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A Mighty Wind
DoraLives writes "Fascinating New York Times piece regarding a proposed wind farm for Nantucket Sound. Suddenly, all the environmentally friendly locals are going ballistic over the prospects of seeing an 'industrial energy complex' in their backyard. Walter Cronkite decries it, as do many other local checkbook environmentalists. Greenpeace says 'Jim Gordon (the developer) is the real thing, there aren't many entrepreneurs out there willing to take risks to clean up the environment.' Who's right?"
This is a REALLY old story.
Next?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
It's the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome. Everyone thinks these ideas are great... as long as it's not where they live. If you want the benefits though, someone has to live with the negatives.
Liberals are all for saving nature, stopping business, and building big government. And they're even for alternative, CLEAN energy like this...as long as it's not where they have to look at it.
They're all for women's rights...unless it's Bill Clinton on the prowl.
They're all for freedom of choice as long as it only applies the the choice of abortion, and not school vouchers that might actually SAVE some of the poor urban kids from the continued ghetto.
Do we really care what they have to say about anything? Do we really want'em running the country?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
1. Plant wind
2. Raise wind
3. Harvest wind
4. PROFIT!
Windmills are funky looking, sure. That section along I-10 in California is proof enough of that.
The thing is, they are quiet, clean, and often installed in places that there wouldn't be much other human habitation/recreation anyway. They're not good targets for terrorist attacks, since there's not really much to blow up, and jamming them isn't going to work either.
N.I.M.B.Y. syndrome needs to be reckoned with anyay. And yes, I do live near a power generating station. There is a Natural Gas facility that also does experimental development on the grounds, like solar, less than two miles from where I live. It's in the middle of the city, and not really close to a major industrial section. If you don't want to see it, there are three other cardinal directions to look toward. I'll take the cheap electricity, myself.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is just unbeleivable! Nantucket island is filled with greener than thou environmentalists.
Apparently, windfarms are only acceptable in places where they don't offend the rich and the green. The middle of the dessert or the middle of a farmer's field is ok... but ruining they're prestine ocean view? Unacceptable! That ruins the environment for.... umm.... seabirds... thats it, it kills seabirds.
This is rediculous, those people make me sick.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
...who thinks these windmills look cool? A similar controversy is taking place near where I live (except not in the water), and I don't see the problem. I wouldn't mind having one of these in my yard. Plus I could mount my DirecTV dish on top of it for great reception. :-)
I live in the midwest, where it's really flat and windy pretty much all the time. I bet wind power would really take off here,
If G W. Bush keeps falling off his Segway, we could be talking seriously about this one day
i live on cape cod, and i am sick of the people who are protesting this. the major arguments against it consist basically of the lessening of aesthetic appeal for beach-goers and boaters. it irks me that the same people who realize the necessity of easing the power demand on the canal power plant (a vile, coal burning smoke belcher) are unwilling to take steps to find alternative energy resources. stupid rich tourists, afraid of seeing a few gulls chopped up in windmills on their way to the islands.
Pleasing an environmentalist burocrat is impossible. Just ignore them and they will go away.
--
Thanks for reading at -1.
These Elites exist to tell the rest of us how to live, not to actually follow any sort of conservation or limited consumption themselves.
The banning of DDT, for example, caused thousands of deaths for poor and brown people worldwide due to Malaria.. But Hey! Birds are more important than people!
Why is this a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 30 years??
If you build them on land, they're usually in the way (not just visually, because wind farms are noisy and require a lot of surface terrain), and if you build them on water they need a foundation, and just about every kind of foundation is bad for the environment.
And personally, I like windmills. I mean, I think they look good. The so-called environmentalists resisting the installation of a wind farm anywhere just to preserve the appearance of the landscape are simply full of shit. I say push 'em out the airlock at the earliest opportunity. Of course, first we have to build the space elevator to the airlock, but IMO that should be our primary goal right now anyway...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
....call me crazy, but i'm thinkin those two might be a fuggin gold mine for any 'wind harvesters'....Hot-air balloon industry might like a heads-up on this too...
;-)
NYT Story
The moderators are on crack.
Bush lied about 9/11. Bush lied about WMD. Bush stole an election. Bush lied about California's energy crisis. Cheney got his company a several billion dollar contract in Iraq.
Clinton lied about a blow job.
I once knew a girl from Nantucket...
Oh wait, that's related to another story....
... is to just wait 10-20 years. By then the air will be so brown with the burning coal residue from the the electric plants, nobody will be able to see the windmills anyway.
Or build them now and avoid the impending, unavoidable air pollution problem.
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
I have a friend who is an attorney who had been litigating a case down there. A person bought an empty lot, and one of the neighbors been fighting in court to prevent him from building the house because it interfered with his view of the beach.
If the person was really concerned about the view of the beach, he could have bought the lot.
Fight Spammers!
These rabid environmentalists are totally clueless about the enviro-friendliness of most energy technologies. It's not like someone is wanting to start an offshore oil operation or a huge pollutant producing coal factory. The reality is that the US is outpacing our current energy supplies, and we have to explore alternative methods to increase production. I would hardly consider a wind farm among the most harmful to the environment.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Hypocrisy of this nature is not just emotional.
Somewhere, sometime, highly populated states are going to realize that they are not entitled to simply purchase energy production from other states without suffering the drawbacks of that production.
This is a major public policy and national security issue. There will be much more of this to come.
Regardless of the fact that there may have been energy market manipulation, states like California fail to build a power plant for decades and complain that they have to pay an 'unfair' price. Their populace is not entitled to purchase at cost that which other states take the initiative to produce to fill their own demand, tolerate risk, deal with pollution, and expend capital.
There is no obligation for other states to acquiesce to large population states' lack of discipline, foresight, and planning.
Lastly, this type of conflict is a perfect example of why we have a bicameral legislature and the benefits of the elcectoral college system.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
At this rate, 130 or so windmills will supply 2% of the states energy. On the other hand, the 100 or so fission reactors in this country supply 20% of the country's total energy. Multiply that by at least 10 if we were to switch over to fusion, porobably even more than 10X that. That would mean that we would need at max, 50 fusion reactors in this country. With the windmills, we would need 50 farms for just that one state.
Liberals have varying beliefs. We are not united with one belief set the way Rush Limbaugh unites the conservative. However, I can tell you that most liberals I know are not politically correct, and realize that racism can apply to any race, including whites, and sexism can apply to men. As for free speech, the leader of the ACLU, a Holocaust surviver, once argued for the right of the American Nazi party to have a demonstration. Yes, you read that right.
Trouble is, wind farms don't generate much electricity. More efficient omnidirectional prototypes were tested in the 1980's but they were banned because they tended to attract and kill birds. Since the cost of electricity in the USA is rather inexpensive, the only way windmills can compete is if costs are cut in manufacturing. When manufacturing costs are skimped, quality suffers. That is why windmills don't last very long and fall apart easily. The situation is such that when the wind actually picks up and really gets the blades going, a safety mechanism locks the blades.
There's also the liability problem of broken windmill parts falling on cattle (many windmills are on farms and ranches) or even people. The huge monetary settlements further drive up the costs of windmills and force the manufacturers to skimp even more.
I know the above sounds a bit depressing but I hope this encourages some young engineers to come up with some new ideas to bring this industry back to life.
Just put a nuclear power plant there instead. That should make them satisfied.
If it doesn't, say, hey, what's the problem? It isn't blocking your precious view...
The "renewable" energy sources such as Wind, Solar, and Geothermal energy don't have a lot of chance of being particularly useful. However, if they're going to be useful at ALL, people have to recognize that they're only going to be useful in *very specific places*. If "renewable" energy is to go anywhere at all, we need to recognize the places where they can run continuously and effectively, and install them there, *no* exceptions. Installing a bunch of wind farms in Houston isn't going to power anything. Installing a bunch of wind farms in a constant high-wind area like an island like Nantucket Sound could potentially power a decent area larger than Nantucket. If we don't recognize these choice spots for renewable energy and take advantage of *all* of them, and only pick and choose well, where would be convenient for the locals, Wind power is going to continue to be NOTHING more than a gimmick.
-super ugly ultraman
The windmills are to be located in a shoal area. As far as I'm concerned, they are a navigational aid. Just put red lights on them.
Liberals? Hypocritical? Nawww...can't be true.
There's excellent scientific evidence that self-identified "conservatives" are actually merely chronically sleep-deprived psychotics. Chronically sleeping only 6 hours a night (the average for "conservatives") shrinks the fore-brain, the seat of human civility, the ability to initiate new behaviors, and discontinue obsolete behaviors. How much do YOU sleep, Mr. Wheeldweller?
Ok, I consider myself an environmentalist and these people who bitch about wind farms really have no business claiming to be so. Their choices are according to my recent utility supplied info are along with my half-assed pissed-off descriptions:
1) Oil - Polluting
2) Coal - Seriously Polluting
3) Natural Gas - Clean compared to other fossil fuels, but still requires us to fight wars for it.
4) Nuclear - Cart toxic waste across country to bury it in Yucca Mountain. Also, BOOOM!
5) Wind - Unsightly, similar in price to fossil fuels.
6) Solar - Still too expensive in cents/kWh.
7) Biomass - Can't really increase the supply unless you want to start collecting cow farts.
8) Hydro - Most rivers that can generate hydro already are.
9) Imported Power - Mysterious Power!
10) Municipal Trash - Burning stuff is not clean.
Now, of the above choices, what should we focus on until something better becomes available? I think wind is the obvious choice. But no, they are unsightly! OMG! Everything has a negative and wind power's is pretty minor compared to the others. The land that wind power is on can also be used for other purposes such as farming or grazing.
I have a feeling that the people who whine would really like all their power to come from number 9, Imported Power. You know, that magical, free power that some poor schlub in another community has to suffer the environmental consequences for. Now, unless they want to whip out their magic fairy-wand and produce energy out of thin air, they have to use something and they should wake the hell up and realize that wind is a very good choice.
If you are interested in costs, check out the California 1996 Energy Technology Status Report Summary. For a summary, it weighs in at 93 pages. Bleah.
They're going to use public land (term used loosely, as it's actually water covered land) for a private, for-profit organization. Either a government venture (which I'm not that interested in), or a non-profit organization would be better suited for using public land.
The NIMBY factor is obviously huge here. The part of the article that really stated everything right on the nose was on the last page (did you get there? I did)
To them, the national illusion that you can have electricity, clean air, a stable climate and independence from foreign oil without paying a steep price is ludicrous.
Where "them" are the local residents screaming NIMBY!
There's another great example discussing a local oil tanker that leaked oil into the sound. It basically did far more damage than any wind farm could ever do.
Many of the complaints are rediculous.. The oil lubrication oil will leak from the wind mills and pollute the sound. Birds will die. Arguments that just aren't thought through.
Personally, I'm with some other people here that say windmills aren't particularly ugly, and to me it's like coffee or beer. I didn't like the taste of either initially, but once I realized what they did, they became much more pallitable. Even if I don't really like looking at a siteline spattered with windmills, I know that they're creating electricity in an environmentally friendly way.. and that makes them much more acceptable to me.
Huh. The average sleep time for a reader of Slashdot is 4-5 hours a night. What's your point?
The whole reason you earn enough money to live in Nantucket is to live life the way you want.
And when you're that rich, you're subject to "noblesse oblige", which means, you'll help the poor sods to make sure they stay the hell away from your house in Nantucket.
I *get* why they feel that way; if I had their money, I've feel the same way.
Fighting these windmills seems a bit Quixotic to me..
Cliff Notes:
Quixotic
Don Quixote
...thru the years, I have to ask him consider the plight of residents in the country next to me (Bastrop, SW of Austin) who have been fighting Alcoa's latest lignite strip mine for years and have lost. And this at a time when our air is Texas has both acids and mercury and the South Texas Nuclear Power Plant is shutdown with new leaks of primary coolant. I say ring the coasts with wind power! Put them on MY block, please!
law.
This might be old news too, but if you search for this article on news.google.com you'll notice that they have a link to the NY Times site that doesn't require registration. The URL has some extra parameters in it, like partner=GOOGLE.
:)
Maybe Slashdot should become a NY Times partner too.
As opposed to conservative libertarian/republican Dog Eat Dog, survival of the fittest idiots, such as yorself.
,public transportation, public education "The only reason why they want vouchers is to get rid of public education, and make it so that only the rich can have an education"
They're all for the Idea that women should have no rights.
They're all against the environment, give the conservatives what they want, there will be no clean drinking water, no clean air because they will get rid of all laws against polluting.
They're all agains all social services, Financial loans & aid, Minimum Wage, unemployment, worker's comp
They believe that all blacks are "Out of date farm machines" and hate anyone that is not white and is crippled "maybe that's the real reason Daddy Bush puked all over the Prime Minister of Japan, maybe he really hates anyone that is not white"
they're all for the employers being able to do whatever they want to their employees.
They're all for the idea if you're not rich, then you need to live in poverty for the rest of your life with your children and their children and their children's children living in poverty their WHOLE life by the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
"BTW, I am not a liberal, I am a moderate"
I wouldn't give a sh*t if someone built 75000 wind mills in my backyard. Hell I would welcome it. Why do people keep bitching about it? It looks kewl (it moves .. it beats grass or sand!) it prevents annoying pigeons from waking me up in the morning (it'll scare them off) and it gives off POWER.
And don't give me any of that 'it spoils the view'-crap. Or the 'those things are noisy'-scam .. they're not any more noisy than the wonderful highway next to my door!
GO FUCK YOURSELVES.
Sincerely,
The rational libertarian, moderate and liberal people of the United States who want to see clean, cheap energy so as to save our environment and power our lives at the same time
We have the same people living here in SoCal - who don't want to widen freeways - or build rail systems for that matter, and prevent all forms of growth. They would rather increase the pollution by having cars running in their least-efficent mode (stop and go traffic) instead of them zipping around at 60 MPH (when cars are by far the most efficient).
Here in Los Angeles, the number of hybrids are growing exponentially, with next year's hybrid SUVs on the way (Ford Escape Hybrid), Near-Zero Emmission Vehicles (NZEV's) like the Prius, the Insight, and Escape are going to be the rage of Los Angeles. SoCal car dealers cant keep hybrids in stock here!
We are the largest buyers of NZEV's and with increasing numbers of NZEV's, freeways are the cheapest, least-polluting form of transportation. Rail systems cost far more to build, upkeep and power (central power plants). NZEV's lose near zero energy in transportation (unlike electricity), and they do not require polluting central-plants to produce electricity, they simply use the jouels in gasoline extremely efficiently, and easily can be converted to hydrogen thereafter (hydrogen burning ICE + electrcity storage may be cheapest, most effective means of vehicle power instead of fuel cells which are very expensive to make and power)
The same NIMBY's are crushing the addition of an Orange County airport which would take the load off of LAX, which is 60 miles from Orange County - causeing all those people to DRIVE their cars (read: clog the freeways), and increase current poolution and congestion - not to mention watsting about 2 hours every time you want to fly out of SoCal.
I swear, i just want to put you fscking NIBMY's on a boat and sink the ship sometimes. YOU ALL SUCK!
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Suddenly, all the environmentally friendly locals are going ballistic over the prospects of seeing an 'industrial energy complex' in their backyard.
I live in The Netherlands; a nice, flat, windy country in the west of Europe, sometimes wrongfully call Holland (Holland is a part of the Netherlands, sort of like England is a part of the UK).
Anyway, 30 years ago most foreigners thought of 4 things when they heard about NL: tulips, wooden shoes, Rembrand and windmills! (today our excellent pot would also be mentioned). Those old-fashioned windmills are pretty big and bulky, and you can see them from afar.
Funny thing is, when someone wants to build an environmentally friendly windmill for electrical energy, he or she cannot get a permit for that. We even have a special word for it: horizonvervuiling (horizon pollution)
I cannot stop to wonder how our country would have looked like if that word had been invented in the 17th century.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
dammit! I mean it is the RAIN in Texas with the acids and the mercury. Sorry
nt
really, moderators suck today.
Liberals are all for saving nature
Yes.
stopping business
Yes.
and building big government.
Straw man.
And they're even for alternative, CLEAN energy like this...as long as it's not where they have to look at it.
I love the windfarms in my neighborhood (Altamont Pass farm, near San Francisco). They're gorgeous. Wish we had more. We're going to need them.
They're all for women's rights...unless it's Bill Clinton on the prowl.
Bill Clintion is a jerk of the first order. However, that does not mean that he was bad administratively. The Monica affair is a black spot on all our faces. The only blacker spot is the witch-hunt that the Republicans launched trying to play it up as something on the same order as, say, taking your country to war and killing innocent civilians on false pretenses.
They're all for freedom of choice as long as it only applies the the choice of abortion, and not school vouchers that might actually SAVE some of the poor urban kids from the continued ghetto.
Vouchers are deceptive. They leave even fewer resources at the bottom of the barrel for those few kids who -- for whatever reason -- are unable to take advantage of them. Thus, we will fund an additional program (vouchers) while at the same time still having to deal with poor education at the bottom. Wouldn't be a problem, except everyone knows that when that happens (when we are funding vouchers and still trying to save our schools) the conservatives will be the ones filibustering and grandstanding to stop the tax increases or funding distribution necessary to help those at the bottom.
As always.
There's a wind farm at South Point on Hawaii's Big Island.
The look really cool from far away but when you get get close to
them, they're pretty nasty. These are big Mitsubishi units. Granted
these mills have not been maintained as well as they could but they're
rusty and leaking lots of oil all over. Many are not working, with pieces
missing; blades, access panels and such, which looks like they are just
scavenging the broken ones for parts. Politics played a large part in getting
them built but the farm has changed hands and they are dying from neglect.
They do sound very cool when you're under them, a big stereoscopic whirr.
I've always been a bit suspicious of wind power, myself, as I doubt that the environmental impact is really as low as they say.
The main concern is variability of wind conditions. You're not guaranteed the average output from them, (winds to high, they need to be shutdown or be dangerous, winds too low, low output) and this would require one of the following strategies to deal with it:
A: Build so many of them all over the place that it's statistically very unlikely production will fall below demand. This would use a lot of land, and be pretty uneconomical.
B: Endeavor to store the energy. Pretty much the only way to store that much juice is by creating a lake by flooding some valley, using excess energy (when you have any) to pump water into it, and when demand exceeds production, let the water run out and drive turbines.
Personally, I wouldn't describe either of these options as being particularly environmentally sussed solutions.
The programs that you are probably talking about were run by the federal government. They tried building large windmills on the order of 1-2 MW with synchronous generators which is the reason that they had problems. Synchronous generators have been abandoned at this point and people with brains make windmills using induction generators.
The other thing that they do is make smaller windmills and make lots of them. This is why they are called wind farms. The prototypes you refer to were likely meant to be large individual sources. This is another advantage of wind power, it is modular. When a windmill needs maintenance, you can shut it down and only take a few hundred kW off the grid.
Also, if you see my other post in this article, and take the link to the California report you will see that wind costs are comparable to the fossil fuels.
As for liability for broken windmill parts, I have never heard of such a thing. Please point out your source. There is a safety measure for this sort of thing anyway. Windmills have a brake put on them and their blades feathered when the wind is too strong to prevent them from centrifugally ripping themselves apart.
I think at one time people though Power Lines looked cool. They were a novelty when they were new and not a lot of people had seen one. Now they are about the worst of a city's common eyesores. The same thing applies to Wind Turbines. At some point they will be viewed just like power lines. Ugggg-LY!
And these windmills won't in fact make a dent in the big picture. People want the people near Cape Cod to suck it up for the greater good. But this project would not improve the greater good as defined by green house gas production. The article said they would handle 75% of local power needs but that was only 1.8% of New England. And the damaged view would be permanent.
Now if the people of New England really wanted to (as the article says) produce power "without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil" AND in addition do so with an absolute minimum use of land and shoreline, they would build a typical modern Nuke plant in the multi-GW range. That would impact much more than 1.8% of the region's power needs.
The only downside to Nukes is a Chernobyl-like operating mess. But that has proved extremely rare (one such event in the history of Nuclear Power, 50+ years) and probably even less likely by an order of magnitude given the plant designs and operating policies in Europe, Japan, and the US vs. the former Soviet Union. I'd rather live with that risk than the risk presented by thousands of trolling supertankers in the world's oceans.
Say what you want about the French, these folks know Nuclear power. Imagine if the US were 70% emission free power like they are. Electric cars would suddenly make sense, hydrogen economy would make sense... because the ultimate source of the juice was emission free.
d
Who's right?
In this case, none of them are right but there is a high hypocracy quotient.
Some other players in this battle for two faces are Sen.s Edward Kennedy and John F. Kerry. Both bashing any effort to increase US oil production, both wanting to preserve the scenic views of their porperty in Nantucket by opposing wind power there.
In the first place, this wind power business is fine for experimenting at this time, even large scale, but don't fool yourself into thinking it can dent the energy requirements of the US. Same with solar and biomass, it is just so much hot air and BS.
My vote is for wacky schemes like these to be constructed on the property of the politician wishing to impose it on the rest of us. Obviously the Kennedy/Kerry alliance wants the issue for something to complain about. The longer it is delayed the more they can complai
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these fans...
Damn it it makes sense, doesn't it?
Just 2 km outside the harbour of Copenhagen (Denmark) there is a wind farm with 20 very large mills.
Great pics here and info in english here.
You can see the energy production from the mills online!
IÂm an avid sailer and love the mills - great symbol of enviromentalism and the danish heritage as a country dependent on the wind. No complaints from anyone anymore. Most people like the Wind Farm - and much more than the nuclear powerplant on the other side of the sound in Sweden.
Yenz
Yes, there are some plants which are clean. However, you are leaving out the coal extraction process which often rips the tops off of mountains in order to get at the coal. Coal mining is also dangerous and deadly when it isn't ripping the tops off and is instead staying underground.
seem like a great anchoring point for coral to me.
Perhaps a decent way to stop erosion as well.
Not in My Back Yard.
People are too selfish, and they don't really care.
As long as it doesn't affect them, they don't care.
When it starts to bother them, they might consider doing something, but not until.
Exactly! That's why it's so damn frustrating to have the world of politics forcibly coerced onto this assinine 1 dimensional spectrum, with liberalness at one end and conservativism at the other. There are so many different, orthogonal dimensions of political opinion. Most Americans tend to be "conservative" about one thing and "liberal" about another... we end up (largely) having to align ourselves along that axis by primarily whichever aspect we consider the most fundamental. Economics, personal rights, scale of government power, foreign policy, public works, entitlements? It's as much an issue of which of these (or other) axes you consider defines your *overall* political alignment, as it is a question of how you feel on any particular issue.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
Why can't they stop jacking off long enough to know that by allowing these windmills they are doing a GOOD thing...
Fucking politics.
That most /.ers are libertarian?
Okay, okay, I know no-one gets the reference. I'll shut up now.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
putting a mesh around a windmill would cut off the wind...probably reducing electricity production beyond that of the ones in use today.
From what I have read, apparently the problems are birds flying into them and leaking oil. Therefore if they are maintained and the propellers are painted a color so the birds can see them, there is no real problem. Or have I just missed a whole big piece of the puzzle? Well, there's also what to do about the days when there is a low amount of wind and too much. Stronger materials for the really windy days and a storage system for the low-wind days. How about putting those flexable solar panel sheets around the poles, or would that reflect too much light?
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
Comparing 130 windmills with 100 fission reactors is like talking about a cluster of 130 computers with 100 old-style supercomputers.
A single fission reactor creates more disturbance for nature by heat and for your eye by steam than
a number of farms could cause.
And I see no reason, why mankind should pollute earth with more radiactive waste.
Fusion reactors might be a nice technologie to reaserch, so it is ready when it might be useful for interstelar travels. But on earth there are much better ways then creating radioactive waste....
Palm Springs CA has windmills providing most of their electricity. Interstate-10 cuts right down the middle. Driving down the freeway and suddenly you're in the middle of these can be trip.
Austin, TX has a similar program. Excel does it in Colorado, too. If you believe in this stuff, put your money where your mouth is! It's just a few dollars.***
* OTOH, it sucks - they need more capacity, and I think wind is the cheapest new capacity they can build. So why am I subsidizing it? Oh well, if that's what it takes.
** Let's not get into the "dude, your house isn't powered by wind, all the electricity is mixed together" discussion - yes, I know. But if I use 700kWh/month, and I pay to put 700kWh/month of new wind power online, I will happily say that my house is wind powered.
*** Actually when I signed up in Austin, I got a -refund- because that was the summer when power was insanely expensive (thank you Enron!) and the wind generated power turned out to be -cheaper-!
Just wondering, say we put up enough windmills to handle, like, all of our electricity needs...which would probably be a pretty insane amount. At some point, do the wind patterns get changed enough so that the climate is signifigantly warped? Or is it really that close to being a "free lunch" if we can just put up enough of the dang windmills up?
I saw a few of the modern windmills for the first time in Germany recently. I was surprised at how slowly they were rotating, wouldn't have guessed they could be generating useful enough amounts of power at those speeds.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The danger or at least inconvenience to pleasure boaters and commercial fishermen is a big reason the locals say they're against this offshore windmill farm. That makes no sense. It looks to me like there would be plenty of space between the towers for a pretty large yacht or fishing boat to pass through the line of windmills.
:)
Not only that, how hard would it be to provide several wide passages between selected towers for the big-boat people, and mark them with standard channel navigation buoys?
I have trouble understanding how any sailor could be against this project. I mean, if you take a look at my boat, you'll see that it openly and unashamedly uses wind as its primary power source.
But don't worry about me, Nantucket Sound people, I promise not to sully your view with my litle wind-powered boat. It's a lot cheaper to live and sail here in Florida... and we can sail year-round, too.
- Robin
PS - I'd be okay with windmills off the shore in the Gulf of Mexico. They'd be a lot better than the environmentally destructive offshore oil rigs Pres. Bush wants to put here -- but his brother Jeb, FL governor, keeps fighting against, so far successfully, although the oil people keep attacking and handing out the bribes, so sooner or later they'll probably get to do their damage unless we manage get the reflubicans out of office first.
(somewhat redundant with my other post, but)
http://www.austinenergy.com/greenchoice/
I'm not for dubya, and I'm pretty sure he's anti-renewable since that's bad for oil, but I don't know about that evidence. Michael Moore is famously partisan and is known to skew (or outright fabricate) evidence to fit his case/cause, as in his Columbine documentary. Second, Kyoto was simply in(un?)feasible and was overly idealistic - Europe is now admitting it can't meet the deadlines Bush said were impossible, for which they criticized him at the time.
That said, I wouldn't doubt he's on board with H2, simply because it can be generated from oil and coal. This, as opposed to methanol fuel cells, which is more likely to be generated from non-fossil sources. I've wondered for years why they prefer h2 to methanol, since methanol has a bunch of advantages (safety, higher energy density, less complicated and heavy storage equipment. Could be big oil?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Bug me. There have been several such stories in the NE about this lately. The other one I can remember was in upstate New York. Rich people there complained about their views being ruined too. Like other posters, I agree that the developer should acquiesce and give them a coal-burning power plant instead.
It makes me think that perhaps the wind-farm developers are going about it all wrong. They should first say they're going to put a nuke power plant in Nantucket, and let the residents get good and riled up about that. Let their faces go beet-red with fury, let them picket the site, and give them tons of air time on the local news channels. Then you throw your hands up in the air and say, "OK, OK, I give up! I'll only build a wind farm! Boy, you environmentalists sure make it hard for honest entrepreneurs to do business..." The locals will say, OK, that's more like it. They'll think they've won, and you get to build your wind farm.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Of course it's cool to see them when driving/walking by, to listen to the noise they make - but imagine having to live close to one of them.
Wind also tends to be unreliable and changing. Would you agree to only use electricity if the wind blew between 3 and 5 Beaufort only ?
Finally - anybody needing to fight wars to grab enough energy for domestic use seems to use way too much of it...
Ideological liberals and conservatives are not opposites at all, they are meerly mirror images of the same thing. The far right and the far left are equally fascist, equally dangerous. It's very frustrating when they are the only ones who really get themselves heard when I'm sure (at least I hope), most people are far more rational.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
REPP has a paper on how wind the top five or so wind farfarm projects have affected housing and property values. See the report in PDF here:n d_online_final.pdf They refer to "view shed" as a way of indicating how far around the area the wind generaters are visible. Very interesting look at wind energy.
http://www.repp.org/articles/static/1/binaries/wi
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
This sounds like Europe (specifically Germany, France, and Belgium), where the green parties speant years trying to build up reliance on "clean" nuclear energy and now have shifted to trying to get RID of nuclear reactors, for safety reasons (everyone ignores, of course, the practical impossibility of a meltdown with today's tech). On another note, I find windfarms quite stunning to look at, and would gladly have one put in my backyard...
My hometown is in the northwest of Germany (Emsland) and about half an hour drive from NL. The landscape is very similar to the Netherlands and therefore quite attratctive for windfarms.
About 15 years ago when the first windmills were being built nobody objected them and it was no problem to get a permit. So many farmers sold a bit of their land to some investor and windmills were built everywhere.
What we have now in my hometown is probably the perfect example for 'horizon pollution'. Anywhere you look, you see windmills.
Believe me, you really don't want this in your neighbourhood anymore than a nuclear power plant!!!
I think wind power is a great idea since it is a renewable technology. But wind farms shouldn't be built anywhere close to where people live. There is enough space in Germany (which is quite crowded!) to build wind farms where they don't bother anyone so I think it is possible in any country to find such places.
Off-Shore platforms are a great idea and are possible, even in tough environments as this article shows: Off-Shore platforms in the Baltic Sea
Tidal power plants are also an interisting renewable energy source.
''I'm very concerned about a private developer's plan to build an industrial energy complex across 24 square miles of publicly owned land
Industrial energy complex?? WTF? When it is "good" it is a "renewable energy source" but when it is "bad" it is a "industrial energy complex"? What does he want, a non-industrial energy complex? No industry? Industry only around poor people?
And it's not like the windmills are that visible based on the drawing. Just little specs far out in the ocean. Maybe he would have a point if it was a giant monolith 10 feet from his house.
This is just a further example to show that many so-called environmentalists like Kennedy and Cronkite are nothing of the sort. They are only interested in image, not substance. They act but don't think. To me this would be like a right-wing religious Bible-quoting conservative fighting the construction of a new church because it would reduce tax-revenue.
Brian Ellenberger
Food fight? (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). No, I said "Who's right?". (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Good night?! It's not even 5 pm. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). NO!!! I SAID "WHO'S RIGHT" (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Ohhhhh.... Who's riiiight. Ummm... I dunno. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Shovel snow? In June?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now, I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a degree of N.I.M.B.Y. going on here, but in a less emotional vein, there are a few legitimate reasons to be against this:
1) We're not talking about a small number of these things, and they're hardly silent/invisible/maintainance-free. There would be a serious quality-of-life reduction, and in a highly-populated area, property-owners should be concerned.
2) These things are hardly the eco-friendly energy sources their proponents make them out to be. They're a huge, monsterous field of bird-shredders, and we're talking a wide area that would be deadly for any flying creatures. This is also something of an environmentally sensitive area, at least for North America.
3)Wind-devices don't produce as much power as many other "free" sources, although that might change with advances in tech. The argument for putting resources behind different energy methods than wind is a legitimate one.
4) Finally, last I heard, the environmental impact from producing and maintaining these things is considered by many to be worse than the benefit they generate -- while operation may be "clean" and "cheap", maintainance and construction is expensive and dirty.
Again, I am sure that the multi-zillionaires living in this area have a bad case of the NIMBY-s, but that is hardly the only thing going on here.
Windshare looks very interesting. However, I have a few questions...
How noisy is it? Have any of the neighbours complained? Have you had trouble with vandalism?
I'm also a little confused about your investmentment system. Why do people have to buy in chunks of $2500? Why can't someone buy more than $25k? What's the point of having seperate "membership shares"?
Let those rich b*stards live under the same environmental restraints we all have to. Let's close down their local oil and coal plants for some emissions problem (I'm sure Greenpeace or some other org will help).
I wonder if wind farms would be more acceptable then... C*cksuckers.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
And how much of that 0.4% is microparticulate thorium and uranium? More than you think, I bet.
Give your plant's public relations lackies a round of applause. They have sure done a number on you.
and trasmit the power to receiving stations via microwave. Yes yes I know, it sounds easier than it is.
The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That's with a blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, and doesn't include the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
The unsubsidized, fully amortized cost of wind power is about $0.04/kwh. Most jurisdictions also apply a subsidy to wind. You do the math.
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony last week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
From what I understand, one of the problems with wind generators - other than their supposed uglyness - is that they leak oil. I assume this oil is being used as lubricant. Well, what if the moving parts were supported - levitated - by massive permanent magnets? Kinetic-to-electrical energy conversion already involves magnets anyway. Does anyone have any thoughts on the feasibility of this idea?
The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That's with a blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, and doesn't include the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
The unsubsidized, fully amortized cost of wind power is about $0.04/kwh. Most jurisdictions also apply a subsidy to wind.
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony last week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
So.. I wonder what they serve for lunch at a wind farm? Baked Beans? Broccoli?
You see this same sort of thing every time someone wants to build a dam to produce hydroelectric power. All the environmentalists who complain about burning fossil fuels, start complaining about ruining the environment. In fact, there are a number of environmentalists who won't be happy until the human race is extinct.
Vote for Pedro
Last I checked, the Koreans, Panamanias, Somalis, Vietnamese, Grenadians (?), Bosians, Croats, and Muslim residents of Kosovo don't have any oil. That pretty much covers every signinficant US military action in the last 50 years leaving the one exception being the collective Gulf Wars. So actually when you think about, the US fighting for oil is the exception, not the rule.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Yes; that, sir, is a thing of unparalleled beauty.
We gotta harvest antimatter through worm holes in space-time. And anyone who disagrees is gonna get the business end of my phaser, set to "kill". You damn luddite fusion proponents. Get with much better technology!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I would *love* to stroll along the beach and see these babies churning away off in the distance. How could you look at them and see anything other than a complete triumph of environment-PRESERVING technology? Those wind turbines glimmering in the sunlight would be keeping fucking oil-spilling barges like the one that soiled my grandmother's beach last month away, and maybe making our next middle-east war 1% less likely. They will help keep the rest of the Cape cleaner - cleaner air, cleaner water - anybody with NIMBY syndrome about such things is a total fucking hypocrite.
The article said Cronkite suggested building them inland in the state. I'm inland in the state, and I'd be all for it - bring them on. Only problem is, we're in a fucking valley and there isn't much wind. On the open sea there's wind all the time. It would be stupid not to put them there.
Personally, I'd like to see them on every hilltop on the horizon. Give us cheap, clean power and I'll be happy.
I remember seeing that gigantic eggbeater one up in Montreal somewhere, on a high hill/mountain. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
With power to spare for Woonsocket. Those with homes on the Bay Blew even harder, they say, So that's where the tree-huggers stuck it.
[
Flat out, this is what it comes down to: What will cause more damage in the long run - a wind farm, or the complete depletion of fossil fuels by incineration? Yeah, wind farms can be ugly (they can be built out in the ocean too) and they kill birds, but what's more important here?
I'd take one for the team. Hell, if I could afford my own windmill, I would've had it up and running years ago.
Nantucket, you suck.
I live in Southern Holland right where Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany come together. All along the freeways and farmland these majestic propellers turn in the sky...i find the effect rather calming...
Belief that Perspectives matter more than Facts = Mark of the Truly Ignorant
According to your own link, Defense gets over 360 billion, and for each of the others you lump together several categories, such as Medical into "welfare programs", meaning that you seem to think HMO regulation costs, hospital insurance costs, government employee health benefits, the cost of funding the FDA and health research, as well as disease control and training all fall under the heading of "welfare programs".
Just a wee bit of bias, perhaps?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
On the contrary, the entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much oak forest lost in California each year.
The unsubsidized, fully amortized cost of wind power is about $0.04/kwh. Most jurisdictions provide a subsidy for wind. The more heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That doesn't include the cost of the blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, nor the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
WTF? If it wasn't for your final paragraph, I would be sure you were a shill for the nuke industry. Your information is either very outdated or just plain wrong.
Please read the FAQs.
The people who want to put up the wind-farm are right. The rest of them are just a bunch of bitches who don't want to have their view 'ruined'. Personally, I think windmills look nice.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Unless you are using super-conducting wires, the farther you send electricity, the less you have. It would be hugely wasteful to try to send power all across the country. If you tried to go super-conducting you'd need to keep the wires chilled to cryogenic temperatures the whole way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They buy from Oregon, Oregon buys from Washington, and Washington buys from Canada. The whole process is made transparent by software.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Oops! Excuse me!
Until the baby boomers retire, and then we're totally screwed.
The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That doesn't include the blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, nor the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
The unsubsidized, fully amortized cost of wind power is about $0.04/kwh. Most jurisdictions also apply a subsidy to wind.
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony last week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
To a lot of people, environmentalism is nothing more than a front to gain political power. When it comes down to it, they want to keep their cabins, SUVs, boats, planes, views, etc. They just don't want you to have them. The environment is really the furthest thing from their minds. It is about money, power, influence, and control.
Unfortunately, in the last five years or so, Walter Cronkite has become very outspoken in some disappointing ways. The person once called "the most trusted man in America" has become yet another liberal mouthpiece seemingly more interested in preserving the status quo than in doing anything really helpful, as the interview with him in this article shows. It's nearly to the point where I don't pay attention to him anymore.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
They already make complete replacement roofing systems that are solar PV. the cost is offset some by not needing a lot of the conventional roofing materials (shingles, etc). there are also now many lenders offering 100% financing when it's tied into the home mortgage, rather a less painful way then full up front cost.
I like them myself, I plan on getting more after we move. Right now I am more cruising on my neighbors solar rigs (I work for them, that's part of my pay), and I'm really impressed with them. Maintenance is minimal, the batteries carry you through the night or across cloudy days, clean power, and etc. Quiet, reliable. I have a few of my own that I use as well, I run all our lights and some of my smaller stuff with them when I need to. I like the idea of paying my electric bill completely off, and get it over with, plus it's a *dandy* whole house (or as many circuits as you wire into them, you can still have grid supplied as well, it doesn't have to be either/or) sized UPS unit.
I find it perfectly understandable that people don't want these things in their back yard. I don't see a contradiction with being for clean energy. I mean, do proponents of "clean coal power" or "clean nuclear power" want coal or nuclear power plants in their back yard (you know, the people who run the ads about "Americans for sensible energy choices")? I don't think so. Likewise, the vocal members of Congress that foam at the mouth about the glories of private sector health insurance have cushy government health care coverage, in addition to usually being independently wealthy.
This has really nothing to do with the nature of the energy, but with the nature of political power in the US. In many other nations, the government can eventually just put its foot down and make this sort of thing happen, and the income and power disparities are not as big as they are in the US. In the US, if you have enough money, you get the influence to keep this from happening. That doesnt affect just power plants, it affects every political decision. It's a problem that needs to be addressed, but proponents of coal and nuclear power shouldn't get a monopoly on hypocrisy until then.
you argue about radiation, you're original argument was about fusion, fusion itself creates no radioactive material. Yet you somehow forgot to mention this
HEPA filters are fine for cat dander, but please find a better way to keep your radioactive dirt out of my lungs. Thanks.
west nile is killing a lot more birds now than anything else, windchargers included, although I'll admit they do clonk into them and get chewed up some. I can see it around here, bird populations in general are dismal the past two years since west nile was detected here. I even was the first person to tell the local vet about it, she had never even heard of it, told her to watch the birds and horses for it, so she went and looked it up on the net, before it was really hitting the TV news.. It used to be pesticides I believe killed most of the raptors, being higher in the food chain they accumulated more toxins, etc.. Also, some environmental "rulings" stuff has a side effect of killing eagles, example, when they shut the klamath farmers water off, it also dried up the remaining marshlands downstream of the irrigation canals,really devasting huge numbers of species,including the largest cocnentration of eagles in the lower 48, to "save" a couple of really not endangered species. It also removed the food that millions of migratory species were depending on in the pacific flyway. whoops. Good intentions (sort of),but unfortunatly really bad ecological results, plus wiped out a lot of humans economically and socially, for no real reason..
I don't think there's any single one silver bullet energy solution, it's natch though we will be building a lot more windmills, because they actually *work* and are pretty cost effective now. I am hoping to find some property local to me that has a small stream, I use solar now but I'm juiced on low head small scale hydro,I am liking that 24 hour a day concept, well, until the government tells me I can't do it. I have a small wind charger but it isn't installed yet, again, waiting to move now, soon sometime.
You're giving away too much info... Here's how to do it:
1. ???
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about economics, like most of the other liberal slashbots who don't know anything about economics except what they read on slashdot.
Clinton's economic policy of having a strong dollar added to our trade deficit and the export of our jobs overseas.
The USA will always have debt- ever heard of US Treasury bonds? We are nowhere near crisis levels of debt. Our debt is not even close to 100% of our GDP.
Let people decide to do with their money.
Lets assume that I have a multi million dollar home in Nantucket with a nice view of the ocean (which could not be further from the truth). One of the reasons that I purchased this fancy home was because of the breathtaking view of the ocean. Some developer comes along and says that he wants to put a number of large fairly ugly looking objects in the space that was once a gorgeous ocean view. Of course I am going to be opposed to that. I am also opposed to putting more oil rigs in alaska for much the same reason. You are taking a gorgeous area and mucking it up with some man made contration
Wind energy is actually the only alternative energy form outside of hydro that is economically feasiable at the present time.
Wind technology is also vastly improved over the last twenty years; quieter more efficient bigger wind machines. The blades of the larger wind machines actually spin slower (50 RPM on older machines 15 on new bigger ones) which I think would be more astheticly pleasing to look at.
According to a recent (24Feb2003) Chemical & Engineering News article
I think wind in general is a good idea, but if the machines keep getting bigger I wonder what affect this will have.
There is a huge amount of unharvested energy in the current in cape cod canal. Nobody uses it for shipping any more so why not use the 6+ knot tidal current to generate power? The generators would be nicely out of view and the current flows every single day...
I'm sure KFC could make this go away if we would let them...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Believe me, you really don't want this in your neighbourhood anymore than a nuclear power plant!!!
Why don't we want this in our neighborhood(s)? Exactly what is it about windmills that makes them bad near residential areas?
There is a spin on hydro power and that is generating electricity through tidal energy.
The US didn't enter WW2 to stop the Holocaust or stop Hitler from getting a nuke. It entered because it was attacked by Japan in Pearl Harbor, followed by an immediate declaration of war from Germany.
For as long as it had a choice, the US chose to stay out of the war.
Not being from the US, I didn't know that welfare got >2x what defense got (would I have known if I was American? ;). But here's an idea - draft welfare recipients. No more street people and defense gets more money (somewhat offset by the low-ranking, low-pay conscripts). It's a winning solution, well, except for the welfare recipients, but what an incentive to get off the dole!
Of course, I don't believe that, but you can bet there's at least one clown on the Hill who thinks that's a good idea (and he probably has half his staff telling him to shut up about that idea until pension kicks in...).
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
A bit off topic, but I really need to get this off my chest. Go ahead and mod me down, but this does relate to a lot of comments people have left on this thread.
There seems to be a really bad tendency amongst some people here to paint "environmentalists" as one single group of people. This lets people make out that "greenies" are completely hypocritical. "They want renewable energy, and then they complain whenever people try to build wind farms".
That's nonsense. It's like saying "Geeks go on about how great open source is, but half on them use Windows! See what hypocrits they are."
Unsurprisingly, the world just ain't that simple. Guess what? More than likely the people complaining about wind-farms being built in their back garden are probably not the same people calling for them to be built elsewhere. Just like the people who think open source is the best thing ever are not the same people who use Windows.
Just because there is some hypocracy within a group that YOU have chosen to assign a label to, doesn't mean everyone in that group is a hypocrit, It doesn't even mean than one single person within that group is making inconsistent demands. Probably a few idiots do, but there are idiots in any lobby group, be it environentalism, the open source movement, the pro-life lobby, etc. etc.
Argue in favour of wind-farms. Argue against them. Don't try to paint all environmentalists as idiots just because one says something is good and another says it's bad.
- The type who want increased governmental control over every aspect of life. Some go so far as to say people should be forced to be vegetarians. Others simply want the fishing industry to close its doors. Think PETA.
- The type who simply want to complain about something. These simply jump on the first type's bandwagon. These are the wannabe-hippie protesters you see on CNN, and celebrities looking for free advertising.
- The type who favor balance and reason in preserving natural resources. Examples here are hunters and outdoorsmen.
These folks in Nantucket are clearly #2.I was watching Discovery the other day. A ten square mile facility of solar panels in the Nev Desert would power all of the US. Takes away the Nuclear polution, uses existing technology, and would all for easy change of Voltage since it comes out DC.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
Wind farms aren't all that...
Environmentally and economically there are good reasons to dislike them. They kill a lot of birds. They break down a lot, requiring a fair energy input to maintain, and they only work when the wind blows.
Here are some alternatives that may be better:
Cogeneration of heat and power. A decent quality diesel engine runs in a soundproofed enclosure. The coolant liquid runs through radiators in your house, or to a heat pump that heats your house. Electricity from the generator is sent back through your meter onto the grid. This works with TODAYS technology. Some states already allow it. It produces power at much higher fuel efficiency than centralized plants and its distributed nature allows reduced transmission loss and increased reliability.
Conservation: instead of building million dollar wind farms, change the way people consume energy. The biggest consumer is probably heating and cooling. Therefore, white roofs, and geothermal heat pumps are both probably going to save thousands of kilowatts vs. older heating and cooling techniques. White roofs considerably reduce heat gain during the summer.
Geothermal heat pumps use heat from groundwater to heat, and reject heat into the groundwater to cool. Much more efficient than regular heat pumps which are already quite efficient.
Combine this with cogeneration and you have a very attractive heating/cooling/power generation technique.
The life of a typical quality diesel engine is about 20-30,000 hours. Then it needs an overhaul then it gets another 20-30,000 hours. Some run as long as 40 or 50 thousand. This means that with a monthly service contract and overhauls every 3 years or so you can have high efficiency reliable distributed generation.
One engine will put out typically say 10 kilowatts of electric power, which will on average power 10 houses, though at peak times it might only power 1 house. A decent engine costs around $5000. It can burn the same #2 heating oil probably already in use for heating.
By running the cogeneration plants only during the appropriate peak heating/cooling/electric demands you could probably stretch the life of the engine to 10 years or so.
Schools, govt buildings, hospitals, gyms, apartment complexes, and other reasonably large energy consumers can usually do quite well with cogeneration units in their basements, making money off the power, and saving a bundle in heating or cooling (the reject heat can be used with the proper type of refrigeration unit to cool the building).
Plus this technique acts as a "backup" generator for power outages and bad weather situations.
Economically and environmentally speaking there are plenty of other responsible techniques for decreasing power requirements and increasing availability.
perhaps this article is biased so as not to report the good technical reasons against this project?
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
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.
One way to get rid of those moles is to put your snowblower out in the yard, turned on full, with a few vegetable placed just in front of it.
I think you mean "nucular power consumption" or "nookyular power consumption". However you want to spell it. :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Will this wind be so mighty, as to lay low the mountains of the earth?
Just build them on the nearest Indian reservation, between the casino and the fireworks stand! The tribe can make some money and the checkbook environmentalists won't have their view spoiled.
As part of the current Energy Bill. In this case, the plant will be in Idaho instead of Nevada.
Those things look and sound like a swarm of giant angry helicopters. The people who complain about them really do have a point. Coal fired power stations are better...
Oh well, what the hell...
Ok, some things about this ordeal: The energy is connected to the grid, not just the town that has to put up with them. The energy is next to nothing. It destroys prime sailing, and fishing areas. They look ugly as all hell. They are taller than the Statue of Liberty. The company doing this has an advertising campaign that is outright lying to the public. Nantucket Sound is not JUST about Nantucket. It is about Cape Cod, Martha's, and Massachusetts as a whole. Nobody I know on the cape (ie the non super rich annoying natucket/martha's people) want these towers.
Sleep is for the weak.
I was particularly disappointed by Cronkite. When I was growing up, he was universally recognized as one of the good guys. Here's his quotes from the article.
Something to take into account is that Cronkite is an avid sailor with a home on Cape Cod. The windmills are seven miles offshore, and spaced 1/3 to 1/2 mile apart. Speaking as somebody who's done a lot of boating, this leaves PLENTY of room for boats to move around. Maybe he thinks the rotating blades would hit the mast or the sails? Possibly, but the stakes seem bigger than recreational sailing, and people can always SAIL AROUND the wind farm. Hello, it's called GPS, and it even works in pea-soup fog.Here in Massachusetts, the Kennedeys are revered as gods because JFK's presidency put Irish Catholics (Massachusetts' biggest demographic) on the map. RFK Jr. (nephew of JFK) has weighed in with idiocy like this:
This isn't a dignified time to be from Massachusetts.WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
"A mighty wind?" Is that related to the previous story about sensors in airplane seats?
Don't those things go thump thump thump?
(Holland is a part of the Netherlands, sort of like England is a part of the UK
Um, sorry. Dumb American here. I thought England was part of the United Kingdom? Not trolling, genuinely ignorant. Care to explain?
Build a nuclear plant.
Have one raised road going in.
Declare the area around the plant a wildlife preserve.(~ 10 sq. miles)
There everyone(almost)is happy.
Recreational boating.
Recreational boating.
Well ... uh ... yeah, I guess we oughtta cancel squeaky clean, endlessly renewable energy if it's gonna interfere with something as crucial as recreational boating. Yeah. Of course. Silly me.
Recreational boating.
Is it fascism yet?
People seem to forget that Congress decides on the budget, and that both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats during Reagan's two terms.
The Gramm-Rudman Balanced Budget Ammendment was a bipartisan initiative, that, aside from the Democratic co-sponsor, had very little support within the Demcratic party.
The election of Clinton also coincided in control of the House and Senate passing to Republicans for the first time since Hoover.
Strangely enough, because Congress, and not Clinton, decides on the budget, we had a deficit reduction. Possibly because the Republicans then at the time (part of the Contract With America) were very committed to fiscal responsibility. Clinton likes to take credit, but he had as much to do with that as he does with sunny weather in Southern California on any given day.
Now...the current crop of Republicans in Congress apparently haven't seen a pet project they don't like. So far the government budget is growing at an 8% annual rate. Democrats are whining about some programs being "cut", but what is really happening is that the rate at which their budget grows is being cut. Very few things are being cut in actual dollars. Almost everything is growing.
But first I'd like to add a proper PARTNER=SLASHDOT link to the article .
;)
Bet you didn't know you could do that.
Like I said before, This NIMBY stuff really irks me to no end. Especially if it's generated by something as good an idea as a windfarm, but Cronkite's concern (private, for proffit usage of public space) is quite valid. This concern could be addressed by permitting the purchase or lease of the land, by the company, from the community.
That said, the Nantucket community should be welcoming the wind farm as an opportunity to further the cause of energy independance for the United States, and of leaving behind a cleaner planet for future generations.
The reality is that the coastal plains of the New England Atlantic coast are ideal locations to find steady and strong winds (at least they were thirteen years ago), making them ideal for this application. It disturbs me that NIMBY ever happens at all (why should the poor be the only ones to smell the landfill, paper mill, power plant, etc), but it is especially troubling when it is blocking something as sensible as a wind farm that will be three to six miles away.
Read, L
a massive generator attached by special gearing and a chain to a set of enviromentalist backpedals. The more they backpedal - the more electricity is produced. Add in a collector for Walter Cronkite's hot air and voila!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
http://www.town.nantucket.ma.us/contact.htm
I would have asked myself that same question a week ago, but they've been having him testify before the Energy Committee
when they go back in time!
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Ok, I've got to say that I wasn't being literal when I said "BOOOM." However, nuclear plants can have meltdowns, so everyone in this thread please stop dismissing their risk because I was trying to be funny. (Not just parent, but I only want to reply to one.)
As for the costs on wind power, I have seen the same type of figures as you on residential use and it isn't cheap. My father lives on an island and has a windmill. However, it would also cost him MUCH more to get a power line out to the island, so he deals with it. But, utility-owned wind power is the topic here and it is on the same order as fossil fuels. Hopefully, in time costs can come down for residential usage as on-site generation doesn't waste power in the transmission. This would be great for less densly-populated areas, but it will probably still not be worth it in cities of any reasonable size.
I don't know of any environmentalists that are protesting against fusion. The government just seems to think it isn't worth funding. They have pored a lot of money (a lot to me, not to the government) into the Tokamaks and I guess they feel that haven't seen results quick enough, so they stopped. I feel they are being extremely short-sighted, but have you ever heard of a politician that wasn't?
Interestingly, my 88' Honda CRX has better emmissions than the latest hybrids. And my CRX is only the DX model, not the econo HX version.
This should tell you something. Car makers aren't doing what they could easily do to make efficient autos. The gas guzzlers are on purpose.
I'd imagine to prop up oil companies.
You're talking about the proposed windmill project off of Long Island NY, off the shores of one of the hamptons (south hampton? east hampton?). It houses some of the richest people's beach houses in the world.
Good ol' boy kennedy, from the tree-hugging and election launching group riverkeepers, is more interested in forcing GE to dredge the Hudson River of PCB's (which btw was legal for them to discharge, they had permits to do it from the federal government, therefore it should be a government cleanup because it was their fuckup, not GE's), and which will disturb the PCB's, creating more problems (I've been an environmental inspector for years), and defending his murdering relatives, like skakel and ted, rather than let a project go forward that will supply badly needed electricity in an environmentally friendly way to an area that has had a forced shutdown of a nuclear reactor, opposition to an underwater natural gas pipe (cleaner burning than the oil fired generators in use on the island) under the Long Island sound from Connecticut for "environmental" reasons. Just to protect his rich friends and contributors beach house views.
The US has for the last twenty years been slowly marched, thanks to tree-huggers, to an unstainable and crises in the making, situation where demand (due to development and growth, not inefficiency) is far outstripping supply, which all the while helps fill the coffers of the tree-hugging organizations.
NO NUKES! COAL is DIRTY! (except when algore repeatedly hammers the term "clean coal" as a researched key phrase that resonates with voters during his election bid), USE OIL AND YOU ARE A TERRORIST! DRILL FOR OIL IN ANWR (where teh caribou don't roam, where ice roads negate destruction to roads, where todays technology negates negative impact, and where YOU WILL NEVER GO) AND YOU ARE A TERRORIST! DRIVE AN SUV AND YOU ARE A TERRORIST! CAN'T INSTALL THAT CLEAN BURNING NATURAL GAS GENERATOR FOR EXTRA CAPACITY THAT WILL PREVENT BLACKOUTS, BECAUSE THAT WILL ALLOW YOU TO CONTINUE RUNNING YOUR OIL BURNING GENERATORS, SO EVEN THOUGH OVERALL POLLUTION FROM YOUR PLANT WILL GO DOWN, WE WON'T ALLOW IT!
CARBON DIOXIDE (plant and tree food) IS A POLLUTANT IF IT COMES FROM HUMANS! AND IF THE MAJORITY OF POLLUTION COMES FROM NATURAL LEAF AND DEAD TREE DECOMPOSITION, THAT'S A CONSPIRACY OF MAN!
How did the tree-huggers descend to such a level of lies anyway?
The story sans registration.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The many, many, many many other US military invasions of the past 50 years(insignificant, perhaps, to US citizens, not so for residents of invaded countries) usually had a lot more to do with installing pro-US dictators, deposing leftward-leaning popularly elected governments. There are some exceptions. These involve either power/resource grabs(Iraq) or the policy of containing the Soviet Union(North Korea).
Too lazy to find links - Google will back me up on this one.
Valete!
I would love to have some more windmills in the area. It's not the best place for it though. The energy generated would not cover the cost of the windmill. I shopped around and talked to people that had/have them. They're only good in areas with lots of sustained winds.
We could also use another few nuclear (nuculer? ;) ) power plants. Radioactivity should scare people about as much as dirty water. As long as it's not clogging your lungs or all over your house, you're probably OK.
NIMBYs are going to have pioneer other planets if they want a perpetual pristine view. Earth isn't getting bigger AFAIK.
I recently lived in Adelaide, South Australia, and the same thing happened there.
In the hills to the south-east of the city, some investors decided to build a wind-farm. It was all okayed and ready to go. A couple hundred turbines. But the selfish dumb-fscks who live within viewing distance protested and raised a hell of an uproar about the rolling plains being turned into a wind farm. Apparently an eyesore is far worse than burning gas to power their (and our) homes.
So now they are only building around 50 turbines.
Seriously dudes, there are so few investors willing to toss their fortunes away like that, that if someone comes along who wants to do some good in the world, you shouldn't violently oppose them. Selfish dumb-fscks!
Imagine what the rolling plains will look like under a few metres of water due to global warming.
On a semi-related topic, also in the same city, a company (Optus I think) was planning to roll-out coax cables to an entire suburb to provide them with cable TV and broadband. But a vocal minority put a stop to it. Apparently, the cable company was going to put a cable up on the existing power-line poles. One extra cable to a pole with maybe 10 already. But the vocal minority insisted that the only way they could proceed was to fut the bill of burying their own coax *and* the existing power and electricity cables, to tear down the poles.
As you would expect, the cable company couldn't afford it, and even if they could they would have every right to tell them where to shove it. So the people who live there have no cable TV or broadband because of a few old farts who should have done something when the poles first went up, not 50 years later. If I was in that situation I would find the name and address of the protestors and go around paint-balling their houses for taking away my broadband. Even more stupid dumb-fscks.
And let me guess, you are one of those people who thinks there's an actual carved in stone law someplace that you have to use EITHER some sort of alternative energy system OR just grid supplied?
I hear this so much from scoffers, it really is weird too, because it's so completely illogical. It's like saying your personal commuter car can't carry 2 tons of rocks all the time so that means cars are impractical and useless. I also hear it from people who -example only- think nothing of dropping similar sums on things like skiboats they might use half a dozen times a year, or something like that.. Surprise, you can run BOTH, or have a multi-hybrid system like most people have (and what I recommend to people first getting into it, to build up to it), which is usually (depends on your site survey obviously)solar PV, and a wind charger (that deals with the winter/summer split nicely), then grid supplied and some sort of fuel genny. Mix and match and spice to taste. All can feed into the same battery banks with zero effort through the charger/inverters, or most states have a grid buy back program if you want it simpler.
It's schweeet.
If you live someplace that's dead calm all the time,never any wind or vewery little, never gets any useful amount of sun, has no running water in some small creek, well, yep, short of your own home depot baby nuke plant, nope, not a lot you can do about it, sorry. If that's 90% of the planet I guess I never travelled much. I know of some places like that, I guess I just wouldn't live there. Anyplace else besides those dead zones there's something "alternative" that will get you some kind of juice. Heck, I got a buddy of mine sells wood boilers that run a homes heat, hot water and electricity, if all you have is some handy trees or coal on the property. there's usually something that would work for most folks, but yes, there's always some places or situations where i guess you are just stuck. In that case about the only thing alternative you can do that is practical is to make sure your home/building is built or retroifitted to "super insulation" standards, which is an entirely different but related subject. ANYONE can do that, anyplace, any climate or environment it works.
I live in north georgia, it's humid as all get out here, rains a lot, then when it's not raining, yes it's sunny. In the winter it's pretty windy, not so much in the summer. My personal requirements, yes, I don't use much, but I get by. I'm running a desktop now, 17 inch monitor, speakers, got a light on and a window fan. Seems to all be working, and it's all I need right now. My stove and burners and furnace run on propane. My next door neighbor who uses a lot of power on the other hand, lives in a three story mansion,close to a million bucks worth, close to around 6,000 square feet, and is a gadget head. He's doesn't "do without" none whatsoever. He runs everything but his heat pumps and his electric stove on solar and one electric dryer. The refrigerator and chest freezer run on solar. Most of everyhting else he has runs on solar. the deep well is switchable, a lot of the times in the summer if we have to water the gardens I run that 220 VAC well completely off the solar, just because it's possible and in mid day there's a lot of extra juice going begging. We run the washers on solar. And yada yada yada. I think his total cost that included bringing in from out of state a three guy crew for installation was around 25 grand, basically the cost of an extra bathroom in a new better quality home some place. With a 20 year note for some folks, not that bad, and the deal is, it's the same sort of price if you live in a high rent or a low rent place, it hides itself in that big mortgage pretty easy I hear. I think if he had done the labor himself and scrounged a few of the pieces he could have knocked around 5 grand off that price. Just depends on what you want, I read that that charming foyer in most peoples houses with the marvelous bay windows don't put out much electricity at all.
I know
Solar has a large energy investment and the panels, batteries etc are hard to recycle. Oil and coal are environmentally devastating in production as well as use (our largest local (Muja) coal station burns 12 tonnes a year of uranium, to say nothing of releasing radon etc); gas is better but shipping all of those big bombs around the country's just gotta have a sudden, loud environmental impact one day, hopefully not near any serious population. Wave and tidal generators muck around with the local ecosystem something chronic (as does Ocean Geothermal, but if you integrate fish-farms you at least get roughly twice the industry for the same amount of intervention). Nukes are quiet, clean, low-profile and produce small amounts of straightforward-to-manage waste.
If we were allowed to build proper nuclear rockets as well (get Burt Rutan to design them, not NASA), we could fling hundred-tonne loads of waste into the sun (or better still store it in a safe place (orbit/moon etc) for later re-processing) for an extremely low environmental cost. This is a question which has been studied to death, the answers are all to hand.
Stand by for a flock of "-1, Outrageous" mods from people who call themselves "green" but never actually think about the issues. They drive old, cheap, smoky, polluting cars and track dieback through the native forests they claim to protect. Here's a better way of approaching these things.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
He's telling the truth about stuff like this.
The only reason "rich people" do charity work and help other people is for the PR value that it generates.
And yes, rich people want the poor people as far away from them as possible. They may do "telethons" to raise money, but at the end of the day, they don't want to come in contact with poor people.
And it is a good question.... why become rich if you can't live the way you want?
"...thus balance out this huge $44Trillion debt that is going to bite us in the ass in the next few years..."
... easy.
;)
just don't build anymore electric generating plants. in a few years there will be rolling blackouts and the computers holding all the information on national debt will crash and
the data will be gone
no information = no debt.
maybe they could get the aliens at rosewell to make a few fly-by's over the big data-warehouses. i heard their "anti-gravity" engines produce some kind of electromagnetic pulses. this would also
contribute to erased harddisks (?)
long live the diesel-powered computer!
Well, they proposed off-shore platforms for the Netherlands as well. Cannot do that either, as birds migrate along the coast.
In Europe (as well as everywhere else) everybody likes to talk about the environment, but no-one is prepared to make the sacrifice necessary. Last time I checked no country is on schedule to make the Kyote reductions in pollution.
Michael Moore is famously partisan and is known to skew (or outright fabricate) evidence to fit his case/cause, as in his Columbine documentary.
That's really not fair. Specifically what did he fabricate? What about the Columbine documentary was "skewed" to fit his cause? Hell, what exactly was his cause? If you say gun control, then either you didn't actually watch it, or you weren't paying attention.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
(according to the book "Stupid White American" by Micheal Moore)
The book was called "Stupid White Men", not "Stupid White American".
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
that Australian project...someone was going to build a HUGE inverted funnel tower that would heat air from solar energy, then use the convective currents to drive wind turbines and generate electricity?
Is this still in someone's plan?
Environmental hypocrisy is everywhere. When I went hiking in Boulder CO yesterday, I had to be extra careful dodging all of the gas-guzzling SUVs on the road.
I will, though, debate the current feasibility of some of your suggestions. First, with electric cars - a range of 125 miles is simply unacceptable when the refuel time is more on the order of hours than minutes. That won't go. 125 miles is bad for a range on an oil-powered car that you can refuel in 10 minutes, so people simply won't tolerate it for an electric car.
As far as wind - even the environmentalists hate it, It kills birds and disrupts migratory patterns, and it takes up a lot of space to collect, and there are only so many places that you can do it - ultimately, it won't solve the problem for a significant percentage of our energy consumption.
PV will be good, but right now there's a biiiiig problem. Essentially, I can do one of two things - use a single-crystal semiconductor, or a polycrystalline semiconductor. Single-crystal have the good efficiency, but they are expensive, both in terms of $ and energy to create. They have to be used for quite a while before they break even on either consideration. Polycrystalline semiconductors, such as a dye-sensitized TiO2 cell can be made cheap, but have rather low efficiency. But that's getting better, or so I'm told by others in my research group working on them.
I'm intrigued by the H2 study - if only because it was done here at Caltech. ;) Bottom line is H2 will destroy ozone, but many seem to think the estimate of leakage was too high. Either way, I didn't like H2 before for other reasons. Anyone want to explain to me again why we can't use methanol for fuel cells?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
A guy I worked with was trying to prevent a wind farm being placed in a small bay in Toronto. His reasoning was that there were a couple of safety issues that hadn't been considered:
1. Ice. In Toronto (and I suspect New England), ice will form on the blades and when there is too much or it melts, it will get thrown. Several kilometers, in fact, and with a lot of energy.
2. Blades will break and get thrown periodically. With the proposed wind mills for Toronto, it would be expected that one blade would be thrown each year. These blades are massive and could conceivably do a lot of damage.
The solution, put them further out in the water away from the city; kind of like what is being proposed here. It was interesting to see that in the concerns regarding the Nantucket Wind Farm that these two points weren't brought up.
Personally, I would think that a wind farm out in the water would be attractive (at least a lot more attractive than a traditional power plant) and a good feeling that somewhere, there isn't coal being burnt or nuclear waste being produced to fuel my lifestyle.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Gun control was certainly one of his causes. Also slamming anything right of flaming liberal was another. If you missed that, YOU weren't watching. Also remember his little acceptance speech at the Academy Awards?
Seriously, if you don't think that Moore is completely political and completely left, you're either too daft or farther left than him to even notice the difference. Nothing wrong with either, but it makes Moore less than objective.
I would say he's never done a documentary in his life - rather, all his work are conflict pieces where he creates the conflict to expose his cause. That's not a documentary, that's propaganda, whether you happen to agree with the cause or not.
Oh, and as for his fabrications:
# The Charlton Heston speech supposedly given at Denver is edited from two different speeches, one a year later and a thousand miles away. The audio is edited, with the cuts hidden by visual and pans of crowds, so as to create a misleading impression that Heston's remarks were one contiguous speech. Nor were both speeches entirely of the same general content: in fact, at least two sentences from each speech have been spliced together to form a brand new one.
# The sequence in the bank is staged, again to create a false impression. Forbes reports that an early scene in "Bowling" in which Mr. Moore tries to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain guns in America was staged. He goes to a small bank in Traverse City, Mich., that offers various inducements to open an account and claims "I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, I walked out with my new Weatherby," a rifle. But Jan Jacobson, the bank employee who worked with Mr. Moore on his account, says that only happened because Mr. Moore's film company had worked for a month to stage the scene. "What happened at the bank was a prearranged thing," she says. The gun was brought from a gun dealer in another city, where it would normally have to be picked up. "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period," she says. Ms. Jacobson feels used: "He just portrayed us as backward hicks."
# The "missile manufacturing plant" actually builds civilian rockets, and converts former military missiles to carry out civilian launches.
#Mr. Moore makes the preposterous claim that a Michigan program by which welfare recipients were required to work was responsible for an incident in which a six-year-old Flint boy shot a girl to death at school. Mr. Moore doesn't mention that the boy's mother had sent him to live in a crack house where her brother and a friend kept both drugs and guns--a frequently lethal combination.
#Mr. Moore repeats the canard that the United States gave the Taliban $245 million in aid in 2000 and 2001, somehow implying we were in cahoots with them. But that money actually went to U.N.-affiliated humanitarian organizations that were completely independent of the Taliban.
I could fo on, but I think you get the idea. When confronted with inaccuracies in his books, he has this answer to why he doesn't care about inaccuracies:
"No, I don't. Why should I? How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?"
So just remember, Moore is doing 'comedy.' Real funny too.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Living London as I do at the moment, I have been across to the continent a few times and everytime I go there I see wind farms. To me they are almost a thing of beauty. I look at them and think there is still help for the planet. But then I read this article. Champagne Socialists as a rich family friend says. Fight the good fight but not if its in your backyard. They are silent and have a beauty in form that I love. ANd they look much better than normal power stations. I'd have one in my back garden. Stop being so selfish...
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Thanks for the chuckle ;)
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
14,000 acres is the amount of land taken from use, not the area of the total land needed to accommodate the turbines.
The point being, that the land in between the turbines is still fully available for farming or pasture.
"Be sure to evaluate the bird-hand/bush ratio."
Fuck it
"yet another liberal mouthpiece seemingly more interested in preserving the status quo"
While I may agree with your about Cronkite, I must take expect to the idea that a liberal is interested in preserving the status quo. Most liberals *I* know think that status quo is Latin for the "mess we are in". And they are hardly supporters of the lying, mass murdering, and greedy regime with G.W. Bush as the figurehead.
This very timely. You can avoid the extra fuel cost that will come from the shutdown of STNP by signing up with Greenchoice!! It will actually make your bill CHEAPER!!!
We need more of that around the country. Let those who built the nuke pay the extra cost of the nuke - ALL of the cost until the end of time.
don't put them in migratory paths.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"If the "drawbacks" aren't paid for it's the seller's fault for setting the price too low, not the buyer's fault, which you try to blame." New England is suing the Midwest because the costs of power in the Midwest is not included in the cost of power generated in the Midwest. Those costs are such things as dying lakes and ponds, dying trees, etc, caused by sulpher and nitrogen compounds pumped into the air from burning coal and oil in power plants and cars. Of course, England and France are paying the social costs of the same kinds of pollution in New England....
...and I do not dispute that it is more expensive to support a person in the military than someone on welfare...
If this were the case it would significantly cut down on the amount of money spent on maintaining the welfare system AND it would provide valued skill and training to these people that could be used to get jobs once their term was up.
Expand this concept to include a more "public service" type of spot for these people and they could contribute good things to society such as road work (for which labor always seems to be in short supply), help at police and fire stations, help in hospitals, and really the list could go on and on. Heck, how about training welfare recipients to run a federal daycare system, something that could benefit the taxpayers that are donating their weekly money through taxes?
I have been touting a "workfare" program in my circles for 10ish years. It seems that if you take the free out of the money people will respond and make an effort. Everyone likes to succeed and feel good about it. Some just need a bit of help to get there.
That's because all of the global warming data used in the pushing of that treaty has since been disproven. It was a manic project for a few countries to "get on the map" with the environment, but it had no reality.
The earth is warming at 1/10th the rate stated when that treaty was ratified and the causes now are begining to look like they might be largely external to the planet.
Not that improvemnts shouldn't be made, but the treaty was more or less insane in it's dire predictions and it's suggested remedies. THese things were being disproven even during the treaty's ratification, but the snowball was already rolling too fast to stop it.
I dont think so. Ever stood near one of these things?
--- I hate my sig
Last time I checked, in 1939 the countries fighting Hitler included Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Britain, Australia, New Zeland, Canada, India, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Singapore, Malay, Burma, Greece, Nepal, Pakistan (I admit, some of those countries didn't exist at the time and were defined as colonies). The countries that didn't fight Hitler from the outset were Russia and the USA. Hardly the rest of the world turning it's back on the Holocaust.
"I should have said "concentrate on the selling, not the buying"."
And I should have said social cost = private cost + external cost.
And the problem is that you don't seem to understand the concept of external cost. External costs are those that aren't factored in the price of a good or service.
Energy, of all goods, has more external costs than any other with the possible exception of military weapons.
There are the external costs of pollution and that is one that many recognize.
But how many people recognize the external cost of oil wealth destroying the traditional economy of the Persian Gulf and a number of other regions where oil has been found (eg. Argentina)? The result has been millions of people cycling between wealth and poverty and back while never producing any actual goods. (Oil is not a product - it is "land", a finite resource, that once consumed is gone.)
More people, but not many, recognize that the US military presences in the Persian Gulf is an external cost of energy.
The focus for energy must be on incorporating the external costs into cost of energy. Costs are costs. Costs are costs. Costs are costs.
An economist says price is the sum of the factors of production plus profit. Factors of production are land (resources), capital, labor, technology, and institutional costs. For oil these costs are extremely low if the short view is taken, and for oil the long view is a million years.
Oil is different from iron or gold, after mining and processing iron and gold, the iron and gold still exist - trash dumps contain as much iron per cubic yard as many iron mines, and that is excluding the steel recycled before the dump. Oil is stored energy, and once the stored energy is released, you're left with carbon and hydrogen in much lower energy states.
Externalities cause the value of the "land" factor of oil production to be set at effectively zero. Some of those externalities is the claims that "oil will never run out", "coal can replace oil", "technology will find more oil", "technology will replace oil". This is the externality of "the commons".
When oil can be produced and delivered to the US from Saudi Arabia for $10 a barrel (the situation in 1999), the effects ripple through the economy.
This low price makes coal a high cost method of producing electricity, so coal plants were not built, pollution control equipment was not installed because that would make the cost be greater than the market price, power production was shifted from coal to natural gas.
I would put the external costs of oil at $50 a barrel, and I might be low.
If oil were priced at $60-80 a barrel, coal powered electric power generation could afford to be extremely clean, possibly paying for CO2 sequestration in the ocean. But now wind becomes extremely profitable, equivalent to about $20 a barrel for the equivalent amount of electricity produced from oil, and that would be after running a million miles of power lines to connect the upper midwest and canada to the US east and west coasts.
The only problem is the mechanism of converting external costs to a factor of production.
Something that is very political given the debate over the actual costs - Bush will not accept the idea that 9/11 is an external cost of a carbon fuel based economy.
Bush will not accept that the illusion of great wealth in the Persian Gulf (from oil) as a huge external cost of oil. The assumption is that Iraq can be transformed into a democracy cheaply because of Iraq's oil, but Iraq's oil will prevent Iraq from developing a sustainable economy and it sow the seed of another 9/11. The US would be safer if the US mandated that Iraq could produce no more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, but an unlimited amount of electricity and hyrdrogen from solar and wind. Ditto Iran. Ditto Saudi Arabia. It might not be a good "market" solution, but it would be a lot better than the likely outcome.
Wonderful idea.
So let's see what this leaves us with -- the people who, for whatever reason can't find other employment, and the people who, for whatever reason, don't want to find other employment. Or in other words, the incompetent, the disabled, the slackasses, and the dispossesed.
And these are the people you want in the military?
Not to mention that sending to war a bunch of people who don't want to be there in the first place is a great way of weakening your position in any actual battle.
Besides all of that, White America would never go for this plan. They've worked hard to ensure that black people are pretty much forced to stay as second class citizens, and now you want to give them, en masse, guns and the training in how to use them effectively?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
If it were not for the Prace-Anderson Act, nuclear operators would be required to obtain insurance on the open market. Please correct me if I am wrong, but this lack of subsidy would push the cost of nuclear electricity far over $0.22/kwh.
Quoting operating costs ignores all externalities, not just waste disposal and insurance.
Well, I guess it depends on what you consider 'chernobyl like'.
So, how many people have to die before it's not considered cost effective? What value have you applied to a human life in your benefit/cost analysis?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What are the actuarial costs of promoting nuclear energy in the U.S. at a time when the U.S. is asking the international community to more closely monitor Iran's research and development in nuclear energy?