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America's First Offshore Wind Farm In Pictures (businessinsider.com)
Last week, an anonymous Slashdot reader submitted a story from the Associated Press, detailing the United States' first offshore wind farm that is set to open off the cost of Rhode Island this fall. Business Insider issued a report today with some additional specifications and stunning pictures of the Block Island Wind Farm: "GE and Deepwater Wind, a developer of offshore turbines, are installing five massive wind turbines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They will make up the first offshore wind farm in North America, called the Block Island Wind Farm. Over the past several weeks, the teams have worked to install the turbines 30 miles off the cost of Rhode Island, and are expected to finish by the end of August 2016. The farm will be fully operational by November 2016." Fun fact: GE's offshore wind farm has turbines that are twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. You can view the slideshow of images here.
That was painful to read
They are 4 miles off shore; who gives a shit.
30 miles off the coast of Rhode Island
Hardly the middle of the Atlantic, which as you point out would be stupid.
You're right, let's keep taking a dump into our air with your island's diesel generators. You can suffer a few whirlygigs and blinkenlights added to the view of multi-million dollar mansions.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
You are wrong. It worked. The subsidies have brought down the costs of installing wind power to the point that it is becoming competitive with (and perhaps cheaper than) other forms of generation.
These 6MW turbines are actually small. 8MW turbines are being installed now. The effective cost will be higher because only a small number of turbines are being installed.
This is a recent article from someone who has been very skeptical about alternative energy
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Spreading FUD? Got an agenda? David Koch, is that you?
http://www.aweablog.org/fact-check-about-those-abandoned-turbines/ (Yeah, yeah, it's on the Internet, so it must be true.)
One failed wind farm is hardly a reason why wind farms are necessarily a bad thing.
Take a dump? Srsly? If not four miles off shore, where exactly would you put them?
Fucking NIMBYs. Fucking billionaire NIMBYs that think they can afford to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
Because they actually can afford it, and to hell with everyone else.
If it was 150 years ago they'd probably be whining about all the damn ships. With sails. Sailing through their view.
The core of the argument is sound though. It costs ~$500k to put up a 100kW wind turbine. With energy at about 12c/kWh, each hour at full power would generate only $12 and would thus break even after 5 years of full-time, full-power wind however the largest turbines catch wind only 20% of the time and are only 30-45% efficient, smaller ones even less. So you're looking at 50 years before they break even. That is off course if they never needed maintenance, these turbines are specced for 20-30years of service WITH maintenance but most of them last only half that long.
Wind power is a loss at this point in time unless we jack the price of energy like Germany does, we need way lower costs and way higher efficiencies but for that we need rare earth magnets and the like. Solar is better (less maintenance) but it still doesn't compare to a well-maintained nuclear plant or other forms of clean energy.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No, the oIL platform next to them is significantly uglier, imho.
And neither is quite as ugly as your mentioned oil refineries in NJ.
For comparison, here is an authentic NJ refinery.
http://media.nj.com/business_i...
I'll agree. Those pictures are about as pleasing as a triptych of oil refineries in NJ.
If anyone wants to judge for themselves, just how foolish this particular statement is, check out:
New Jersey Oil Refinery vs Off Shore Wind Farms.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as more beautiful than a windfarm.
My pics.
TFS says 30 miles, not 4.
Learn to love Alaska
You ignore that there are actually more days of usable wind per year at sea than there is on land.
Well done to the USA for catching up with many other parts of the world.
Denmark, Germany, Holland and the UK all have significant offshore Generating capacity already operating. Thousands of generators are dotted all over the North Sea and beyond.
Hold on, I linked to two google images searches - both of which had hundreds of images of oil refineries or offshore wind farms.
You cherry picked two wind farms (and not off-shore ones at that), both of which are against a fairly unattractive landscape, but are still more attractive to me than any oil refinery I've seen.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as beautiful as a wind farm.
How about you post side-by-side pictures of an oil refinery you consider as attractive as a wind farm?
My pics.
In the typical American view of the world you would fall off the edge another 30km or so beyond that, so in that respect it is the middle.
Shipping by Spliethoff, which is Dutch.
Europe in the lead this time.
Wind turbines worldwide kill less than half a million birds per year; house cats kill over half a billion per year.
Allrightee, how about we just cut the bullshit & go back to your original statement - the one I'm calling out as dishonest:
If you meant ugly when you said stunning, I'll agree. Those pictures are about as pleasing as a triptych of oil refineries in NJ.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as pleasing to the eye as a wind farm. Do you? How about you link to a picture (or three) of NJ oil refineries that you find of equal (or greater) pleasantness than one of the pictures in the article.
My pics.
Look at onshore wind turbines; they said the same thing about those a few years ago. But now they are pretty cheap and still getting cheaper, where in the past they needed subsidies to be viable. They got cheaper for a simple reason: thanks to the subsidies these things got built, and in the process we are learning how to build better ones. Compared to other sources of energy, there was and still is a vast upward potential in wind turbines to increase efficiency (in terms of kWhs generated per turbine), decrease production and installation costs, and greatly simplify maintenance which is another big cost driver. Newer turbines are higher, poking into a region where winds are more constant. The newest models do not even have to be stopped in heavy winds (current ones do, at some point the wind bends the turbine blades so far in they will strike the tower) which further increases overall production efficiency. The same applies to offshore wind farms. There's not many out there yet but already costs are falling rapidly due to innovations, like specially designed support ships and the use of inspection drones contributing to lower maintenance costs, a big factor in offshore wind.
Now is not the time to invest billions into large scale offshore wind farms. But an energy strategy aiming at replacing fossil fuels with renewables should, at this time, include subsidies for smaller offshore wind farms. See them as an investment into R&D to improve offshore wind farms and drive own costs, same as happened with onshore wind. This kind of R&D is not done in front of a blackboard or in a lab, it's practical engineering, making incremental improvements based on past experience.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As someone who photographs industrial equipment as a hobby, no. Oil refineries are far more beautiful especially at dusk.
As for which I would want to live near, wind farm all the way. Refineries are smelly polluting things especially at night when they blow soot from furnaces
Incorrect. You can't get more than 6MW from these turbines, the capacity is limited by the mechanical parts (gearbox). And at high winds they actually have to be _stopped_ with blades at minimal pitch and motors electrically locked.
They are 4 miles off shore; who gives a shit.
Location doesn't matter, but if anyone cares about cost;
Yet when Deepwater proposed to sell its wind energy to National Grid, the cost was more than twice the going rate for electricity.
https://www.wind-watch.org/new...
Especially if it can be seen from one of the Kennedy's beachfront mansions.
Is the cost of the extinction of the human race included in the cost analysis?
You're bitching that you can fucking see the windmills?
As a former resident of RI who still loves the damn state for all its political and economic faults and the goddamned provincial attitudes and is a former member of the 294/295 telephone exchange:
You, and everyone like you in RI is everything that is wrong with Rhode Island.
Go. Fuck. Yourself. From. Point. Judith. All. The. Way. Across. The. Sound. To. New. Shoreham. And. Then. Fuck. Off. Some. More. Hopefully. Out. To. Sea. Forever.
tl;dr:
Fuck You.
--
BMO
You are aware this is about 200 miles from NYC, right? NYC, one of, if not the single largest source of electricity consumption on the East Coast. This isn't actually "in the middle of the Atlantic"... it's a few miles off the coast.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
How do you walk with your knees jerking like that?
If wind power proves to be profitable, the Koch brothers would invest in it. They're businessmen, not emotion-driven zealots for oil.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Those of you who don't live near one let this Tulsan tell you, the unsightly looks of an oil refinery having nothing on the nasty smell. There's a whole quarter of our city that most folks don't want to live in if they can avoid it because the typical prevailing winds blow air from the Tulsa oil refineries that way.
I've never smelled a wind farm, but I'm guessing it isn't nearly as bad.
But hey, our gas is $1.78 a gallon here today because of those refineries. Vroom vroom!
He runs a solar power business in Maryland. Therefore, this is a competitor, he wouldn't even think of giving them a mention unless it was to talk about the negative aspects of this technology.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The Koch brothers have shown time and again that they're more about power and control
What a load of crap. They're libertarians. Power and control is your fetish, not theirs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No, they're capitalists. They just manipulate Libertarians, who tend to be rather useful idiots.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.