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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.'"
'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'" I thought that was why the Department of Energy was created.
As a resident of SE Mass, I'm thrilled. Just think: Massachusetts has enough windy coastline to power most of the state with turbine farms. All we need to do is go through this process another 30-40 times! We should be done by the year 2500 or so!
The Wampanoag Indian tribes, I totally respect their position about the burial ground.
Ted Kennedy was just a hypocrite. He was all for green energy EXCEPT when it was in his back yard.
It’s about time this was passed. Now maybe they can put these wind farms on the Great Lakes also.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
All the other objections were just bullcrap political cover for the real reason the project never got off the ground until now; Senator Kennedy didn't want to see the turbines in HIS view. Now that he has went to Hell progress will be rapid.
Democrat delenda est
Nuclear doesn't produce that much waste. Especially if we could reprocess the fuel. In the end you get a few tons of waste that's hot for a couple hundred years, but that can be dealt with better than the tons of crap coal spews out a day. It's just that we've had 30+ years of people scaremongering about Nuclear energy.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Bean town gets the first windmill farm.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Government approves offshore wind farm, with the caveat that they are responsible for the cleanup of wind spills.
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.
Basically we have some choices;
1) Invest in newer, cleaner forms of energy
or
2) continue to destroy the environment, kill oil rig workers and coal miners, and rely on oppressive regimes in oil producing nations, e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
AFAIAC, this is a sudden outbreak of common sense.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If Christians had said that it messed up sunrise services for Easter would you have been respecting their position too?
Mass transit authorities put trains under cemeteries all the time, why should these guys be any different?
Oh and they have really good leadership too
http://boston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/campaignviolations021109.htm
"In February 2009 Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe chairman Glenn A. Marshall pleaded guilty to federal charges of violations of campaign finance law, tax fraud, wire fraud, and Social Security fraud – all in connection with the effort to secure federal recognition for the tribe."
That argument does not hold. Every power plant has downtimes for scheduled maintainance or because of accidents. You need backup power plants anyway for that. The fact that the downtimes happen more often for wind power than for nuclear power does not make it a lot more expensive or complicated to provide the backup power.
For some of these scenarious (emergency shutdown of a power plant) you need special power plants (gas turbines usually) that can quickly produce additional power. Both coal and nuclear are completely unsuited to fulfil that task.
As far as the environment is concerned it does not really matter what type of plant you use for backup power as they run a relatively small portion of time.
The vast majory of energy can be produce by a mix of unreliable sources without brownouts as long as the resulting variance the you get after mixing can be covered by some quickly reacting reliable source with relatively low capacity.
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?"
Nuclear power does not create all the much waste. Unlike coal, we know where the waste goes.
Nuclear Waste: Amounts and On-Site Storage
"Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about seven yards deep. "
Electricity can be used to power electric cars.
To support a large number of electric cars you need a decent generating capacity and a good network.
If people have electric cars they don't need cars that run on petrol.
Petrol comes from oil.
More electric cars means less oil needed since there are fewer petrol cars.
Less oil needed means less dependence on foreign oil.
Stupid narrow-minded thinker!
A study showed that in the Netherlands, one third of the electricity could be reliably generated from wind. There is a link to the Ph.D. thesis at the bottom of the article.
The Netherlands has a long coast line, which makes it a very good location for wind energy. I don't know if the US has enough good locations to place wind farms to produce one third of electricity, but if it does not, then the problem with fluctuations in how much power is supplied to the grid will only be easier to manage.
In other words, you indeed cannot get 100% of your electricity from wind, but this is no reason not to build lots of wind farms today since you're nowhere near the limit yet.
You're right, if you take a short-sighted view.
But energy is fungible, and it gets more and more fungible as technology advances and energy gets more expensive.
Every bit of coal we save now is a bit of synthetic gasoline we can make 300 years in the future.
- don't block the sunset as much for the same reason
I was with you up until this point. This is Massachusetts, the east coast. As the Chili Peppers said, "The sun may rise in the east at least it settles in a final location."
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
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.'"
"Why won't electric cars significantly reduce our carbon output?" -- "Because they're still recharged by coal power plants."
"Why won't replacing coal power plants significantly reduce our carbon output?" -- "Because cars are still powered by oil."
Focus on any one solution and of course you'll find that it's not the entirety of the problem. That's why you don't focus on only one solution.
Not a typewriter
It's kind of funny that this happened around the time when MIT researchers talk about the posible impact of massively deployed wind turbines
Pardon the bad source, but I don't have time to really look into it.
America's first? Really? Are we that far behind the times?
Sad.
Did you even bother to read my post?
Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
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?
I've been living and working on Air Force bases for the last 15 years. People in the industry know how to find and take advantage of wind conditions as they are absolutley critical to airfield operations both in runway placement as well as ambient wind speeds that assist in the takeoff and landing of aircraft. This has been going on for nearly a century, so I think it is safe to say that the guys spending the big bucks on windfarms know what they are doing.
The down time excuse are pretty weak at best, and are usually held up by the NIMBY crowd.
Except electric cars, even if 100% powered by electricity from gasoline plants, would still be a massive improvement. Internal combustion engines have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 30%, but large stationary plants can afford to be much more efficient. Collecting the energy from a gasoline plant, piping it through wires to a person's home, putting it into a battery, taking it out of the battery, and operating an electric motor adds up (or, rather, multiplies down) to a total efficiency of... 48%. That's right, 60% more bang for your buck, even if nothing else changes.
The waste is denser than lead, keep in mind. It sounds like a lot, but in volume it really isn't.
The newest thinking for the waste is really simple and, frankly, surprising it wasn't considered before: Use deep drilling technology to drill a half dozen miles deep, drop it down there, and plug the hole behind it. Problem solved.
You don't really refute the GP's argument. Instead, you switch to an electric-car-as-savior argument. But wind turbines do nothing to address the deficiencies of electric cars (it's not like they're being held back by a shortage of electricity).
Electric cars would be great, if they didn't suck at doing important things that petrol-powered cars do. So until some dream of yours which you can't really articulate comes true, your electric-car-as-savior theory remains no more than an optimist's dream.
And, so, your cute exercise in word logic doesn't [in reality, today] solve our problem, and certainly has nothing to do with wind power.
(And, no, throwing money at a problem is not a sure way to solve it.)
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.
Hundreds of tons a year... Cry me a river.
As we speak hundreds of millions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste are getting blown out the top of chimney stacks of coal plants every year.
Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country,
The fallacy is that we can remain a "first world" country without reducing our oil consumption past the point where we can satisfy our needs domestically. The question isn't do we stop consuming foreign oil. The question is, do we do it deliberately before we are forced by the depletion of all sources including domestic, or do we neglect the problem until it's too late.
inefficient electricity production
Haha, no.
There's a lot of problems with wind power (mostly in the broad category of logistics), but efficiency isn't one of them. Modern windmills are very efficient.
The enemies of Democracy are
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Yeah, you just need to find the places where people don't mind the ugly behemoths rumbling all the time, high enough to be in a constant wind.
Sorta like the mountaintops that have become national parks and forestlands out here in the west. Cut down a bunch of those damn trees, move the hippie-treehuggers living in them to the city, and put up turbines. Or let the hippies live in the turbines in exchange for maintenance.
Look out, though. Those on the east coast are likely to start blowing the volcanic ash from Iceland back onto the US...
That's right, solar can't compete on an unsubsidized market, but oil can! Oh... I'm sorry, were we talking about the same thing? The fact that we subsidize perhaps the most profitable industry on the planet is patently absurd.
Here is a list of offshore wind farms
There aren't that many and all but a hand full were just opened in years that start with "20" (e.g. there are only 5 that opened in "19xx" and they are all "199x"...)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Maybe we could put it on a rocket and shoot it into space? Everything up there is constantly bathed in cosmic radiation anyway.
Or maybe we could put it back where it came from in the first place. Surely now that it has expended enough energy to generate all kinds of electricity, it must be less dangerous now that it was before?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
My point wasn't that electric cars will solve everything, I was questioning the GP's assertion that being able to generate lots of power cheaply (assuming a balanced network that this build would be a part of) can lead to results that don't always appear to be immediately linked.
He dismissed the "reduce dependence on oil" argument by saying that only a small percentage of power is generated by burning oil.
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil. Not all the barriers - you still need to make them cheaper, improve batteries, practicalities etc, but that's the second issue - these things will all improve anyway as time goes on. You can't state "why provide cheap energy, that's not what's holding back electric cars" and call it done. It's one of the factors to be overcome, but once it's solved doesn't mean the other factors weren't also being addressed.
Creating a solid, reliable power grid with effective generating systems will help to provide cheaper, cleaner electricity. This will have a knock on effect along the line - electric cars, cheaper manufacturing etc.
It was all about options and possibilities. If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
Cheaper electricity can bring down the price of aluminium and make it cheaper to make double glazed window frames, making them closer to the cost of UPVC ones, reducing the need for oil.
Energy is a huge part of everything. Anything that makes generating easier, more efficient or cheaper has a huge impact.
You'd think that people with ocean-side real estate would want something like this. Either that or we can just burn some more coal or oil and their houses can underwater instead. Would they still be land owners?
If you immediately try to go renewable 100%, you'll run into the problem that wind is intermittent, the sun doesn't shine at night and solar cells provide less power in bad weather, etc. But in the summertime, solar provides the most power just when you need the most A/C to power air conditioning. If you have to burn fossil fuel to cover the gaps, that's OK; you're covered and you don't need to import nearly so much from unstable or hostile regimes. In the long term, there are a number of possible mechanisms for energy storage to handle uneven availability of wind or solar. In addtion to batteries, you can pump water uphill to store both water and energy, use flywheels, reward people for using energy when it's highly available, etc. We'll end up using a mix of technologies, and that's a good thing, just like it's a good idea to diversify your investments.
For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll? And which Kennedy would that be?
Because it is true and simultaneously embarrassing to parts of the electorate. Ted Kennedy is who we are talking about here though the Kennedy family in general matters for this story - Ted until his death was merely the most prominent member of the family in recent years. He ostensibly supported green energy but when it was proposed to put a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts (his home state) he opposed it or at least opposed this particular wind farm. The opposition is more complicated than many here represent but there appears to be some credibility to the claim that significant opposition came from rich people (including the Kennedy family) opposed the wind farm on the grounds it would "ruin" ocean views from their properties.
Did you even bother to read my post?
Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
Right you are! And I might add that existing power grids already have to handle large short term power supply-demand mismatches due to the unpredictable nature of the... wait for it ... WEATHER! Sulimma cites hot weather shutting down nukes in Europe, but very commonly everywhere hot or cold weather (over huge areas) cause huge power demand fluctuations. That this occurs on the demand side rather than the supply side makes not a whot of difference in managing it.
Managing a nation power grid with lots of wind and solar power is exactly like managing one without it.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Apples and oranges. Scheduled downtime is just that - scheduled. You can plan around it, sometimes months or years in advance. Windpower's downtime isn't scheduled or predictable. Nor do entire plants shut down for accidents with any great regularity. So yes, it is more expensive and more complicated to provide backup power - as you cannot predict the frequency, duration, or level of backup required.
Apples and oranges, and then there are peaches.
Coal power plants undergo unplanned shutdowns about 6% of the time (nuclear plants are more reliable), in addition to the 6.5% of the time in planned outages. Day-night power demand variation is around 30%, and daily peak power demand can vary unpredictably (in the exact same sense that the wind is unpredictable) by 10% due to extreme hot or cold weather.
Wind power doesn't add any new level of grid instability until its use level exceeds 10% (i.e is at least half the size of the nuclear power contribution, and at even at much higher levels production variation can be handled the same way we handle most of the normal 30% day-night variation: throttling coal plants. We don't get into regimes where exotic or unusual backup power solutions are called for until wind grows to more than 20% of the grid (thus exceeding nuclear power's contribution today).
Really, you are greatly underestimating the amount of power balancing already required, and overestimating the severity of the wind production fluctuation problem.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There seem to be a large amount of /. posters who don't understand one of the biggest immediate benefits to wind+solar energy. Currently, if you don't want brown outs you have to build an eletric grid that can supply as much power as everyone could every try and use at one time. This causes us to spend way more in for large capacity power plants, and also lose a lot of energy in the distribution of energy itself.
So, when are the peak energy demands for the USA? In the middle of the day, and In the summer. Hmm, when are the peak production times for Wind and Solar (its the same!).
To fully move off things like coal, we would need to have better ways of storing energy, people are already working on this (gyroscopes, batteries, pumping water uphill), but that is the second step, not the first.
Once they get the rights to build casinos alongside the wind farms they'll come on board.
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.
The exciting thing is that with breeder technology, the world could run off existing nuclear waste for the next 500 years without opening a single new uranium mine. With breeder technology, even the background uranium and thorium in GRANITE becomes energetically and eventually economically viable (when thinking about uranium supplies in a million years or so).
As Finrod claims:
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.
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For some weird reason, I have never experienced a brownout in Germany with currently 16% renewable energies in the mix. I did, however, while I was working in California for a year. I suspect your brownout problems are caused by an ancient grid infrastructure and poor management. There is nothing inherently unmanagable about huge supply/demand fluctuations in a flexibly constructed grid.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
But it really sucks when they do. A non-trivial but undisclosed amount of radioactivity was released from three mile island. It must be significant, as many families have won lawsuits against them.
Modern reactor designs are getting safer but they're certainly not fail-safe. I agree that it's better than coal, but the "eco-mafia" has some legit concerns. Engineers still don't fully understand everything that happens in a pressurized water reactor. Trust me on this, I've heard it first hand from engineers working for one of the two major US reactor companies. Waste is also a huge concern. You can put it into a breeder reactor at extraordinary profit sucking cost to reuse the fuel and create byproducts that can be used for fusion bombs by rogue states if they're misplaced, or you need to bury it somewhere where there is no risk of it leaking for several hundred thousand years.
As much as coal sucks, nuclear is far from safe. While we're pretty much screwed if we stick to coal, the risk of another meltdown is small but non-zero and every new nuke plant increases those odds. Solar and wind offer nice alternatives.