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Government Approves First US Offshore Wind Farm
RobotRunAmok writes "In a groundbreaking decision that some say will usher in a new era of clean energy, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said today he was approving the nation's first offshore wind farm, the controversial Cape Wind project off of Cape Cod. The project has undergone years of environmental review and political maneuvering, including opposition from the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose home overlooks Nantucket Sound, and from Wampanoag Indian tribes who complained that the 130 turbines, which would stand more than 400 feet above the ocean surface, would disturb spiritual sun greetings and possibly ancestral artifacts and burial grounds on the seabed. But George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, hailed the decision, saying it was 'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'"
While I'm all for renewable energy, We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants so it would lead to brown/blackouts in the long run if it was taken up more. What we really need is a renewable energy that can provide a base load, then we start shutting down all the coal/nuclear power plants that create so much pollution.
So while this is good news, we really need to start working more on forms of renewable power creation where we can get a minimum load of them on demand or renewable energy will stay on the fringes.
Stupid hippie.
I was sortof following your argument until there...
On the long run, any coal you don't dig up and burn for energy is an ace up your sleeve on the international energy market: "Sure, we are interested in your coal, but better make a new offer else we'll have a closer look at our cubic kilometers of coal still buried under waiting-to-be-blown up mountains. And it would be a shame if something happened to the coal price, right?"
Well Nimby is hard to defeat.
Objections for marine deployment of this type of farm are mostly navigational (ships mostly skirt this area beyond nantucket Island but smaller craft and fishing vessels could see collisions), radar interference, and a whole bunch of people that want to push even visual impacts onto someone else. (Bird strikes are for the most part gross exaggerations, long since debunked.)
Driving in the west, I find the wind farms something majestic. I suppose I would not want one directly over my house, which is why the off shore solution is perfect for the eastern seaboard. These things are quiet, and have a proven track record of reliability. Standing up to the salt air may be an issue.
The Indian tribes build casinos on their own ancestral sacred grounds but somehow object to wind farms out on the water. This was never a sea-going tribe. But a few perks from Uncle Ted and sure enough a spirit dreamed up just last night will be annoyed.
Its odd that Kennedy's objections were enough to hold this project off under republican administrations, but as soon as he is dead, even the Democrats decide its good to go.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I actually thought that was the least reasonable argument. Saying "somebody was buried there once" is not a good argument for, well, much of anything. Spiritual beliefs aside, the one thing we're sure about today is that you aren't using your body any more when you're dead. That pretty much precludes your having any rights regarding it. How many people have been buried at sea? How dare you lay an undersea cable, or eat a fish? The whole thing is ridiculous. Everyone else has to buy land if they want their corpse to stay there, why should they be any different? I think it's been conclusively shown that being somewhere first is not enough, unfortunate or no.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
America's first? Really? Are we that far behind the times?
Sad.
We don't use any foreign oil whatsoever to generate electricity.
You got proof of that?
We use oil to generate 3% of our electricity. It's bigger than all "alternative" sources (like wind farms) combined. If we use less oil for electricity, we will need less oil overall, which will reduce demand for foreign and domestic oil alike.
If we have more electricity, we may use more electricity for home heating or cars, so this works on both supply and demand.
So unless you've got a credible citation for your claim, I'm going to say fie.
I know people in the area. They told me the biggest objections came from people living in NYC and Conn. who had summer and weekend homes in the area. The thing is some 15 miles off of the coast. The people most bothered will be on their yachts miles out to sea.
Can you really blame them? Take a look at the estimated visual impact of the wind farm:
/sarcasm
http://www.capewind.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=9&page=1
I don't know about you but I'd obviously rather stab my eyes out and burn down my vacation home than see those ugly filthy things on the horizon.
Why would you totally respect their position? They don't know if there are burial grounds there. From the Article: "would disturb spiritual sun greetings and possibly ancestral artifacts and burial grounds on the seabed. The ocean floor was once exposed land before the sea level rose thousands of years ago." So, thousands of years ago, some people may or may not have lived on some land that is now under sea. We'll probably never know, and the Wampanoag people don't either. Now everyone come back at me with claims about how accurate non-literate cultures' tribal histories are. Anyway, what the fuck is a "spiritual sun greeting", and why is this any less dumb than ancient carpenter worship?
Standing up to the salt air may be an issue.
The Dutch have had them for a couple of years, so there's at least some precedent and any issues they encounter are likely to give a 4 - 5 year heads up to this initiative.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Use nuclear waste as ... wait for it ...
radiation shielding.
One of the issues with nuclear energy is absorbing the high energy neutrons to generate heat. We can line the reactors with nuclear waste and the neutron bombardment would transmutate it from 100s of years to safe in decades.
I actually think they are rather beautiful. Certainly not a "natural" beauty, but there is something majestic about them as a feat of engineering. Now the noise is what would bother me, but I think they are planned to be sufficiently far away were that wouldn't be a problem.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Ted Kennedy, youngest brother of JFK (president) and RFK (US Attorney General and Democrat presidential candidate). Ted Kennedy was a polarizing figure, called the Lion of the Senate, famous for having driven off a bridge (killing the female passenger), drinking a lot, being liberal, and having a wicked Massachusetts accent. If not for the bridge incident, he quite possibly would have become president.
It's insightful because it is claimed that it was largely Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy of wanting alternative energy but not where he could see it (from his family's very expensive island compound) that prevented this project from going forward. flamebait and troll for the same reason, because some moderators feel that it was unfair to blame him, and bringing it up is a sore point among his supporters to stir up trouble.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"We wanted to build the church on an ancient Indian burial ground, but none were available in the area. We had to have it imported from Nantucket."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Currently, the main reason nuclear "planets" are not being built is not government regulation, but the fact that no insurance company will write a policy for a nuclear plant.
Until the pencil pushers at insurance companies decide that nuclear plants are safe enough to insure, there won't be new plants built. Either that or there will have to be a law absolving the energy providers of any liability in the case of an accident.
I'm not saying the plants aren't safe, the insurance companies are. Personally, I'd love to get cheap electricity from a nuclear power plant, as long as their built far away, say, in Arizona or South Carolina, where radiation can't do too much damage.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If we put them a little farther out, then they will be over the horizon and out of sight. At 25 miles out, a 400 foot structure would be hidden by the curvature of the Earth. Then it is just a question of power distribution, which is not much more complicated at 25 miles than at 10 miles. The continental shelf extends for well over 25 miles, so the water is less than 500 feet deep even at that distance.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I wonder how far off shore one would need to place a floating nuclear plant so that it is far enough away.
Assuming the worst devastation in the worst case scenario, how far would the damage go, and thus how far it would need to be out at sea to not affect the coast.
It's a crappy thing to do to the ocean, but still.
Another downside is that after a certain distance out, it is no longer US soil.
While I have no doubt at all that if our navy wanted to 'own' a small patch of ocean to park a plant on, they have enough ships to maintain it 24/7/365.. but at a huge cost.
Better us than them? Or very bad idea?
Bad quote. If you stored fuel rods that closely together they'd explode.
I'm not an expert in this sort of thing by any means but I don't think they'd actually explode. They would go critical, though, and possibly start a runaway chain reaction which would be bad enough. So you're certainly correct that it would a bad idea to stack them up that way. Not that anyone ever would. It was just an an example used to allow people to visualize the amount of nuclear waste that has been generated over the last 40 years.
This ain't rocket surgery.
As someone what lives on Nantucket that actually supports the wind-farm (unlike 99 percent of everyone else), people are against it for many reasons, which range from destruction of marine life, sight and sound pollution, fear it will hurt real-estate and tourism, that it will hurt the fishing industry, and fear that it will increase electric bills. I have no proof, but I think a lot of people would support it here, if it meant free electricity to all in and around Cape Cod.
From the French experience it is possible to an extent but incredibly difficult and expensive so it is very rarely done. It only takes a few moments to think about why it doesn't work very well - we're talking about working metal that is emitting very high levels of radioactivity so everything has to be done remotely and everything that touches it gets contaminated.
You'll notice that only journalists and others outside this field are pushing reprocessing - it's a view that is well and truly stuck in the 1970s and I wish those loud nuclear advocates would actually learn something about nuclear power.
However the existing depleted fuel rods could still be used by more recent designs that are a lot less fussy about their fuel - that's a much better idea than reprocessing. For instance Uranium fuel rods or even expired weapons material could be included with the Thorium fuel in an accelerated Thorium breeder reactor such as the one under construction in India at the moment.
California has only a few good sites for land wind farms - Altamont Pass, Pacheco Pass, Mojave, and Solano County are the big ones. All four now have big wind farms. Other than Altamont Pass, which is a big migratory bird corridor and has row after row of windmills, there have been few complaints. There aren't many remaining on-shore sites in California; we're about done with onshore wind. The Cape Cod people have been whining about their wind farm for a decade. Tough.
Offshore of Calfornia looks promising. Take a look at that high-wind area close to shore, west of Humbolt County. There's also a huge high wind zone south of Santa Barbara, and most of it is still on the continental shelf, so the water isn't too deep. I doubt there will be objections; Santa Barbara has already had off-shore oil wells.
I have always supported Cape Wind. But I need to take some wind out of the sails of some advocates. The truth of the matter is, most wind power is not economically viable. Far from being a negative factor to Cape Wind, this is actually a positive attribute. In most places in the US, the wind simply does not blow consistently enough to make harnessing it competitive with gas fired turbines and nuclear power. Mostly, this is because wind is not available 'on demand', but rather an 'opportunistic' power source. The current model of electric consumption is one of 'on demand' and therefore a surplus of electricity is not easy to harness, and has little value. This may change over time, as industries which consume vast amounts of electricity are reconfigured to be opportunistic consumers. They will enjoy low, bulk rates when that power is available, and otherwise either curtail their use or shut down entirely. It is conceivable that businesses will develop which store electricity when it is available cheaply and sell when it is dear. Though this business model is a difficult one to finance now, with our inefficient storage technologies, in the future it may be viable.
What we need from government and 'big business' is a reconfiguration of the electric grid to intelligently switch electricity to where it is needed (i.e. has the highest commodity cost at the moment), while at the same time being reliable and efficient (i.e. ultra-high voltage. That means bigger towers, folks!).
Net-metering is the start of what I have explained above, but it is a stop-gap measure. This is because alternative energy producers are paid for the energy that they MAY HAVE produced and contributed to the grid, even if the grid is not able to consume it at the time. This cannot continue indefinitely. There needs to be a rectification of the rules, as technology and the installed base of energy production becomes more flexible. Until this is accomplished, expect that projects like Cape Wind, and many others, will be subsidized by those power plants which are efficient in the short term (gas-fired turbines) yet have long-term disadvantages.
Bravo Cape Wind! But supporters need to be informed and honest.
p.s., even though I am logged in as 'drwho', I appear as anonymous when posting. This has been going on for some time. Slashdot mechanix, please fix.
For people who are complaining that wind tech/solar tech isn't there yet, I think you have to think of the politics behind this. If we get the ball moving now and get lawmakers and the public to overall have a good impression of these energy generation systems, when the technologies do improve it will be vastly easier to implement them. The biggest issue I see extends not only to clean tech, but all tech. America's energy infrastructure is incredibly aged and inefficient. Power consumption will continue to increase which will continue to strain the system. So even if our energy source is clean, there is still a large energy issue that needs to be addressed.
A friend of me lives in Germany in a small village in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. They actually live with the thing in their back yard and could not be happier! The power plant provides the town with some good income they invest in the local economy and infrastructure. People are actually moving *to* the town instead of away as with many small rural towns.
I've visited the power plant and they have a special visitor center where you can learn all about the specific processes used, from mining the fissionables to storing the waste in huge steel containers. But the best part about the exhibit is the cloud chamber, you can see all kinds of different radiation particles in the box of about 1 square meter (really awesome!). It really emphasized the fact that absolutely *no* radiation leaks from the reactor, the only trails you could see were random in all directions. In fact the kind gentlemen who showed us around told us that every single coal plant exhausts more radioactive radiation in one day than a nuclear power plant in a year!
I can also honestly say that I want nuclear power and I want it in my own backyard. Sadly nuclear is still on the decline here, mostly because people are very misinformed by the eco-mafia... If they knew that the alternative (coal realistically) is so much worse for the environment and health of locals (and that modern nuclear is completely different from Chernobyl) they would not protest. So I guess the only way is to properly inform people (so good move by E-On with their visitor center).
I don't know what everyone else's problem is, I think windfarms look really fucking cool. I was driving an interstate road I hadn't been on for a few years and they've put up some wind turbines, and they're damn impressive! I wanted to stop and take photos but I was in a hurry.
How many deaths are attributable to pollution from coal power? How many deaths are attributable to diseases that are commonly acquired from mining coal?
Your figures are effectively worthless.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.