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Cape Wind Ready To Bring First Offshore Wind Farm
An anonymous reader writes "The Cape Wind Project, a wind farm of 130 turbines to be built in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, can finally move forward as they have been given a green light by the US Minerals Management service. Leaders from labor, civic, and environmental groups across Massachusetts and the country hailed the release of the report, as it is the final federal environmental report needed for the long delayed and much scrutinized project to finally move forward. When completed, Cape Wind will be capable of supplying up to 420 megawatts of electricity, potentially offsetting as much as a million tons of carbon emissions and saving more than 100 million gallons of oil every year. But the environment wont be the sole beneficiary of Cape Wind. It will likely be a boon to out of work Massachusetts residents, as well, given that as many as 1,000 green jobs could be brought to the Bay State in addition to a significant supply of clean, renewable energy."
The two major roadblocks were this federal report and Ted Kennedy... Ted's bloated ass is in the hospital and the federal report gives the green light.
There was talk of this back when I was in Boston in 2001, it's great news it's finally coming to fruition! My only concern is for the overall turbine design and aging repair costs associated with a salt water environment. Other than that I'm looking forward to seeing this go up!
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
If anyone wants to read what the Alliance To Save Nantucket Sound wants to say about this, it's here.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Please, sweet jebus, read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector. Every dollar that goes into this project through taxpayer money is a dollar not spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc. All those local businesses will eventually see that reduced income and be forced to downsize. With government services, the most you can hope to do in the long term is break even. There is no competitive incentive to drive the service provider toward efficiency, and so public services tend to be the least efficient out there, as well as being the most prone to corruption.
Any thing can be made to seem cheap if you subsidize it with tax money. People only look at that one thing, and not at all the other things that are negatively impacted.
Is it just me or is "wind farm" a misnomer? I always thought of "farm" as production. "Wind farm" makes it sound like they're producing wind. Which is obviously hogwash. Producing electricity, sure, but they didn't call it an "electricity farm."
I know that N*Star already provides an option in Mass. of getting your energy from wind turbines for a smaller fee. I just hope other companies follow suit.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Sadly, when NIMBY is involved (as it was in this case), usually all it takes is a well-placed funeral (or the equivalent) to move the decision to finality.
think I'm joking right?
there's already a lawsuit
1300 raptors are killed annually. Among them are 70 golden eagles that are federally protected. In total, 4700 birds are killed annually.
although I'm sure these are a little better planned out then they're predecessors I still haven't heard anyone talk about this in a long while.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
Full disclosure: I am a libertarian with pro-environmental views and a penchant for cool tech like wind power.
On one hand, the rich Kenedy's of the world don't want their beautiful ocean views ruined by wind mills. Bunch of arrogant, rich, hypocrites that I feel pretty much sums up the Democrats.
On the other hand, how pissed would I be if someone installed that shit in my local national/state parks?
We have to ruin all natural areas? Nothing is sacred? We whine when Bush's DOI let exploratory gas drilling in some beautiful areas....I whined too. But does wind get a free pass?
Here's a case where I actually agree with both sides. We need clean energy, and we need pristine natural areas. Build these mufuckin wind farms in farmland.
THL phish sticks
Is it just me or is "wind farm" a misnomer? I always thought of "farm" as production. "Wind farm" makes it sound like they're producing wind. Which is obviously hogwash. Producing electricity, sure, but they didn't call it an "electricity farm."
dirt farm
-noun
a tract of land on which a dirt farmer works.
You can't take the sky from me...
One thing I think is funny is that every time I make a comment suggesting that right wing libertarians are less than 100% correct, it gets down modded in a few minutes, while they all whine that Slashdot has a left wing bias. But I don't care...
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Please, sweet jebus, read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector. Every dollar that goes into this project through taxpayer money is a dollar not spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc. All those local businesses will eventually see that reduced income and be forced to downsize. With government services, the most you can hope to do in the long term is break even. There is no competitive incentive to drive the service provider toward efficiency, and so public services tend to be the least efficient out there, as well as being the most prone to corruption. Any thing can be made to seem cheap if you subsidize it with tax money. People only look at that one thing, and not at all the other things that are negatively impacted.
Oh thank you for the Economics 101 lesson, I needed it so dearly. Could you please explain to me how they plan to build these windmills? They will probably be imported from Turkey, right? Not a red cent will be spent on local people or bring local jobs?
... well, I hate to break it to you but he was still paid. He still bought food for our family with that money. It wasn't magic money that flew away to China once the government spent it on something. Nor do I expect this windmill project to be entirely outsourced to another state or country. This creates jobs which in turn gives the local folk money to be "spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc."
My dad poured cement for the foundations of about a hundred windmills on Buffalo Ridge in Minnesota. Oh, but the project was government subsidized so
Your explanation is no better than my explanation which looks a very complicated situation with many complex irrational variables in a paragraph of two year old logic. Get real.
I generally don't like subsidizing anything but your argument is a fallacy and I will pass on your suggestion of reading that book.
Both the military and the contractors are operating with U.S. taxpayer money and inadequate accountability. Inneficiency and coruption are not exclusive to taxpayer funded operations, but private businesses with a profit motive and a need to compete for customers are at least motivated to please _some_ customers. The military and contractors please nobody.
Furthermore, I have th choice of not funding businesses who want my custom, but the government takes my tax contibutions under the explicit threat of violence and improsonment and then used my taxes to act anauccountably in Iraq. If the governemnt didn't have my tax money, they couldn't use it immorally.
You obviously have never been in the military if you think the military ever does anything efficiently.
So the fact that there has been one in denmark for quite some time doesnt count or what?
http://www.hornsrev.dk/index.en.html
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
and with less dead birds just by subsidizing a real mass transit system for the city of Atlanta.
The biggest problem with this argument is that it's completely inaccurate. Its not being paid for with taxpayer money... now. It's being paid for with taxpayer money a couple years from now, plus a couple years worth of interest. The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
That may seem like a trivial distinction, but if that raises consumer confidence and restores the US (and world) economy even just a little bit sooner, then it's absolutely a good thing. Plus, unlike the other oft cited case of this (war spending), we actually get something out of it other than craters and rubble -- in this case, wind turbines.
My hand to God. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled.
Note: When I said "this argument", I meant the GP's, not yours.
My hand to God. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled.
Don't forget the Daily Show: :)
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=91140&title=jason-jones-180-%E2%80%93-nantucket
From six months ago, so some links may be dead...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=609029&cid=24137949
Atmospheric Thermal Depletion, baby.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
It's about national security stupid. It means we're less dependent on OPEC and the King of Saudi Arabia. And, yeah, the cost of energy will probably decline somewhat too, but that's a perk.
But I disagree with the offsetting argument. The demand for energy is just going to go up to meet the increasing supply.
There's been a decades-long fight by activist shareholders to try to get corporations to actually answer to the shareholders. Especially in very large corporations with dilute control, it's not clear who management actually does answer to, if anyone. Perhaps the board, but then the boards are so terribly intermingled with management and between companies that they hardly constitute an effective advocate for the shareholder.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A lot of modern business is predicated on coercion, though you're correct in that it's less coercive than actually, 100% forcing you to pay them. Usually, it's by manipulating markets so that you're limited to a choice of paying them or going entirely without the service, sometimes even forcing you to go without vaguely related services if you opt out. For example, the infamous "Microsoft tax" is an effective use of market power by Microsoft to coerce consumers into purchasing Microsoft products whether they want them or not, by requiring OEMs to bundle them with new PCs. The consumer still has the choice not to buy PCs from OEMs at all, but they don't have the choice to simply not buy the Microsoft product.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is no such thing as renewable energy !
Usable energy sources basically comes in 3 forms : Nuclear fusion, nuclear fission and kinetic energy.. and all of them are just transformation of mass into energy.
Oil & coal is nothing more than stored energy from the sun's nuclear fusion. (the result of the high pressure decay of photosynthesizing organisms).
Wind energy is just grabbing the energy from the sun's nuclear fusion power & earth' momentum.. Tide generators are solely tapping into the leftover kinetic energy from earth' spin, the moon's movement around earth & earth movement around the sun..
Geothermal energy is just tapping into earth' radioactive decay energy (which thanks to earth' interior's fairly adiabatic environment means it's being kept in store for a long time).
So..
What do they mean by "renewable energy ?"
(and I'm not going to go into the "No CO2" ads I've seen recently which - were they ever successful - would mean the end of all photosynthesizing organisms on earth - since they would be depleted of one of their food!).
--Ivan
But if the government is doing all sorts of borrowing, then they're competing with all the other people who would like to borrow, and that does impact the economy. It raises the (real) cost of borrowing money. And, especially in today's economic climate, where it is so very difficult to borrow money and government bonds are nice and safe (... well, by comparison ...) it's a real drain on economic growth - how much is hard to gauge exactly, but it's still a very real effect.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
won't |wÅnt|
contraction of
will not.
wont |wÃnt; wÅnt|
adjective [ predic. ] poetic/literary
(of a person) in the habit of doing something; accustomed : he was wont to arise at 5:30 every morning.
People aren't loaning because there's physically no money left. People aren't loaning because they can't tolerate the risk, especially when we just went through a crisis where our risk models catastrophically failed. The safest entity on the planet to loan to is the government of a superpower.
My hand to God. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled.
There once was a man from Nantucket Whose dick was so long he could suck it He said with a grin As he wiped off his chin If my ear were a cunt I would fuck it!
Seeing you Americano's hate Wind power so much, Canada is sending the sludge & tailing pond water from the tar sands south for you guys.
Enjoy.
Wind will not be the way of the future. This plant needs 1000 people to produce 420mw of power in a year. San Onofre Nuclear power station produces 2400mw of power (1200 per reactor) and while I can't see the number of people employed there, I'm guessing it isn't much more than 1000 people either. With a negligible carbon footprint and insignificant risk of meltdown (I used to live nearby, was never worried). Oh and San Onofre doesn't care if the wind stops blowing...
If this keeps up, don't be surprised if your electric bill triples people.
...in bed
I'm not arguing that they have an obligation to provide me with specific goods or services; but that it reduces individual freedom and is a form of coercion if they attempt to prevent others from providing me goods or services unless I purchase their goods and services as well. This is particularly problematic when entities have monopoly power and so can coerce others into accepting such contracts.
In general, I only consider contracts valid when entered into by individuals with roughly equal bargaining power. A contract signed by a destitute man desperate for lunch, with a megacorporation who has achieved a monopoly on food supply, is not a "meeting of the mind".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Having monopoly control over, say, food, means that there is no "lack of duress caused by the other party". The corporation has gotten itself ownership of all food, so now anyone who wants to eat must pay it.
My point is precisely that in monopoly situations such as that, it is not the case that "other options [are] available".
In the Dell example, I wish to buy a PC from Dell, which they would like to sell me. Microsoft is not involved in this transaction, as it does not involve their products. However, they exercise their monopoly power to forbid Dell from doing business me me, unless they force me to purchase a Microsoft product---i.e. force me to sign a separate contract with someone who was not party to the original proposed contract.
In short, I generally take Thomas Jefferson's view that the goal is individual liberty, and the means depends on the situation---which is why Jefferson was generally opposed both to powerful governments and to large corporations.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
See subject...
The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
What can happen *now* is that other countries can see our huge debt and decide it's not a good idea to trade with us. They'll want nothing to do with our currency if they see that we have no intention of paying back our debts, that our government is essentially "owned" by other governments. This is one effect of the disastrous economic bailouts that have already been passed under Bush and are soon to pass under Obama.
if that raises consumer confidence
Why would it? You've simply increased uncertainty about the future. That drives people to save more, not spend more, no?
we actually get something out of it
Your false presumption is that it would not happen otherwise. Why wouldn't it?
if that raises consumer confidence
In addition, why is consumer confidence important? If you put your money in a bank, it doesn't sit there idle. It's used by the bank to invest in productivity. The more people save in banks, the more capital banks have to loan out to companies to expand their businesses and create jobs. People who live paycheck to paycheck have no savings, and thus no investment toward the future. They hold their own, but do not advance the economy. Buying products is the end result of production, not the cause. It is savings that made those products possible.
Saving money is the right move now for everyone, and that is why you see everyone doing it - it just so happens that what works best for the individual also works best for the economy.
Imagine my joy at finding nearly the whole discussion hijacked by Ferengi who spent all their time talking about economic models and contracts.