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First Offshore Wind Farm In US Waters Delivers Power To Rhode Island (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, energy company Deepwater Wind announced that its wind farm three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, has the all-clear to sell electricity to the regional power grid. The Block Island Wind Farm is the first offshore wind energy plant in the U.S., and it's expected to produce 30 MW of electricity at full capacity. Deepwater Wind is slowly ramping up energy output and still must provide additional paperwork to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, but the executive director of that organization, Grover Fugate, told the Providence Journal, "we don't anticipate any major issues" to getting the wind farm fully online. The one hitch in the Deepwater's plan is that one of the five turbines was recently damaged when a drill bit was left in a critical part of turbine. According to the Providence Journal, "the bit had caused damage to an unspecified number of the 128 magnet modules that line the circular generator and are critical to producing energy." Although the magnet modules can apparently be replaced easily, Deepwater needs to have the components shipped from France, where General Electric, the manufacturer of the wind turbines, makes them. For now, four turbines capable of churning out 6 MW of power each are operational. The Providence Journal notes that National Grid will pay Deepwater Wind 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour of power, with the price escalating over time to 47.9 cents per kilowatt hour. Because the residents of Block Island have some of the most expensive electricity rates in the nation, they will actually see energy savings, despite the price. Mainland Rhode Islanders, on the other hand, will pay an extra $1.07 per month on average.
Britain is not the best comparison for Europe. First off, Britain is always a laggard when it comes to clean power - it was a laggard just in cleaning up its act with sulphur emissions with the coal plants. The UK is also not really Europe and generally doesn't subscribe to Europe's more progressive policies when it comes to energy. Expect a lot of backsliding on this once Brexit is complete and EU regulations are no longer pulling the UK kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
4 links to articles asserting that fossil fuels get subsidies, and the only subsidy actually named is, hilariously, the cap on liability for nuclear accidents. If you had doubts about the neutrality of Wikipedia before, ask yourself why that would be included in a section titled "Impact of fossil fuel subsidies".
One article also links to another article that mentions production expenses for drilling, and loss of value of a field. These may sound familiar to people who have ever done business taxes, because similar deductions are available to most businesses. Also listed in that article are generic tax breaks available to all or most businesses.
See that "Preview" button?
US leads in total wind capacity but not per capita or as a percentage of total energy produced.
total renewables by country
Different countries face different challenges so there isn't really point in comparing wind by itself, you need to look at their entire energy production. A country like Iceland is much greener than the US for energy production but doesn't have wind production at all. If you look at all renewable resources the US is well behind most of Europe. Also China is not ahead of the US in wind production but they have much more hydopower.
The problem of course, is that while the US has a good bit of coastline, we have a lot of real estate that is a long way from the ocean.
Of course we do. We also have the ability to transmit electricity there. And don't kid yourself. A huge percentage of the population of the US lives within two hundred miles of the ocean. This includes the entire populations of New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Jacksonville, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and plenty more. Counties directly on the shoreline account for 40% of US population. All of these cities could easily be supplied by off shore wind power. We're idiots for not taking advantage of this power source.
The east coast of the US is prone to some serious weather excursions in the form of hurricanes. A lot of them. Even in Rhode Island. So an offshore wind facility has to be designed with that in mind.
They are. My understanding is that they stop the turbines from spinning above a certain wind load (somewhere around 125kph currently). They have a hurricane mode where the blades are pitched to neutral so it doesn't spin and then locked down facing the wind. Of course if the wind gets high enough damage is likely to result from a hurricane on land or off shore. Cuba had some wind farms survive hurricane Sandy which had winds of 110mph.