The US's First Offshore Wind Farm Will Cut Local Power Prices By 40%

merbs writes: The U.S. is finally getting its first offshore wind farm. Deepwater Wind has announced that its Block Island project has been fully financed, passed the permitting process, and will begin putting "steel in water" this summer. For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates. The company has secured $290 million in financing, with funding from the likes of Key Bank and France's Société Générale, in part on the strength of its long-term power purchase agreement with US utility National Grid. Block Island has thus surpassed the much-publicized Cape Wind project, long touted as "the nation's first offshore wind farm," but that has been stalled out for over a decade in Massachusetts, held up by a tangle of clean power foes, regulatory and financing woes, and Cape Cod homeowners afraid it'd ruin the view.

Comments

Comparing Nonsense

[SuperKendall]

Turbine bird deaths are a red herring. An estimated 10000-40000 birds die each year from turbines.

First of all, your numbers are plain wrong, by an order of magnitude.

But given any number, the question is - what is that number out of how many working turbines?

Because there are a LOT of structures, and powerlines, and other things that also kill birds as you mentioned. But you are giving us no idea if the number killed by turbines is proportionately higher or not, only absolute numbers with no means to intelligently compare...

All the intelligent reader has to do is mull over how many times they have seen dead birds beneath skyscrapers and other structures, and compare that to a rough average of at least a few dead birds per day, per turbine.

But then you are AC, so all you were really interested in is making up facts (most of those number s are suspect: and spin to make wind power seem harmless.