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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."
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...
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.
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
I've never been in the military, but I was in a military family and did odd jobs for them for summer employment. I've also worked at a taxpayer funded institution and private companies. My experience is that government work is not appreciably less efficient than private businesses.
I used to think otherwise, until I saw how hilariously inefficient most businesses are.
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.
The military is still the most efficient employer I've ever had.
I think the military's increasing dependency on inefficient civilian contractors is what's causing problems. I remember in basic training we had certain administrative briefings done by this guy who bragged about leaving the military only to come back making 30 dollars an hour when they could have just used an E-3 or E-4. Many lower-level tech instructors joked about the same thing.
And then you have places like Blackwater -- if being a glorified security guard(though much more demanding than working for DHS) is your thing then you can make around 350,000 a year, though I hope to see that kind of excess come to an end very soon.
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
But with this we get the worst of both worlds... It's paid for with public dollars, but 100% of the ownership, and 100% of the profit go to a private sector owner (Cape Wind).
Don't let the propaganda fool you. The opposition to this project about who was, and who was, and who wasn't getting a cut of that money. The links in this summary only point to one side of the story. Good luck finding a single word on the Cape Wind site about where the funding is coming from.
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.
We must have radically different definitions of right wing.
Indeed, the one-dimensional political map normally used is hopelessly inadequate for even very basic purposes. May I recommend the 2D political compass?