Economic of Floating Wind Energy

At Quest Floating Wind Energy, www.QuestFWE.com, we have created, not only the most detailed database on Floating Wind Projects, but also the Economic model which can be used to drive this new industry forward. Below, is an analogy on this dynamic market

I was visiting the Duke Energy website. Very interesting. I would say they are a fairly typical electricity producer/provider.

They have a generating capacity of 49.5 GW. They have 7.6 million customers

So, that means that for each million customers they have 6.5 GW of capacity

So, that means that 1 GW of capacity covers 150,000 customers

The USA has “about” 150,000,000 electric customers. So, that should equate to the USA needing about 1,000 GW of generating capacity.

We had originally figured that it would take 10,000 x10 MW FTUs if the USA were to power 10% of the base. This shows to be pretty much inline with the extrapolation from Duke Energy’s numbers.

This would require an investment of approximately $250 Billion, assuming $25,000,000 per FTU. (Floating Turbine Unit)

We can obviously use our website’s Project Economic calculators to determine the return. I have included a snapshot from the calculator showing that at 50% efficiency, a wholesale price of $0.08 and assuming a 12% annual return, on a 20 year lifespan of the FTU, would mean a CAPEX of approximately $25,000,000 per FTU