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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
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.
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.
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.
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...
Especially if it can be seen from one of the Kennedy's beachfront mansions.