Can't say as I blame the PUC. The offer smells over-priced for guaranteed rate of return to Deepwater investors. It's not clear in the reporting if the rate schedule applies only to the 8-turbine (40WH?) installation or capacity added up to 100 turbines over the 20-year period. If these are the terms for 8-turbines alone, I'd tell Deepwater to go to hell, too.

The crux of the proposed agreement was a sale price of 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly three times the price National Grid pays for energy from fossil-fuel fired power plants and nuclear facilities [improper project comparison]. Over the 20-year contract, the price would have escalated by 3.5 percent annually, so, by the final year, it would have been 48.6 cents per kilowatt hour. Combined with a 2.75-percent markup on clean energy that National Grid was allowed by Rhode Island law, it would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs to the state's 480,000 ratepayers over two decades.

Setting aside NYMBI and EIS window-dressing on 12.9% UE and Carcieri (R) : This 8-turbine "demo" is no simple installation and MOE demo. Look at the JOBS^TM bait: Why buy, when you can build it all for much, much more?

Deepwater Wind has pledged a significant private investment in Rhode Island of approximately $1.5 billion with the construction of a regional manufacturing facility in Quonset, and creating up to 800 direct jobs, with annual wages of $60 million. The Quonset facility will manufacture support structures upon which the turbine and its tower are based and will serve the entire northeast...

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When the hearings opened on Tuesday, the director of the Energy Council of Rhode Island, a nonprofit organization that represents 35 of the state's leading manufacturers, universities and hospitals, vehemently argued against Deepwater's proposed price. John Farley told the commission that the high price would harm large businesses in Rhode Island that use a lot of electricity.

Moore began the session on Wednesday by responding to Farley's statements, which were made as part of the public comment period and not submitted as formal testimony that could have been reviewed by the commission and other parties beforehand.

He said Farley failed to consider that power from the wind farm could actually lead to some cost savings by displacing the most expensive types of oil-generated electricity sold on the energy spot market. A study commissioned by Deepwater and issued Tuesday found that 40 percent of the additional costs of power from the Block Island project could be offset by what Moore called the price-suppression phenomenon. The Cambridge, Mass.-based Charles River Associates carried out the study and has done a similar analysis for Cape Wind [!], an offshore wind farm proposed in Massachusetts.

Moore was asked several times about Deepwater's projected return on investment for the Block Island wind farm. He said Deepwater estimates a return of between 15 and 18 percent for its investors. He said that range is relatively low considering the high amount of risk [?!] involved in offshore wind farms, which have been built in Europe, but not in the U.S.

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FFS. Elsewhere Deepwater claims being awarded DOE grants. How much of its investment capital derive from RGGI proceeds? How many MW available for export to RGGI or other spot exchanges?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.