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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?"
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.
NYT Story
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.
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.
"Windfarms are, in my experience, very beautiful, quiet, aesthetically pleasing things."
Huh? Windfarms in my experience are anything but quiet, with each windmill making "woosh-woosh-woosh" sounds as the blades turn and the generator in each making a high-pitched whine. When you have farms bigger than a dozen or so, you can hear them from miles away.
While I for one think they sound cool and wouldn't mind living near one, I know I'm in the small minority. I also like airplane noise.
this huge $44Trillion debt that is going to bite us in the ass in the next few years especially with these tax cuts,
The Federal Gov't budget was $2.1 Trillion for 2002. The tax cuts are $35 Billion/yr.
In comparison $75 Billion/yr goes to family farmers who have been obsolete for 40 years now, $344 Billion for defense, $460 Billion for Social Security and $850 Billion for welfare programs.
Here is a good graph showing national debt as % of gdp. We are not any worse off then we were in the '90s or the '60s.
The 2003 Senate Energy Bill (enter S.14 into "bill number") thomas.loc.gov offers loan guarantees for the construction of 7 new nuclear reactors in the US, as well as a new $1.1Billion nuclear plant in Idaho to produce hydrogen. If these are steps you want taken, you should write a letter to your Senators telling them how much your vote depends on their support of this bill.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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
sPh
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
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
-- from the AWEA FAQ, 2002, emphasis mine.
Oil leakage is an old-technology problem,and then only in the case of poor maintenance. New turbines, like the Lagerwey we built in Toronto, don't use hydraulics.
Turbines failing in high winds seldom, if ever, happen. New generator technology allows wind turbines to generate -- small amounts of power, admittedly -- in winds you can barely feel. There's nothing generates bad feeling like a stopped wind turbine.
The installations in Denmark and Germany, for example, were placed with more care and don't kill birds. Right now Denmark is getting 20% of its power from wind farms.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
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.
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!
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area
I guess we can shut down all our other powerplants then: according to Wind Farms and Wind Farmers, the Tehachapi Wind Farm in California is 40 square miles (25000+ acres), and the San Gorgonio Pass farm is even bigger at 70 sq miles... They don't say how big the Altamont Pass farm is, just that these are the three largest windfarms in the world, so I expect it to be similarly sized...
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
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.