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Texas Tells Cape Wind "You're Not First Yet"
longacre writes "Cape Wind is making headlines for being the first offshore wind farm to earn federal approval, but it still has plenty of legal hoops to jump through before groundbreaking. Texas, on the other hand, requires no review — state, federal, or otherwise — to build wind farms off its shore. Texas energy expert and Popular Mechanics senior editor Jennifer Bogo talks to Texan energy leaders who are confident they will beat Cape Wind to the punch for the distinction of having the first functional US offshore wind farm. 'I was about to write a press release to congratulate Cape Wind for getting their approval,' says Jim Suydam, press secretary of the Texas General Land Office, 'and let them know when they're done jumping through hoops up there they can come build off the Texas Coast.' Despite its reputation as an oil-addicted, non-environmentally-friendly, conservative state, Texas's existing land-based wind farms actually produce four times more electricity than California's."
I'm not American but it's good to see public administrations (a) competing, and (b) trying to beat one another to be in the first line of renewables.
There is a picture of a mechanical engineer working on renewables which will cause some Slashdot readers suddenly to want a career change.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Living in the UK for the last year, I've seen a lots of investment in wind here. On the horizon here in Edinburgh, there's a pretty substantial wind farm. Flying back home I noticed there's another large one in the waters between Ireland and Wales.
Yeah, Mexico will probably blow more "wind" than every other Country, with all their Chilli con carne...
You know, it's easy to mock Texans (from a safe distance) but there's a fully fledged bastard of a good point here. Regulation doesn't produce things. Government doesn't make anything. By and large, government just means worthless expense, and pointless obstruction.
Given the choice between trusting The People, or trusting that small subset of The People who live by taxing the rest of us and telling us what's good for us, I think I'm going to have to call it for The People.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We were ranked fourth - if considered a country (which we already do ourselves...)
Texas wind farms are actually restricted to produce only 10% of the State's energy.
Real time data is available from the following:
http://www.ercot.com/
And again, we have our own Grid. There is the East, the West and Texas.
I still wonder that the technology-oriented /. crowd doesn't understand a major problem with almost all energy sources. The source of wind power (wind energy) is NOT "safe" energy. Removing energy from the wind affects climate, migration, pollination, seeding, and probably other factors I haven't considered.
Pulling out small amounts of wind energy may be harmless; pulling out gigawatts will affect the environment. Why would anybody think that it would have no impact?
Only solar energy has a chance at being "safe". All solar energy is eventually returned to heat energy, so capture it or use it, we still get heat. There are issues with building the cells and boilers, but considering only the power itself shows that the safest energy source is solar.
Wind may be a nice complement, but our efforts should be directed at solar energy for the major source of our power.
I missed posting this in the last Cape Wind Farm story. I read this book a couple of years ago and its description of nimby politics is chilling.
Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Hopefully their fight about who's first should blow over soon.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
That could really take the wind out of their sails.
Try the fish.
Subject says it all.
The coast is going to be a strange place in 80 years with wind farms a mile deep around our coast. The ultimate naval great wall?
moox. for a new generation.
Mainly, because the only scenic vistas off the Texas coastline are of oil slicks and passed-out coeds from South Padre Island.
If wind is solar power, then so is oil.
Oil is energy from the sun converted via photosynthesis and has been stored all these years.
THAT'S HOW THE SHEEP DIE!!! They walk out into the ocean to look at the windmills and drown! It's so obvious!
Conservativism excludes suddenly building 50,000 nuclear plants today because we just discovered a new reactor design, replacing our coal power with solar, and putting up tons of wind farms; just to find out that nuclear plants have some unexpected flaws even in the new design that we don't know how to handle, solar power is about 3.2 times as expensive as we thought since the panels last 20 years but after 3 years they're at 30% of their original operating efficiency, and wind farms draw their energy from weather patterns and thus have drastic impacts on the global climate.
Everyone seems to want to implement their brand new idea today, now, and replace all this old junk that's worked for years but has known serious flaws. Every time someone decides they should replace the power grid, or cars, or our economy (regulatory laws) with something much better they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should emit some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skull until they achieve enlightenment. Replacing our dirty coal and oil plants with something entirely different might be a good idea; the stopgap of upgrading the equipment to be clean-running is an immediately good idea, though, and much better than pulling the plug on the mass scale and putting something new and trendy but only vaguely understood in place.
Forward-thinking is completely useless and even dangerous without forethought; forward-thinking should only be done in a controlled, thought-driven manner that encourages constant thought and constant review of prior ideas until we've refined them enough to drop them in on a small scale. Once things go smoothly on the small scale, we can start cautiously implementing them on a larger scale, going back and fixing things as we discover issues and rolling the changes into continued deployment. Yes, it takes 50 years instead of 5; if this matters, you did something extremely wrong.
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OMG! People doing things without permission! Unregulated activity!
Oh. Wait. It's "Green". That makes it ok. Only climate denialists ever oppose anything Green. But does Texas subsidize these wind farms? If not they are still evil. It's Texas,after all. We have to find something evil in everything they do.
I know. I bet Texas wind farms kill birds (California ones don't, of course: they are properly regulated).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm interested to see what slashdotters have to say about this report, which says wind energy makes coal plants have to run intermittently rather than at steady state, which causes more pollution than just getting all the power from coal in the first place.
Uh, how do you take wind power before it's wind? Really, I'd like to know.
Now how much trouble has the US city caused in reducing wind power? How much trouble has removing forests so you can plant miles of corn caused in increased winds?
Now how much of the energy of the wind is taken by windmills?
How much would the wind slow down to make the kinetic energy loss equal US consumption?
Hint: that last one is of the order of 10-4m/s. Do you notice 0.1mm/sec change in the wind speed???
As maxume noted, you have both diesel and LNG. According to the DOE, 'Alternative Fuel' vehicles are approximately 60% LPG(Propane), 5% ethanol, ~2% electric, 20% Natural Gas.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/issues_trends/fig5.html
So I'll add ethanol, bio-diesel, and hydrogen*.
*Though the best generation method would use electricity; it's better to burn the NG in the engine than to crack it into hydrogen for that purpose.
I don't read AC A human right
We're talking about a state that used the wrong glue on the big dig to deadly results. Hell, when they were painting the lines for RT 24 they used the wrong paint. (They managed to find a paint that eats asphalt. You should see it, all these gouges up a couple miles of highway everywhere there used to be a white line. I wonder how much that cost to fix.) Yeah, against that I figure Texas has a really good shot at having the first working offshore wind plant. (Yes, I live in Massachusetts.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Uh, how do you take wind power before it's wind? Really, I'd like to know.
solar panels?
We had to wait for Ted to die.
Is this really the best time to be bragging about lax regulation of offshore energy production in Texas?
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Not only do they have a fair amount of wind, it tends to be consistent and no extreme.
Other places have higher winds, but they can damage the turbines. Other places have steady winds but they are interspersed with calm periods.
I went to W. Texas a few years ago and there seemed to be a steady stream of trucks carrying turbine parts down the roads. I heard of land owners forming associations (a "Wind Union" so to speak) to negotiate with the power generation companies for better leases.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
First wind farm!!
I'd rather have the nuclear plant, personally. Yay Jobs!!! Followed up by the wind farm. Oil/Coal? I'd probably end up moving.
Hmm... How to put it: For a power plant/farm of the same capacity, much less production, a whole lot more people are going to be living 'next'(IE in sight of) to the wind farm as they would to the nuclear plant.
Add in that a modern nuclear plant might actually be safer - toss up enough wind towers to replace the power a nuke plant produces and you're getting into statistical possibilities that one of the towers will fall and crush somebody, blade break, whatever. Heck, you might get more fatalities from traffic accidents by maintenance vehicles. Discounting Chernobyl(the textbook on how to NOT build/operate a fission power plant), the death rate for nuclear power plants is less than one worldwide, per year.
For the amount of economic activity, that's actually hard to beat.
I don't read AC A human right
We get a small percentage of our electrical power from oil so why is everyone comparing wind to oil production?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I wouldn't mind a wind farm around here. We do have one turbine, but I personally don't mind those things.
kdawson, you and your stories can go to hell. Texas is ten times the state yours will ever be.
Houston has lots of piecemeal regulations that would be called zoning in other places.
However, folks should note that Houston is a great place to live. It's flat, ugly, and polluted and I love it. :-)
The lack of formal zoning works for us. It allows developers to keep prices low so traditional "single-family home on a plot of land" housing is strikingly more affordable here than in most places. For most people, that one advantage outweighs all others.
There are drawbacks, of course. The lack of zoning means that you must own a car unless you're very poor and forced to take the bus or you make a special effort to live within walking distance of a train station. Even then, the car-focused layout of the city strongly discourages walking. Luckily, about half of everything worth seeing in Houston (I know some Houston resident will want to stone me for this) is within walking distance of a train station. That means the city has finally become livable without a car for middle-class folks who make the effort to plan where they live and work. Crazily enough, the city is now a good tourist destination *if* the tourist knows enough to keep within a few hundred yards of a train station for their entire stay. While sidetrips are possible, the ubiquity of cars in Houston means that the taxi service is *terrible* in just about every way. The careful tourist will want to hire a limo, something that's easy and cheap compared to other cities. (There are limo services that are actually just upgraded taxis and cost little more for a *much* improved ride experience.)
Enough about Houston. I could drone on for hours. It's a hugely mixed bag but I love it.
'course coal has its own bigger problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan
Wind turbines don't slurry downhill and suffocate children in toxic waste.
Paint that eats asphalt? Please, paint did not let the asphalt breathe and soak in water, which caused in issues in the winter. Should they have known that? Yes, but apparently it's a new technology. If they didn't use it, you would've been complaining that Taxachusetts is still using decades-old paint technology, instead of this newfangled thermoplastic paint that's working so great in Texas.
http://wbztv.com/curious/white.paint.lines.2.1021788.html
So yeah, now they will have to repave Rt 24 earlier than scheduled (and it was already scheduled for repaving).
California, on the other hand, is "investing" in bloated public sector union salaries and pensions. Guess who'll be better off?
Thanks for the clarification. Still I don't expect them to repave it anytime soon. (Actually looking at the article it's from a year ago and they haven't started on my end of 24. Oh I wouldn't have complained if they stuck to old proven technologies for painting. (I'd at least hope if they're going to use new techniques it's because they're cheaper or something. Actually I'm of the opinion that bleeding edge is for suckers.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Texas understands this probably better than any other institution in the world. It was the largest world oil producer, and one of the first places in the world that oil production plateaued and has now been declining for 30 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_Oil_Production_1935_to_2005.png
It was one of the first places in the world to regulate production to moderate oil prices. It was one of the first governments to have a department that produced reports on reserves and depletion, and served as a model for the creation of OPEC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_of_Texas
The companies and petroleum engineers here first discovered the increasing discovery and production costs of marginal oil finds, and figured out methods to temporarily push down recovery costs.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/OO/doogz.html
We are the cradle of the world oil industry, though our influence has been slowly waning over 20 years. Our success at pushing the limits of oil production probably gave us slightly too optimistic view of its future. There are many better references than I quickly pulled here, but this is what I remember from reading several books on the topic. I do think we have been lax about transitioning out of the oil industry. The oil price shock of the 70's gave us an initial push, but lessons are easily forgotten with time. Our one saving grace is a tendency toward less regulation and free enterprise, so investors, researchers, and inventors come here to commercialize their ideas.
... which never have these problems:
Deepwater Horizon pics
Not that this means we should ignore wind turbine problems, but seriously - we ought to develop a sense of perspective. A wind turbine breaks, and you've broken a wind turbine (typically they're spaced away from everything, so collateral damage will be pretty minimal). An oil rig goes down, and, well... you can read the news and look at the pictures.
I never knew people burned horses to power automobiles.
In fact, we knew very well that drugs affected the unborn. In fact, the thalidomide tragedy was almost completely avoided in the US, because that worthless government agency, the FDA, refused to grant authority to market it in the US until potential adverse effects were studied further.
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the families of those who died in them.
Oh, come on - you can't be serious. "Communist" China bears about as much resemblance to communism as Swiss cheese does to Switzerland. They're communist in name only. The point is that their problems are defective because companies there can and do get away with ignoring regulations, to the extent that regulations even exist.
Geez, every time we start talking about wind energy in this place, someone trots this one out. I'm not going to go to the trouble of looking up the reference again, but suffice it to say that we could extract wind energy sufficient to meet the entire world's supply of electricity, and still not be using more than a tiny fraction of all the wind energy in the atmosphere. It's nowhere near enough to affect anything. This argument is just plain dumb.
It's amusing to see the summary, comments, etc. that use the word "first". It seems that offshore wind farms have been built, and it's not too hard to find information about them.
But I suppose this is a story in the American media, and to most Americans, if it didn't happen in the US, it didn't happen.
To be fair, I'd guess that most American civil and electrical engineers are aware of the history.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
That rig was working in the water off of Venice, Louisiana. It's very deep water there and as a result is favored for deepwater sportsfishing. If you sail out of Venice, it doesn't take nearly as long to get to water with Marlin whereas the Texas Gulf Coast requires quite a voyage to get out to those depths. See the map on this page and look at how that Peninsula in Louisiana extends out to the edge of the gulf shelf. My experience in the gulf is from fishing, not oil, but it could be that the reason those folks are drilling off of Venice is because the petroleum deposits could be at the same footage below sea level, but with less soil between the ocean surface and the oil. Less actual drilling could make it more lucrative to run prospecting drill expeditions to find deposits. Just a guess.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
About five minutes after I posted I realised the post could be taken another way, but by then I was on the way to the office and it was too late.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."