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Besides how it would look visually which for some people was big issue, another large problem was the fact that maintenance would have been very costly and difficult, and the cost of energy even though cheaper to produce was announced that everyone would be charged more for energy than what they currently are. These are the key reasons why so many in the area have been against this project.

These were going to be at least 5 miles away from any beach vantage point. They would be very tiny to the naked eye.
https://www.capewind.org/where...

Its now a race to see who can get the first turbine up and spinning before anyone can claim to be first.

After years of opposition by Ted Kennedy, the Cape Cod wind farm was granted approval and all the law suits have pretty much played out.
The Cape Wind Farm gained final construction approval about this time last year (April 2011). Held up by yet another appeal due VFR (small plane) flights flying below regulation minimum altitude, it is expected to pass this hurdle as well, just like every other wind farm has. The opposition group has recently been fined for election violations.

But Approval does not mean construction has started, and both of these projects seem to be at the same point in their development.

You'll need a lot more areas if you're going to replace something as concentrated as nuclear power with solutions as diffuse as the ones you suggest.

Example: Try campaigning to get the Kennedys to put up offshore wind power as a lasting legacy to Ted. Far enough out in the Atlantic to be barely visible on the horizon on a clear day - and the wind conditions there are quite good. Engineering, renewable power, liberals, topicality - everything is poised to make this the time to proceed with such a worthy project, yes?. Oh wait..

Or, just run the numbers. Kwh/mi^2 for wind, solar, tidal show that if we carpeted the country with these, using *every* available space, we could gin up a big 15% of our energy budget, max. Wanna commute to work using those numbers? Get out your rickshaw ...

What about a company like Norway, who is literally wealthy from their oil production, yet requires their offshore drilling platforms to install sonar activated blowout valves to stop exactly this type of leak? Why can't we do something like that?

There was a blowout valve on the well. It failed. The reason why it failed has yet to be determined.

No, this is America, we wouldn't want to mess with the "free market."

What free market? You make it sound like corporations are running wild. Did you see the news stories about the Cape Wind project? It took nine years of reviews by dozens of different local/state/federal agencies and at least three different lawsuits before the project was approved. There may well be more lawsuits before ground is actually broken on the project.

How the hell are we supposed to compete with China when we adopt this BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) mentality? How the hell are investors supposed to put their money on the line when it takes almost a decade to get approval just to break ground on new energy development? How do we move off fossil fuels when we subject their replacements to seemingly infinite layers of red tape?

OTOH on environmental issues Nixon was downright liberal compared to today's Republicans.

Nixon was starting off with a society that condoned companies disposing of hazardous chemicals by dumping them in the river. Modern GOP'ers are starting off with a society that requires nine years, several lawsuits and 200 different state and federal governmental agencies to approve a wind farm project....

I think the first photo illustrates a design flaw in many offshore wind farms: the wind turbines are arranged on a grid pattern. This means you can see alignments such as the three on the right of the photo. I find these more noticeable that the vague fuzziness on the left part of that photo.

So wind turbines should be placed so they don't form alignments when seen from the shore. For instance one could place them according to a semi-random pattern (imagine a forest). But maybe simply building the grid out of arcs instead of straight lines would be sufficient.

I know people in the area. They told me the biggest objections came from people living in NYC and Conn. who had summer and weekend homes in the area. The thing is some 15 miles off of the coast. The people most bothered will be on their yachts miles out to sea.

Can you really blame them? Take a look at the estimated visual impact of the wind farm:
http://www.capewind.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=9&page=1

I don't know about you but I'd obviously rather stab my eyes out and burn down my vacation home than see those ugly filthy things on the horizon. /sarcasm

Geothermal can be that baseload.

nuclear waste is a problem for later, and will be solved by breeders, which reduce dramatically the volume of waste. It is easy and safe to burrow the final products from these reactors, the only problem being NIMBY

NIMBYs have also stopped wind farms, especially offshore from Maine to Cape Hatteras. For instance before he died Ted Kennedy opposed wind turbines in Cape Cod. Obama may be able to get one built.

As for the "real" price of nuclear, it is a bit like the US medical system, a larger part of the price comes from terrible legislation and political opposition, not from the intrinsic cost.

Ah, how far wrong can a person be? Forget the US, Neither China, France, India, nor Russia has found nuclear power profitable. In those countries politicians not the market says what gets built. Check out the "Forbes" article Hooked on Subsidies reprinted by the Freemarket CATO Institute. Especially notice where is says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

The French government owned company Areva has had large cost overruns building the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant as well as thousands of defects and deficiencies in Finland.

Falcon

Okay, in advocating that there's enough NG to replace coal and nuclear you post a link that says "but LNG will not be a panacea for North American natural gas shortfall" ?

It wasn't meant as a permanent replacement for coal or nuclear, only as a way LNG can be used until there is a better method of generating a baseload of energy.

Second link - aren't we trying to gain energy independence from the middle east?

Both the first link and third list places where LNG come from that are not in the Middle East. The first one lists Trinidad and Tobago which is in the Caribbean. The third lists Barents Sea which is between Greenland and Northern Europe.

Besides - Natural Gas Imported To US For Electricity Generation May Be Environmentally Worse Than Coal.

That's for the link, I didn't see that before. However as you quoted in your post as a baseline capacity it should not matter if LNG plants operate at a low capacity. They are after all only meant to serve for when alternative sources do not provide enough energy.

By the way, that also increases costs for people trying to heat their homes with 97% efficient NG systems.

Properly insulated building reduce if not eliminate the need to heat with LNG. There are other ways to heat as well. Former President Bush used geothermal heating to heat his Crawford, Texas ranch. People in New York City use geothermal heating. People also use solar thermal heating, even in Northern Europe.

We'd need 27 trillion cubic feet per year to replace the coal & nuclear plants.

Only if LNG were to replace coal and nuclear, but not if it is only used as a baseload. That means when alternative energy sources do not provide enough energy. However as I said earlier SciAm has the article "A Solar Grand Plan" that says "solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." For wind power, the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supple electricity to the 48 continuous states. On the East Coast Cape Cod, Cape Hatteras, and points in between the Carolinas and Mass are good places for offshore wind farms. On the West Coast, between British Columbia and southern California there are also good sites for wind, and solar power.

People like you are looking for the next big thing in energy when a bunch of different technologies can be used instead. You're focused on one solution when there are many others.

Falcon

Please, sweet jebus, read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector. Every dollar that goes into this project through taxpayer money is a dollar not spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc.

CapeWind is a private company.

It's a 420MW wind farm being setup off the coast of Nantucket Sound.

Also, check out this page:

http://capewind.whgrp.com/

It's a dynamic page that displays how much power the farm would put out based on the average windspeed for the last hour.

http://www.capewind.org/

You'll note from the project's FAQ that the farm is miles from shore and does not impede on shipping lanes. Also note the power generation (up to 420MW).

The wind turbines will be arrayed in a grid pattern of parallel rows. Within a row, the wind turbines will be .34 nautical miles apart (about 6 football fields), the rows will be .54 nautical miles apart (about 9 football fields).

That's not chump change with regards to ocean acreage usage. But that's the best part. There's lots of ocean out there. And while nuclear energy is a great choice for base load, wind can definitely pick up the slack.

Oh that's true. I forgot about such things as the Cape Cod windfarm. But I thought we were refering to a personal level. You don't need to "float a viable idea" in order to put solar cells on your house or erect a wind generator in the backyard.

[quote]A single coal power plant is a large ugly brick building stuck near a rail yard with a single or short series of tall smokestacks all located on the same campus, not a tens of miles long stretch of hideous moaning machines interrupting your previously uninterrupted property.[/quote]

You've apparently never seen a fossil plant up close. It's not just "a railyard", but a whole coal depot that they have near them. It's like a giant's sandpit; the machinery that moves the coal around looks like little ants. They have to spray it all the time to keep the risk of a fire down.

And that's not the problem.

The problem is the huge plume of pollution that comes off of the plants. Apparently you don't care about your lungs. I care about mine. How pretty do you find hospitals and dead trees?

How come we don't wind turbine farms on the tops of buildings in large cities

Because the building has to be built extra strong for that. You can't just add a turbine on top of a building like that. Extra strength means extra cost. Big cities build their turbines offshore. Like, for example, the London Array.

or in Central Park

Apparently the term "high property values" means nothing to you. How much does an acre in rural New York cost? Now how much does an acre in Manhattan cost? Prices aren't irrelevant. In fact, they're the most relevant issue at hand.

Long Island Sound

There was one. It was going to cost too much compared to how much power it would have provided..

off Martha's Vineyard etc etc

You mean like Cape Wind?

And yes, there are some people like you who've been protesting it. Apparently they'd rather breathe heavy metals from coal burning (like the unopposed Canal Electric plant) than have a barely visible turbine on the distant horizon.

Cape Wind backers enter 'final lap'

"I think this is the final lap," said Barbara Hill, executive director of Clean Power Now, a nonprofit group that supports the project. "We've been in a marathon and this is the final lap."

Hill's comments came after a public hearing at a Newton hotel last night on offshore alternative energy projects.

Oh, and Marblehead is a roughly 3 sq mi town just south of Boston, on a small peninsula into the Atlantic.
Marblehead is just north of Boston. BTW, some towns in MA generate their own power. I'm not sure if Marblehead is one of them. Though you could be thinking of Hull, also an upper-class community that is south of Boston. I'm sure they're really opposed to having a wind..oh..huh. Maybe not.

Try putting something like wind turbines in places where people don't currently have their house. There's a lot of places where you could locate something like this.

Like Nantucket Sound?.

The same is true of just about everyone else. I hear the Federal owns a ridiculous potion of the US; how about we use *that* land?

Because it's set aside for public use (mountains), private use (grazing, mining, forestry), or the wind isn't right.

And that's the problem. These things are big. 400 feet high, the size of a 40 story building. And that's the old 1MW model. The new 3MW units are even bigger, with a 341 foot blade diameter.

But that's only 3MW. These things need to installed in large numbers to generate enough power to drive whole cities. So thousands of these huge towers have to be built. This is happening. And, let's face it, the result looks like an industrial park. We're not talking about those little hippie windmills from the 1970s. This is serious machinery.

Upstate New York people are bitching about this, as mentioned in the original article. The Cape Cod and Nantucket people are furious. The plan there is to build a wind farm six miles offshore, with 130 turbines. This seems huge, but it will only provide about a quarter of Cape Cod's electricity. Residents are upset about how it will "ruin the ocean view". Six miles offshore.

Actually, the Cape Cod site probably should be about 10x bigger. Someday it will be.

These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project has produced much grumbling: "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..." This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.

The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.

Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).

Tidal power seems attractive, but there are only about 20 good sites worldwide.

The Athabasca Oil Sands projects are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.

The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.

Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.

Nothing new here. Try a google for "Offshore Wind Farms."

I was wondering this too, so I googled "cost of off shore wind farm" and came up with Cape Wind. Pretty interesting. Still haven't managed to price it out though. It only mentions that this farm is privately funded... which may just work.

If we've got the likes of (Massachusetts Senator) Ted Kennedy opposing something as benign as offshore wind farms with obvious NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) arguments, how can we expect people to agree to deal with transportation and storage of spent fuel rods which have a half-life in the tens-of-thousands of years?

Why is this marked as troll? This has made the news in both TV and papers recently, about people with enough money to buy off government officials getting offshore wind power turbines denied permission.

CapeWind is one of the local (to me) organizations dedicated to providing actual information about the benefits, rather than the info that the people with more money than sense will give you.

-Jesse

Anyone looking for a recent, comprehensive evaluation of wind power should look at the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Cape Wind project.

There is land that can't be used for housing that can be used for wind energy. You can even locate them in the ocean

I don't have the figures ready to quote, but I heard that a majority of the costs of installing this wind farm have been legal bills. This of course will result in less economic efficiency, further fuelling (excuse the pun) the propaganda of the naysayers that wind is a losing proposition.

We need to have legislative support to block these types of lawsuits before they can harm alternative energy. We need to have a voice to shut down the NIMBY evil groups and shame them.

Actually... the real problem is the political conservatives. Look at the board of Save Our Sound... Doug Yearly: former head of Phelps Dodge Corporation, one of the worst polluting companies and Jack Egan (formerly of EMC) one of W's good buds. It's really very wealthy shoreline property owners who are opposed. The rest is just a smoke screen (or should that be hot air). For more info on the Cape Wind plans see www.capewind.org

The proposed area for the turbines is very shallow...there is almost no boat traffic in the area around the turbines... and if necessary the CG could rescue by an inflatable or other light craft. The CG had no safety objections to the plan. For more info on the Cape Wind plans see www.capewind.org

Or you could put it just off the coastline, like these folks .

ah, i agree with you on energy production but made a politically pragmatic point. your arguments go to what should happen. what i fear *will* happen is a haphazard series of changes designed to be popular rather than comprehensive, and all under the jaundiced eye of industry. actually, that is what *has* been happening for years ever since President Reagan persuaded a receptive public that President Carter was nuts to turn down the thermostat in the white house, perhaps even unamerican.

americans are familiar with cheap energy and relatively minimal government. auto gas in denmark or germany costs what, double? triple? (i pick cars b/c i know at least a little about it.) arguments for behavior-inducing gas taxes, or more efficient cars (e.g., CAFE has been frozen since Reagan), have been shot down even though, yes, they probably would have reaped larger dividends in "externalities." americans angrily notice a 10 cent difference in gas prices (even if adjusted for inflation our gas has gotten cheaper) and not externalities, in fact few will listen to (my) arguments about thinking in inflation-adjusted dollars or counting the price of middle eastern entanglement, and would be quick to complain about the "tin can" cars people favor in countries with expensive gas. The Hummer -- only in america?

i don't mean to knock americans too harshly -- heck, i *am* one -- but to say old ways reinforced by pandering politicians die hard. this is plain old cynical politics, not an intellectual exercise. just because an argument makes perfect sense doesn't mean it will carry the day.

i would urge the public to insist on a comprehensive plan, and to be wary of emotional appeals to do this or that. industry is likely to rig the game if overall performance is not a well-defined quantifiable goal as it is in something like air quality. gee, wouldn't this be a good topic for a candidate for president? this is fight that can be won, but only if we pick it.

btw, i have been watching wind with interest and am especially curious where "cape wind" will come out. again politics are key -- which side will win and why?

I'm an environmentalist also, and I second your critique of these puerile pretenders. I'd add this to your list of alternatives: (11) Living in pre-industrial society.

The organization behind this windmill effort is Cape Wind. Their site includes a map which shows that the proposed windfarm lies at least three miles from any landmass. I can't think of a less obtrusive way to create this much energy. Most people in the world would give a kidney to live in these environs! What a bunch of self-absorbed clueless whiners!

Adversarial nincompoops will surface to decry any large public initiative, no matter how benificial or banal. The important thing is to make sure we don't structure our legislative processes such that a handful of nitwits can derail or impede public works with such immense support. Of course we must alway protect the minority opinion. But we cannot allow yippy little chihauhaus to rule the pack. Not when our future is at stake.

I'm an environmentalist also, and I second your critique of these puerile pretenders. I'd add this to your list of alternatives: (11) Living in pre-industrial society.

The organization behind this windmill effort is Cape Wind. Their site includes a map which shows that the proposed windfarm lies at least three miles from any landmass. I can't think of a less obtrusive way to create this much energy. Most people in the world would give a kidney to live in these environs! What a bunch of self-absorbed clueless whiners!

Adversarial nincompoops will surface to decry any large public initiative, no matter how benificial or banal. The important thing is to make sure we don't structure our legislative processes such that a handful of nitwits can derail or impede public works with such immense support. Of course we must alway protect the minority opinion. But we cannot allow yippy little chihauhaus to rule the pack. Not when our future is at stake.

If anyone read the NYT article and read the caption on the turbines in Kattegatt Strait, Denmark, that's a 10-turbine facility, probably equalling 3-4 square miles (if turbines are placed in 0.5-mile intervals). Cape Wind wants to erect 130 turbines that bow across what approximately appears to be 30-45 square miles of the Nantucket Sound. IMHO, I wouldn't object to implementing a smaller portion of this proposed area to wind power generation, but I think the amount proposed and the amount of area devoted is what I find objectionable. This proposed project fails to indicate other proposed sites, by land or by sea, in addition to the Nantucket Sound, where wind power could be generated in the region. Has Cape Wind studied placing turbines south of Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard, where not so many NIMBY-ites would create uproar? IMHO, dispersing wind generation facilities in small volumes and several small areas is more effective than devoting a large drove of turbines to one large area. I think communities should embrace placing, say, two or six turbines in one town. Who could object to that?

Check out what was implemented in Somerset, Pa., where a small volume of wind turbines (9 MW total) is capable of powering 3400 homes in the immediate area. If you've passed by it on the PA Turnpike (Exit 10), that's what I'm talking about. It's not much an eyesore as, say, hundreds of them; I think it's rather neat.

see: Lights and Windows are the Deadliest Hazards for Birds
The Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP)
BIRD STRIKE
"A study from the Danish Ministry of the Environment says that power lines, including power lines leading to wind farms, are a much greater danger to birds than the wind turbines themselves."

re: point #1 "in a highly-populated area"
huh? they are over FIVE MILES away from the nearest house. How is that "highly populated"?

re: point #3, these are PRIVATE resources. It's not our money, so whether it's a stupid dot com biz, a third summer home, or a wind farm, we have no right to complain about how money is spent. Besides, it will produce more power than not doing anything, and I've not seen any arguments that total energy cost of manufacture exceeds expected lifetime return.

re point #4, their website lists 7 different goverment agencies that have a say on the environmental impact. Just where did you "hear" about the problems?

The turbines will stand 130 meters (426 feet) tall, are to be spread over 65 square kilometers (25 square miles) and supply up to 420 megawatts of power at peak. They'll be just visable from the shore at 8 kilometers (5 miles) distance where they should blur into the sea chop.

Scheduled to begin construction in 2003 and be operationial by 2005 the $600 million project has thus far kept on track and met all impact reviews. It has proven to be particularly economically viable in the ecologically sensitive but rapidly growing Cape Cod area which has unusually high energy rates and a large volume of steady offshore winds.

This isn't as unusual as wave turbines and the like (though it's size is notable) but it is a clever solution to the sound and sight pollution that have been issues with land-based wind farms. While not completely out-of-sight/out-of-mind these will be far enough from folks that they shouldn't be an issue. Furthermore these modern designs have incorporated lessons learned from previous generations and should be wildlife-friendly.