UMaine Offshore Wind Program Featured in Nature
Article by Gene Russo, published in Nature, Vol 513 from September 2014.
“The town of Castine, Maine, feels like a place bypassed by time. First settled in the early seventeenth century, its streets are lined with buildings hundreds of years old. Boats bob in its small harbor and a white lighthouse, constructed of rough-hewn stone, stands guard from a high hill.
But just half a kilometer offshore, a harbinger of the future pokes out of the grey mist. A canary-yellow wind turbine rocks in the waves, its thin blades slowly rotating. Installed in June last year, the 20-meter-tall structure is an experimental floating design just one-eighth in scale. It provides a maximum of 20 kilowatts of electricity, barely enough to power half a dozen US homes. But the structure, called VolturnUS, stands out because it is the only offshore wind turbine in US waters.”
Read on, here: http://www.nature.com/news/renewable-energy-wind-power-tests-the-waters-1.15992