Former state Energy Administrator Ted Peck has teamed up with a year-old, Oregon-based renewable energy developer on a plan to bring a 400-megawatt floating wind farm to a site 15 miles off Oahu’s South Shore.
Peck’s energy development company, Holu Energy LLC, is working with Portland, Ore.-based Progression Energy LLC to generate public support in Hawaii for the project, Peck said.
“The reality is, for us to achieve 100 percent renewable, a project like ours will need to be seriously considered,” he said Monday. “While the ocean is a very precious resource, we simply don’t have enough land.”
This is the second ocean-based wind farm proposal for Oahu.
AW Hawaii Wind LLC, a subsidiary of Danish company Alpha Wind Energy, submitted lease requests to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in January for two offshore facilities. The Oahu South project, consisting of 51 wind turbines, is proposed to be located 17 miles south of Diamond Head. The 51 wind turbines of the Oahu Northwest project are proposed to be located 12 miles northwest of Kaena Point. The total capacity for the two projects would be 816 megawatts, enough to provide about 30 percent of Oahu’s electric power needs.
Progression Energy’s project is roughly the same size as Alpha Wind’s South Shore project with 40 to 50 turbines.
“We’re happy to compete” with Alpha Wind, Peck said.
Progression Energy was founded in 2014, has fewer than 10 employees and is privately held, according to its LinkedIn page. Its website, progression-energy.com, offers no additional information on the company beyond a two-sentence description of its business and a photo of three wind turbines.
Peck said Progression Energy is filing a lease application with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is one of the first steps in setting up an offshore wind farm. Construction is planned to begin in 2020.
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management spokesman John Romero said Monday that Progression Energy had not filed a lease request yet.
Peck said the plan for Oahu is to build turbines about 15 miles offshore, which should make them virtually invisible from the land.
“It is about the same distance as the Waianae Mountain Range from Waikiki, and the Waianae Mountain Range is 10 times the height,” Peck said.
The hub of the turbine is about 400 feet high, and the tip of the blade makes the structure 600 hundred feet tall.
Peck didn’t say how much the project would cost, but said it would be very competitive with other wind farms.
Alpha Wind Energy’s proposal said its two wind projects would cost $1.6 billion.
Progression Energy has met with a number of environmental groups, the state, and state regulators and federal agencies, Peck said.
“We’ve been meeting with key stakeholders, people who are engaged and thoughtful,” he said.
Hawaiian Electric Co. said the utility is aware of Progression Energy’s wind farm but hasn’t entered formal discussions with the company.
“As a former public servant, I am very comfortable putting my name behind this,” Peck said.
Peck was the state’s energy administrator from December 2007 through January 2011. Peck quit his state job to become president of Kuokoa, a startup company that had proposed to acquire HEI Industries Inc., the parent of HECO. Kuokoa dropped its bid to take over HEI in early 2013.
Peck left Kuokoa in December 2012 to become general manager of the South Pacific region for Johnson Controls. In 2014, ZBB Energy Corp. announced Peck would be in charge of market analysis, sales leadership and partner relationship management for the publicly traded company, based in Milwaukee.
