seaweed.