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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.'"
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.
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."
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.
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. "
Yes, but what happens when all the politician's move away because these wind turbines are an eyesore? Is it easy to relocate the turbines to wherever the politicians relocate to?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
When the wind stops, just connect a whole lot of fans to Flander's house.
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.'"
From what I understand, the objection of the Indian tribes was that it might disturb ancient burial grounds that are on land that used to be above water but now isn't. I find it hard to believe they've kept track of where any of those burial grounds are since they've presumably been underwater for many decades, but I suppose we could find them by burying dead pets in the ocean floor and seeing which ones come back to life, then simply avoiding those areas.
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.
How many worthwhile places have you gone in a single step?
AFK
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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.
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.
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.
And when the wind stops, make sure you have candles handy...
This may just be a wry comment, and not an attempt at serious criticism, but this point is often brought up to criticize both solar and wind power. And certainly it sounds like a serious problem since, after all, existing power systems are on-line all the time, and having a major aspect of the power system dependent on something as fickle as weather introduces serious unresolved problems into power grid management.
Doesn't it??
No, it doesn't.
The reality is that even "base load" (constant output) plants get shut down for extended periods for maintenance of various kinds, not infrequently unpredictably due to equipment problems. And, due to large fluctuations in power demand across the daily cycle (which can be unpredictable due to weather) there must be special expensive peaking power plants anyway.
It turns out that managing a diverse national power grid has a substantial component of solar and wind power is exactly like managing one that doesn't. A lot of solar and wind power necessarily means many plants spread over a vast geographical area, and while the wind may die (or the sky may cloud over) down in one place, it will be blowing hard (or shining brightly) in others. The power fluctuations are no worse than fluctuation in demand, and both are addressed in the same way - by having peaking capacity in with costly peaking plants, or some energy storage method, and by having redundancy in base load plant capacity.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
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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.
the U.S. Energy Information Administration would disagree with you there. They claim (data from 2008, report released Jan 21st 2010) that 1.1% of the U.S. electrical power is generated from Petroleum products while 3.1% is generated by "Other Renewables" (solar, wind, etc)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/figes1.html
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 that is true and not just made up then why is it that France is building new Nuclear plants all the time? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Nuclear_Power Are you saying the French are better then us at something? Are you saying the French insurance companies know something the US based ones do not? Come on people. Just actually do some research and then stop making shit up when you oppose Nuclear Power on Slashdot. Nuclear is done correctly with new technology actually has the potential to REDUCE the amount of Nuclear waste we have and at the same time can be designed to be passively safe meaning in the event of a complete power failure the system would still not go critical. Now I can honestly say I want Nuclear Power and I WANT it in my own backyard.
Many of the wind turbines at Altamont pass are of the older, smaller variety. The blades on these small wind turbines rotate very quickly and are harder for birds to detect. The larger blades of modern wind turbines are less dangerous to birds. This is probably why the judge made a distinction between the various types of turbines installed at Altamont.
The law you propose to limit liability has already been enacted. Its called the Price-Anderson act of 1957 (described in detail at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html). It limits the liability of nuclear plant operators, but requires insurance. The current liability limit is about $10 billion. All the utilities pay into a common insurance pool that provides coverage for off site damages in case of an accident, currently up to $8.6 billion. Combined with $300 million in coverage for each reactor, the cost of any accident is insured up to $8.9 billion.
Despite this insurance being covered, it has been Wall Street that has been wary of the financial risk of nuclear plants due to massive cost overruns that occurred in nuclear plant construction in the 1970s along with demand for electricity that did not grow as projected by the utilities.
Here is possible argument. Our dependance on foreign oil is clearly for transportation and not electricity generation, but our use of oil for transportation will always be financially motivated. The cheaper we can make electricity by investing in the future of renewable energy, the easier a transition to eletric (hybrid and full) cars can be. It is already possible to recharge your hybrid car with electricity, just as you can refuel it at the pump.
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.
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:
your a fucking retard, i this is the 3rd hit on google.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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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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).
Vertical axis turbines (which is what I think you're describing) aren't as efficient as horizontal axis turbines where every part of the blade on every part of the cycle experiences maximum lift from the wind.
The massive horizontal axis turbines that have a single support column with a rounded top instead of a scaffolding (like the Altamont Pass turbines, which encouraged raptors to nest on them causing much of the problem) are more than good enough with regard to bird strikes
The enemies of Democracy are