Electricity Grid News

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has set out plans to invest $4.75 million to establish a new national center of excellence to accelerate offshore wind deployment across the United States.The Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind (ARROW), led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst with approximately 40 partners, will focus on workforce development, targeted research, and partnerships and strategies to advance offshore wind development.As offshore…

Belgium-based offshore installation contractor Jan De Nul has signed the export cable contract with Ørsted for its 2.9 GW Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm in the U.K.Jan De Nul will be responsible for the seabed preparation, transport, installation and protection of 350 km of DC export cables connecting the wind farm to the U.K. electricity grid.For the installation and protection of the DC export cables, the company is going to deploy several vessels.Cable-laying vessels Isaac Newton and Connector will transport and install the cables…

Avangrid, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Spanish renewable energy giant Iberdrola, on Monday shared a photo of the completed Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind substation.This is the first offshore wind substation installed in the U.S. and will serve the country's first large-scale offshore wind farm - Vineyard Wind.DEME Offshore used its flagship vessel, Orion, to install the 3,000-ton Vineyard Wind 1 substation.The offshore substation serves to collect the generated electricity from 62 wind turbines and sends the power through an export cable and into the regional electricity grid.Once completed…

Offshore installation firm DEME Offshore said Tuesday it had installed the approximately 3,000 ton offshore substation for the Vineyard Wind 1 project - the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the United States."The installation of the offshore substation, a first in the US, took place after months of preparation with collaboration and dedication of all partners involved in the construction of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, including skilled union labor from the Massachusetts Building Trades…

South Africa has granted Turkey's Karpowership access to the three ports of Ngqura, Durban and Saldanha Bay for a period of 20 years, the transport ministry said on Thursday, as it tries to find solutions to the country's power crisis.Karpowership aims to generate power on its floating gas ships and distribute it through South Africa's electricity grid. The plan received a boost from President Cyril Ramaphosa last week after he told lawmakers the ships would help ease the prolonged…

“Over the next ten years, from 2023 to 2032, more than 15,000 ships with deadweight capacity of more than 600 million tonnes are expected to be recycled, more than twice the amount recycled in the previous ten years,” says Niels Rasmussen, Chief Shipping Analyst at BIMCO.As recycling volumes increase, it is increasingly important that the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships is ratified and implemented. The Convention was adopted in 2009 with the aim of reducing risks to human health…

Interferry CEO Mike Corrigan explains the driving forces behind the global trade association’s imperative to keep its foot on the gas.Interferry and its members scaled some demanding peaks in 2022 but, to state the obvious, our work is never done. Facing an equally busy schedule of challenges and opportunities in the year ahead, we need to keep climbing – a truism that has been memorably expressed as ‘the top of one mountain is always the bottom of another’.Our 46th annual conference in Seattle last October was definitely one of the peaks…

Corvus Energy on Thursday announced it will supply shoreside battery energy storage systems (ESS) for Crowley's eWolf, the first zero-emission, all-electric tugboat being built for operations in the U.S.The system will consist of two Corvus Orca BOBs—the containerized version of the Corvus Orca ESS—used for charging the vessel shoreside from when it enters service in San Diego’s harbor in 2023.Corvus Energy is also supplying the 6.2 MWh Corvus Orca ESS on board eWolf, which is currently under construction at Master Boat Builders…

Belgium's transmission operator, Elia, has presented its draft plans for what is expected to be the world’s first artificial energy island. The energy island, called the Princess Elisabeth Island, will be located almost 45 km off the Belgian coast and will serve as the link between the offshore wind farms in the second offshore wind zone (which will have a maximum capacity of 3.5 GW) and its onshore high-voltage grid. Elia, which presented the plans in the presence of federal ministers Tinne Van der Straeten (Energy) and Vincent Van Quickenborne (North Sea)…

Cutting-edge solutions to an unprecedented increase in human and technological challenges will be unveiled when global trade association Interferry stages its 46th annual conference in Seattle this October on the theme of ‘Power and People’.As Interferry CEO Mike Corrigan explains, "In a fast-changing operational and environmental climate, the ferry industry’s long-term success depends more than ever on two main factors. We need to attract dedicated people who are interested in pursuing a rewarding maritime career and help them achieve the qualifications required by our industry.

Cuba, mired in an energy crisis that has brought frequent blackouts, is negotiating with a Turkish company to have it double the megawatts it currently produces for the country from shipboard generators just offshore, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.Cuban officials are in talks with Karpowership, one of the world’s largest operators of floating power plants and part of the Turkey-based Karadeniz Holding, the sources said. The company already has five…

A meeting between the European Sea Ports Organization (ESPO) and global trade association Interferry has agreed a common work programme to promote an environmentally sustainable future for the European ferry business through the provision and use of onshore power supply (OPS).Underlining the shared challenges and priorities of their Europe-wide memberships, ESPO and Interferry confirmed the following joint approach:1.Ferries must be recognized as a sustainable passenger transport mode that link Europe’s cities and regions, as well as providing a green mode of urban transport.

Sustainable Marine said it has successfully harnessed the tidal currents in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, delivering the first floating in-stream tidal power to Nova Scotia’s grid.Nova Scotia has allocated circa 30MW of capacity via demonstration permits and berths at FORCE (Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy) for developers to demonstrate their energy generation prowess. “Achieving ‘first power’ to the grid from our new platform in Grand Passage signals a real inflection point for our business,” said Jason Hayman, CEO, Sustainable Marine.

Ukraine's national postal service Ukrposhta said it had been hit by a cyberattack on Friday after sales of a postage stamp depicting a Ukrainian soldier making a crude gesture to a Russian warship went online.Queues formed to buy the stamp when it went on sale at the postal headquarters in Kyiv last week following the sinking of the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet. Kyiv said it had hit the cruiser Moskva with missiles. Russia said the ship sank while being towed in stormy seas after a fire caused by an explosion of ammunition.Ihor Smilianskyi…

Interferry has launched a call for papers addressing the ‘Power and People’ themes of its 46th annual conference taking place in Seattle, Washington, in October 2022.Under the Power theme, presentations are invited on any sustainable, future-proof vessel powering options and the related challenges – notably the regulatory targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions of some 50% by 2030 and a ‘net zero’ scenario by 2050. With electrification emerging as the ferry industry’s key driver towards these goals…

The largest-ever U.S. sale of offshore wind development rights - for areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey - attracted a record $1.5 billion in bids on Wednesday, supporting President Joe Biden's plan to create a new domestic industry.The auction, which will continue on Thursday, is the first offshore wind lease sale under Biden, who has made expansion of offshore wind a cornerstone of his plans to tackle global warming and decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035…

The United States will hold its biggest ever sale of offshore wind development rights on Wednesday, in an area covering nearly half a million acres off the coasts of New York and New Jersey.It will be the first offshore wind lease sale under the administration of President Joe Biden, who has made the expansion of offshore wind a cornerstone of his strategy to address global warming and decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035.The auction's scale marks a major step forward for offshore wind power in the United States, which has lagged European nations in developing the technology.

The Biden administration on Wednesday outlined a range of measures to speed the growth of clean energy on the U.S. power grid, including the government's largest-ever sale of offshore wind leases in waters off the coast of New York and New Jersey.The announcement, which seeks to advance President Joe Biden's ambitious climate change agenda, comes as sweeping legislation to support those goals is stalled in Congress. It is aligned with Biden's pledge to take an "all-of-government" approach to fight global warming and decarbonize the U.S.

JERA, Japan's biggest electricity generator and the world's largest buyer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), is operating gas- power plants at lower rates as it runs down inventories amid rising heating demand as temperatures drop.The company joins other Japanese power generators reducing run rates on their gas plants as they compete with LNG buyers across northern Asia scrambling to secure supplies, sending prices higher.Tight fuel supplies are also highlighting vulnerabilities in Japan's electricity grid that make it harder to swap power supplies between areas a decade after the Fukushima nucle

Italian subsea power cable maker Prysmian said Friday it had secured contracts worth $900 million in the U.S. offshore wind market.Both projects have been awarded by Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP)-Worth around $300 million, the first cabling project will connect the 804 MW Park City offshore wind farm to the electricity grid in the state of Connecticut. Prysmian will deploy HVAC 275 kV three-core cables with XLPE insulation and single wire armoring. Cables will be produced in  Arco Felice, Italy, and Pikkala, Finland, and will be installed by the Leonardo da Vinci and Ulisse vessels.

Marine shipping drives 90% of global trade, moving over 11 billion tonnes of containers, solid and liquid bulk cargo across the world’s seas annually. Almost all consumer products we buy — or the raw materials required to make them — arrive at Canadian ports via ship.Each year, Canadian port facilities handle about 340 million tonnes of goods, worth about $400 billion. Roughly 25% of Canadian exports and imports, by value, are transported by marine shipping.Despite their economic importance…

South Africa's government has selected eight preferred bidders, including Turkey's Karpowership, to provide emergency electricity and help prop up the country's ailing power supply, Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said on Thursday.The tender for 2,000 megawatts (MW), launched two years ago when South Africa suffered some of the worst power cuts in a decade, aimed to find the cheapest and quickest options to ease a shortage that has cost the continent's most industrialized economy billions of dollars."The evaluation process has resulted in the selection of eight preferred bids totaling 1…

Greece has linked the island of Crete to the power grid of the Peloponnese peninsula via an undersea cable, a major step in the country's drive to cut its reliance on imported fossil fuel and boost renewables, the country's power grid operator IPTO said.The southern island of Crete, a popular summer holiday destination for foreigners, has relied on polluting oil-fired power plants that will need to cut production or shut down in the coming years, in line with EU climate-change…