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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.
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.
Removing energy from the wind affects climate, migration, pollination, seeding, and probably other factors I haven't considered.
Worldwide, forests dissipate orders of magnitude more wind energy than wind farms would if we provided all of humanities power requirements using them.
Even solar energy isn't "safe" by your definition, because widespread use of solar cells would alter the Earth's albedo.
Pirate Party UK
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
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Hopefully their fight about who's first should blow over soon.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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.
...
Only solar energy has a chance at being "safe".
You do realise that Wind energy is solar energy? So it doesn't matter how you pull the energy out of the system, you are still pulling it out.
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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.
The question is, does it matter if we pull out the solar energy before it turns to wind energy or will the lack of wind energy be harmful. It's one thing to take energy from wind that's already blowing around but different than taking it before it blows.
Have you ever compared the amount of solar energy falling on the planet with human energy usage? I don't know the exact figures but its a tad biased towards the solar energy side of numbers.
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THAT'S HOW THE SHEEP DIE!!! They walk out into the ocean to look at the windmills and drown! It's so obvious!
You do realise that Wind energy is solar energy? So it doesn't matter how you pull the energy out of the system, you are still pulling it out.
You do realize that petroleum IS solar energy? It just happens to be conveniently stored in a thick liquid form that's easy to burn and turn into mechanical energy.
:)
It all goes back to solar. My Jeep has been technically solar powered for years now
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.
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.
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
30% at THREE YEARS?
Where are you getting that information? I've seen nothing even close to that bad reported.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
You can probably come up with 30% overall by fuzzing the numbers a lot, but it'd be pointless and annoying. Solar farms do perform sun tracking and they're affected by the amount of sun light available; but the panels themselves won't likely die so much.
Still, back when we started talking about solar panels (like, AGES ago, not In The Year 2000), they were horribly inefficient AND they wore out quickly AND they were horribly expensive; yet there were people 30... 40 years ago that that were already willing us to go 100% photovoltaic and avoid the horribly environmentally damaging evil nuclear mutant factories. Back then, claiming that under that sort of stress the panels might not retain even 50% operating efficiency for 3 years might have actually been accurate. Either way, it's immaterial to the core argument.
The technology has matured enough to be examined in real use, and indeed I think it has been deployed here and there; we've now got case studies to make, both on the life and cost of the panels and the farm as a whole (maintenance of the servo motors controlling things, for one...). The environmental impact needs examination as well; there's no way a solar farm is as energy-dense as a nuclear plant, even with the huge containment building. Do we need 75% of our wilderness covered in shiny glass plates to power this country?
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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).
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.
Absolutely, and considering the human race has denuded the landscape of trees in many places, the Earth is undoubtedly much slicker than it would be had we not existed
We could litter the landscape with millions more turbines and I would suspect we would still not be back to the break even point..
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.
You know, he was just a man. He may have been an exceptionally powerful man, but if he really was as evil and terrible as many of his constituents thought he was, what stopped everyone from just arranging a convenient accident for him? Or even taking the more obvious approach and shooting him? I mean, don't get me wrong, I am not a particular advocate of murder but everyone acts like Ted Kennedy was some sort of immortal god that couldn't be challenged. I think that reputation was a bit overstated. I mean hell, even a tricky lawyer should have been able to come up with some way to get his ass jailed. It seems that we give some men far too much power based on their reputation alone.
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But it eventually goes back into the system too, mainly as waste heat. Or is there some part of the law of conservation of energy that doesn't work on Planet Earth?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Worldwide, forests dissipate orders of magnitude more wind energy than wind farms would if we provided all of humanities power requirements using them.
Even solar energy isn't "safe" by your definition, because widespread use of solar cells would alter the Earth's albedo.
Well thats an easy fix. For every acre of wind farm we build, lets chop down 2 acres of rain forest! ;)
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!
30 or 40 years ago, if people far enough off the beaten path were told to cough up $50K for a power line to their property, I'd have gone solar too, regardless of the inefficiencies.
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."