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Offshore Windpower To Potentially Exceed US Demand
SpuriousLogic writes to mention that a new Interior Department report suggests that wind turbines off US coastlines could supply enough electricity to meet, or exceed, the nation's current demand. While a good portion of this is easily accessible through shallow water sites, the majority of strong wind resources appear to be in deep water which represents a significant technological hurdle. "Salazar told attendees at the 25x'25 Summit in Virginia, a gathering of agriculture and energy representatives exploring ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions, that "we are only beginning to tap the potential" of offshore renewable energy. The report is a step in the Obama administration's mission to chart a course for offshore energy development, an issue that gained urgency last year amid high oil prices and chants of 'Drill, baby, drill' at the Republican National Convention."
We can just build our wind turbines on that conveniently located plastic garbage island floating around in the middle of the pacific! I'll be auctioning off parcels next week on eBay. Be sure to bid early and bid often!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Yes. But the effect of erecting cities is far larger.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I'm sure there are laws about international waters, but does the closest state own the rights to waters offshore?
Yep, they're called Territorial Waters. And a country's Exclusive Economic Zone ends 200 nautical miles from shore (with some exceptions).
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
No.
A decent weather system churns terawatts around.
We'll only tap surface winds and they're a very small fraction of total wind energy.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
We don't need to send power from the coast to Kansas. Coastal areas are heavily populated and so the power will not need to travel very far to be used effectively. Kansas is a windy place, they will have their own land-based turbines.
These wind farms would not be in international waters. They would be on the continental shelf which are by definition national waters. We already patrol and scan these areas for evil dooers.
Electrical cables for wind farms would be more distributed and harder to disrupt than the current system of power plants.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Most transmission cables *today* are not made from copper.
Aluminum is a fair substitute (you just need 25% wider diameters -- actually less weight), and the price of aluminum is closely linked to the price of electricity anyway: if electricity becomes too expensive to produce aluminum, we won't need as much to distribute it.
They'd likely moor them to the seabed the way they do with offshore oil-drilling platforms.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Considering how uncommon it is for anything serious to go wrong in a nuclear power plant, I don't see how this is a hard choice.
Essentially what you propose is a form of government where all the laws are case law instead of black letter law. Technically, I think the name of your government is "kritocracy". An additional difficulty of government by contract is that lawsuit must precede legal action.
For example, under current law, a police officer can come and disperse a noisy party after 11PM in many neighborhoods. If it were merely a contract, you'd have to suit to get the party to disperse. Is this what you envision?
C//
Every undersea fiber cable has repeater boxes built into the cable every X miles to regenerate the signal. They are powered by electrical cables embedded in the line. Every undersea fiber cut also technically cuts a power line. Not to mention, the technology is pretty darn easy. You should have a GFCI outlet near your sinks and in your bathroom. They keep you from dying when you drop the blow dryer in the tub...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Salt water is.
Does it seem premature to declare this the savior of our energy troubles before you have even put up a single test/prototype site? What are the technical hurdles?
A company called SWAY has all of the details worked out, they just need funding for a prototype.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Despite the objection of Kennedy the Cape Cod wind farm is moving forward.
Its happening as you write. Just got back from a new field in Oregon. Coast farms are nothing new, and Texas is under construction. By the way, there's job growth in this sector. I think your argument is getting blown away daily.
What bothers me about these kinds of comments is that you have spotted a limiting factor, and announced that the whole concept is broken. There is a _lot_ of energy around us, most of which is provided to us by the sun. It doesn't rain everyday - yet we can store up energy and use hydroelectric power. A hydro dam does not have to be very efficient to meet our needs.
Likewise, wind farms can store the electricity - just not in a very efficient way right now. We can store it in the form of hydrogen - which has the extra benefit of allowing wind farms to be placed in very inhospitable locations. The small community located on island of Tristan da Cunha is located in the "roaring forties" in the south Atlantic. With constant winds and access to water - why couldn't they export hydrogen?
We don't have to be dependent on oil or coal to accomplish our goals - and I would think we would want to save nuclear for better objectives (use in space locations, like the moon).
This is all handled via the Law of the Sea treaty, which the United States Senate refuses to ratify but which applies to all federal agencies via executive order. The treaty is supported by everyone from Chevron to the U. S. Navy to Greenpeace. It's opposed by a few groups on the far right who've made the mistake of believing some false information passed on to them by radio talk show hosts and other sources.
The Law of the Sea treaty gives nations 12 nautical miles past their coastline as their territorial sea, where a country exercises near-absolute sovereignty. Nations also get up to 200 miles off their coastline as their "exclusive economic zone" or EEZ. Power generation from wind turbines could be considered economic activity, and therefore be regulated by the United States up to 200 miles offshore. Everything beyond that is international waters.
State authority, however, only extends to three miles offshore. Originally three miles offshore was the amount the United States claimed as its territorial sea. Under Clinton when we expanded our territorial sea claim out to 12 miles in line with the rest of the world, it was accomplished such that this claim only applies to the federal government and not to state governments.
Nobody in the industry takes a cavelier attitude towards bird and bat kills. The Altamont Wind Project and it's well-documented bird problems probably set this industry back 10 years. It was an example of a very poorly sited facility. From Wikipedia:
This idea that we in the industry discount bird and bat issues is false. The American Wind Energy Association, the leading trade association for wind developers, has sponsored a number of studies of the issue. This 132 page report from 2004 is just one resource discussing recent research: www.awea.org/pubs/documents/WEBBProceedings9.14.04%5BFinal%5D.pdf . This report from the American Academy of Science's presents a similarly scientific look at bird and bat fatalities: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11935&page=1. The Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative (http://www.batsandwind.org/default.asp) has fascinating video of bats encountering turbines:http://www.bu.edu/cecb/wind/video/, and has detailed discussions of proper siting and operation of facilities.
The better operations come in two ways -- (1) shut down the turbines during local migratory and breeding seasons; and (2) shut the turbines down at night when bat activity is at a maximum and power prices are at a minimum. By combining these two operating parameters, the bird and bat kills can be reduced to an acceptable level, while revenues to the wind mills decrease only slightly. This is particularly true since electricity demand is at its lowest during the spring and fall -- when animals are most likely to come into contact with the turbines. It's common for fossil units to shut down during this period for maintenance too, because the revenues do not justify the costs.
As usual, things are rarely as simple as we would wish. Generating power is not environmentally friendly. It just isn't. It's all about minimizing the bad parts.
As for nuclear giving "breathing room" - it appears you have been misled as to how long it takes to build a large thermal plant. It takes close to a decade just to build a large coal fired plant and you can think of nuclear as one of those with a few more complicated bits tacked on. Thermal plants scale up so the only way to do it is to build something big.
Okay, I looked the thing up. What I learned is that the radioisotopes in the waste have half-lives that are either less than 90 years or over 211,000 years, so that after 200 years the combination is about as radioactive as natural uranium ore. The latter, of course, is well above background level.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
"Do you realize the cost to maintain those thing? the cost to bring out new blades? Off shore wind is not practical on a large scale. Wind power for alrge scale will be freaking expensive."
May be true, but you should include that nuclear is certainly more expensive. Total cost analysis of nuclear (the only fair way to compare) rings in at about 20-25c/kWh. Wind is estimated at 5c. Even with deep sea turbines, it should be significantly less than any type of nuclear.
So why should we even waste our time with building any more nuclear plants? We should be able to easily replace existing nukes with solar thermal, wind, geothermal and decentralized PV (not to mention conservation) before the end of their lifespan.