By Eric Lindeman
In the United Kingdom as in the United States, the Department of Environment and Climate Change’s energy security policy ran into a national security wall at the Ministry of Defense when MoD earlier this year refused to sign off on plans for 924 wind turbines in five offshore wind farms–Sheringham Shoal, Race Bank, Dudgeon, Triton Knoll and Docking Shoal.
Those turbines are expected to generate more than 5,500 megawatts of clean, renewable energy, but they are located in the Greater Wash Strategic Area to the east in waters controlled by the Crown Estate, which owns the seabed out to 12 nautical miles from the U.K. coastline.
At bottom, the problem in both countries is that the radar facilities were there before the wind farms. The U.K. radar systems covering the Greater Wash Strategic Area are not “outdated,” per se, but they were not designed to see through or around the interference, or “clutter,” that the large offshore turbines would cause, creating blind spots in air defenses and, therefore, a security threat.
As the number of wind farms has proliferated worldwide, particularly offshore in the United Kingdom, the number of radar blackout zones has also risen. The larger offshore turbines–typically about 5 MW, although one company is now building a 7.5-MW prototype–are even more of a problem. Aircraft passing near large wind energy facilities can disappear in the blackout, and air traffic controllers can lose the planes’ positions.
MoD refused to approve the massive project until a tested solution to the radar clutter problem was in hand. And the ministry concluded that, as the saying goes, “the ball was not in its court.” MoD essentially told the developers–Scira Offshore Energy, Centrica, Warwick Energy and RWE npower renewables–it didn’t have to approve or disapprove the project and that it was up to the developers to come up with a solution to the radar clutter problem.
The answer, it turned out, was a TPS-77 radar system developed and produced by U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin [LMT]. The system, with advanced electronics, can mitigate clutter that obscures radar targets in and around wind farms.
Lockheed Martin has had two air defense radars in the United Kingdom for 15 to 20 years, and when the company discovered that MoD was holding up the offshore wind project until there was a tested solution, it invited U.K. defense officials to the Fenner wind farm about 20 miles east of Syracuse, N.Y., to witness demonstration tests.
That was followed by trials at the Horns Rev offshore wind farm in the North Sea, which were conducted independently and declared a success by MoD. The tests showed that the TPS-77 system can filter the movement of offshore turbines with other air and seaborne activity.
Serco, the international defense services company that serves as Lockheed Martin’s in-country Contractor Logistic Support partner for MoD radar surveillence systems, was then able to negotiate a deal among the Crown Estate, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and the four developers under which a TPS-77 system will be installed at Remote Radar Head (RRH) Trimingham by November 2011.
The installation will coincide with the start up of 88 turbines at Sheringham Shoal, providing clear air defense surveillance capabilities for MoD and permitting the United Kingdom to move forward with more than $10 billion of investment in offshore wind energy along its east coast.
In the end, the developers will pay for the majority of the $29 million cost of the new installation, although DECC will also pay a comparatively small portion–$5.8 million.
Meanwhile, a spokesman said, based on Lockheed Martin’s success in the United Kingdom, “We have been approached about the testing we have done.” The TPS-77 radar was designed and tested to work with the type of clutter produced by wind farms, he added. The system has been in operation for 20 years and installed in 33 countries, “but the way we build them,” he explained, “we can update all the electronics on them” as enhancements are developed or specific applications warrant.
“We’ve installed this in the jungles of the Amazon, the Arctic–all over the world,” the Lockheed Martin official said. “We’ve become professionals at mitigating clutter. And when the wind farm issue was brought to us, we knew how to clear out the clutter.”
In a May 13 announcement of the U.K. deal, Lockheed Martin also stressed that the new TPS-77 radar system supports the goals of DECC to reduce fuel consumption. The radar itself, the company claims, is highly energy-efficient, using half the power of comparable S-band radars.
Last year, the United Kingdom put in place a “Low Carbon Transition Plan” aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions 34 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. More than 200 wind farms are now operating in the United Kingdom offshore, and it passed Denmark in 2008 as the largest offshore wind generator in the world.
While early April discussions and negotiations among U.K. govenment agencies, including the Crown Estate, MoD and the offshore project developers were focused on how to put the “tested solution” in place, back in the United States, the Oregon Congressional delegation was haggling with the Department of Defense and other Obama administration national security officials.
DoD and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which conducts air security evaluations for the department, had blocked the the Shepherds Flat wind farm in Oregon, which at a planned 338 turbines and 845 megawatts, would be the world’s largest land-based wind energy project. At the beginning of March, only days before construction was set to begin, DoD intervened, forcing Caithness Energy, the privately held independent power producer that is developing the $2 billion Shepherds Flat project, to halt everything.
At the 11th hour, DoD had determined that the land-based wind turbines would interfere with the aging Air Force radar system in nearby Fossil, Ore., and that would be a security threat.
Lockheed Martin officials said the company did make presentations on TPS-77 radar system capabilities in Oregon, although they declined to say whether they had met with the Shephards Flat project developer, DoD, FAA or other government officials. It turned out to be moot. DoD succumbed to congressional and, presumably, internal administration pressure and withdrew its oblections, allowing the project to move ahead.
In the end, DoD agreed to pay for replacing the 50-year-old radar system at the Fossil, Ore., installation.
Not so for Cape Wind off the coast of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod–the 468-MW wind farm approved by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar April 28 after nine years of proceedings. There the developer was granted approval by DoD and FAA on the condition it set aside $15 million to cover radar upgrades and, if necessary, complete replacement.
At Cape Wind, FAA is recommending a Sensis Corp. TDX-2000 digital upgrade to the Raytheon [RTN] ASR-9 at Nantucket and ASR-8 at Falmouth. If the fix doesn’t work at Falmouth, the older of the installations, then FAA wants to replace it with an ASR-11.
Although Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers said FAA is “pretty confident” that the digital fix will work, even the complete replacement with an ASR-11 system is untested in actual field operations around wind farms. As a result, the proposed solutions and their ultimate costs are uncertain.
U.K. government officials confirmed that millions of dollars were spent unsuccessfully trying to resolve the MoD radar issues for the east coast offshore wind project.
“What happens at Cape Wind if they exhaust the $15 million and don’t have a solution?” asked one U.S. wind industry official, observing that in the United Kingdom, MoD wasn’t going to approve the project without a proven answer.
The path to resloving the energy security-national security face off has been frustratingly unclear, warned Oregon Sen Ron Wyden (D). Right now, everything is done on a case- by-case basis, on the technological side and on the question of who pays for whatever is ultimately done.
Wyden used a May 20 Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on a bill to establish a California Desert Conservation Area–federal lands that would be withheld from development of renewable energy projects and transmission lines–to grill Dorothy Robyn, deputy undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment.
After rehashing the fiasco surrounding approval of Shephards Flat, Wyden said, “My concern is that yesterday, I learned we have the same problem at another project close by [Iberdrola Renewable‘s planned 400-MW Montague wind project]. It’s exactly the same situation. DoD is doing exactly what it did on Shephards Flat. We can’t go on like this…the developers, the contractors are going to walk.”
He demanded an explanation of DoD’s process for evaluating whether wind projects near defense radar installations pose a security threat and the process for deciding whether they should be approved or disapproved. “I need specifics, an outline of your strategy,” he told Robyn, asking for answers within 30 days.
On the defensive, Robyn conceded that “the process is broken” and said the most obvious fix to the problem is to have developers submit their plans to FAA early in the process, instead of last thing, as is currently the practice.
But she also stressed that new technology will be even more important than a new approval process, adding that she is hopeful MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a chartered DoD research and development center for applying advanced technologies to problems related to national security, will come up with a solution at Montague that can be used in many if not all situations where wind energy and radar coexist.
“Fixing the process is step one,” Robyn maintained, “but step two is increasing the level of R&D–better modeling tools to estimate the impact of wind farms and solar towers–that’s the low hanging fruit. The higher is mitigation technology–digital signal processing, stealth blades and a variety of things…We don’t have a silver bullet.”
The dialogue with Wyden ended with Robyn’s prediction: “Technology will solve this problem at the end of the day.”
This is the second story of a two-part series. The first story appeared in the May 28 edition of Defense Daily.