PC/WI: 10% of Hudson Bay made into wind farms?

WILDGEESE

Gone Fishin'
As the post says

What if only 10% of the Hudson Bay (total area 1,230,000 sq klms) was turned into offshore wind farms?

Would that produce enough power for the Canadian/US power supply?

Would it be technologically possible building the infrastructure to produce the wind mills?

Regards filers
 
I'm wondering what winter weather extremes there are to contend with? What do you have to over engineer for thats not necessary further south?
 
Wiki says the US used 3,911,000,000,000 kW-hr/year in 2015. Wiki also says you get about 4 mw from each sqk for wind power. 10% of the land area X 4 mw = 492,000 mw or 492,000,000 kw. 8760 hours/year, so 4,309,920,000,000 kW-hrs in a year. Now you need to transport that electricity. You can transport DC around 4,300 miles and AC around 2,300 miles. Vast, vast majority of US uses high voltage AC lines. You would need a crap ton of new transmission lines, transformers, equipment to change to DC and back if you go that route. Now you get into maintenance and the fact that the wind doesn’t blow 24/7. You have to worry about power factor and reactive loads, etc. What would be the life expectancy of each turbine in that environment? Extreme cold and salt water/air leads to maintenance nightmares. Sounds good in theory but there are a bunch of reasons the grid is the way it is.
 

Lusitania

Donor
The cost factor of building them would make the project unfeasible. Plus must land you talking about is permafrost, swamp and just unusable land. How you access them?
 
Only in some TL which starts the GRAND project (damming James Bay to create a freshwater lake to ship water south to the Great Lakes) yet for some reason never completes it and instead uses all the infrastructure for that project to build wind farms instead in the Hudson Bay. And even that's a huge stretch. There's a lot of better places to build wind farms in Canada (or the US if you're wanting power exports).
 
Errr... OTL, Quebec has a massive, massive James Bay Hydro project that ships most of its power south to the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project

If the 10% is the area of the Bay near the existing Hydro projects, much of the infrastructure is already there. Ya, sure, they'd have to build another few high voltage DC power lines, but Hydro Québec is one of the world leaders in that.

Protecting the off shore turbines from moving ice floes, however, would be ... fun, as the whole Bay freezes solid, and when breakup happens the ice pushes back and forth and is really nasty.
 
Canada have plenty of Hydro power to do this. Also windmills should be closer to the consumer than this.
 
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