Slashdot Mirror
New York's $6 Billion Plan For Offshore Wind Shows That Oil Drilling Really Is On the Way Out (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan earlier this month to develop $6 billion of offshore wind projects off the southern coast of Long Island by 2028 and predicted that the industry would bring 5,000 jobs to the state. The plan calls for developing 2.4 gigawatts -- enough to power 1.2 million homes -- by 2030. It's all part of New York's Clean Energy Standard, which requires 50% of the state's electricity come from renewable sources like solar and wind. The move comes as President Donald Trump earlier this month announced a five-year plan to open up areas of the East Coast to offshore drilling.
"While the federal government continues to turn its back on protecting natural resources and plots to open up our coastline to drilling, New York is doubling down on our commitment to renewable energy and the industries of tomorrow," Cuomo said in a statement. Cuomo has asked Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke for an exemption from the drilling plan, saying in an open letter that the plan "undermines New York's efforts to combat climate change by shifting from greenhouse gas emitting fossil energy sources to renewable sources, such as offshore wind." The report identifies a 1 million acre site approximately 20 miles south of Long Island that would best support the wind turbines, and "ensure that, for the vast majority of the time, turbines would have no discernible or visible impact from the casual viewer on the shore." The report also notes that New Jersey announced a similar plan last Wednesday to develop 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity off its coast.
"While the federal government continues to turn its back on protecting natural resources and plots to open up our coastline to drilling, New York is doubling down on our commitment to renewable energy and the industries of tomorrow," Cuomo said in a statement. Cuomo has asked Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke for an exemption from the drilling plan, saying in an open letter that the plan "undermines New York's efforts to combat climate change by shifting from greenhouse gas emitting fossil energy sources to renewable sources, such as offshore wind." The report identifies a 1 million acre site approximately 20 miles south of Long Island that would best support the wind turbines, and "ensure that, for the vast majority of the time, turbines would have no discernible or visible impact from the casual viewer on the shore." The report also notes that New Jersey announced a similar plan last Wednesday to develop 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity off its coast.
>> Hard to believe the Navy can't just steer around it when in the neighborhood.
The Navy has traditionally test-fired missles from a point nearby, and continues to operate a naval air base there too. Not all naval operations are "steering ships around the neighborhood." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Missile_Test_Center
Completely and totally false. http://www.pnas.org/content/10.... From the abstract:
The analysis indicates that a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
too bad when the whole country is depending on your solar array and battery and you get a week of cloud cover. Just some simple calcs to help. Solar costs about $175/sq meter. However due to scale lets say $100. So with a simple conversion of 2.6 million square meters per square mile the cost is 260 million/ square mile. Then times by 10,000 and we get $2.6 trillion for the solar panels. Now add the batteries so just say cost is doubled $5 trillion. Also various infrastructure probably add 20% so now 6 trillion. I am happy to get started next week just send the first trillion deposit to my account. No guarantee about cloud cover also we need free land as in no cost and we probably need to add another 10% for the approval process and at least 10 years delay. Just to set your mind at ease the batteries are guaranteed for 5 years and the panels for 10. expected life of the batteries is 10 years and panels 20 before total replacement.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
maybe the headline is a mistake
The headline accurately reports what Gov Cuomo is claiming. It is Cuomo that is spouting nonsense.
one explanation is that there are 2 ways to use the offshore area: 1) for producing wind power and 2) to drill for oil for cars.
That is technically implausible and from a legal standpoint, very unlikely. The states control out to 3 nautical miles, and the feds control from 3 miles to 200 miles. So the jurisdictions don't overlap.
( https://news.stanford.edu/news... ) He found that using solar and wind are complementary. Wind tends to be highest at night; solar by day.
This is true for on-shore wind. Offshore, the wind patterns are different, and offshore winds are stronger and rarely stop at the latitude of NY (~40N). This is why it is worth the extra expense of building offshore. It costs three times as much to install and maintain an offshore turbine ... but the better power production more than makes up for it.
I won't dispute the math that it is possible to provide all of our energy from wind but I'd like someone to tell me how much it costs. I have a paper here on my desk from Morgan Stanley that gives me some idea.
Wind takes ten times the steel and concrete per installed megawatt compared to nuclear, coal, or natural gas. To meet current demand and replace existing electric supply we'd have to build 1200 windmills every week for 50 years, assuming 1.65 MW rated output and 35% capacity factor. Then after 50 years we'd start over and do it all again, assuming those windmills last that long.
For comparison we have nuclear power. We'd have to build 1 per week for 50 years, assuming 900 MW rated output and 90% capacity factor. Sounds like a lot? Well, it takes no more materials than the current steel and concrete we use now to build our coal and gas power plants. I know we can do this because we already are dong this. Just stop putting those resources into coal and gas and put it into nuclear. Oh, and like the windmills we'd have to start over again in 50 years because by then those nuclear power plants would have also reached end of life. This also assumes no new technology. With technology that's in development now we could easily cut these resource requirements in half, if not far less.
We can't switch to wind power, not any time soon, because doing so would require many times more steel and concrete than is currently produced in the world. We could divert all of our steel to windmill towers, and all of our concrete to windmill anchors, and fall very short in getting enough energy from wind.
Wind power will not power the world. Solar power won't either as the resource requirements are similar to wind, we can currently produce only 1/10th of the materials we need for solar to replace coal and gas.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
1. New York Builds Windfarm for electricity 2. ....
3. Oil for liquid fuel, Feedstocks, plastics and lubricants on the way out ?
~48% of oil is used to make gasoline.
~23% is used to make diesel and heating oil.
~10 % is used to make jet fuel.
~5% is used to make asphalt.
The vast majority of oil is used for transportation. Feedstocks, plastics and lubricants fit somewhere into the remaining ~15% of oil that isn't used for transportation. Wind and solar are getting cheaper than oil and gas, oil extraction costs are only increasing, the cost of wind and solar is still on a downwards trend and will stay there for a while. Finally, electric vehicles are starting to take over the transportation sector and not just cars, people are even working on electrically powered ships and thinking about electric aircraft on short haul flights. All of this collectively means that the bottom is going to slowly fall out of the fossil fuel market over the next two or three decades and I don't think feedstocks, plastics and lubricants are going to sustain the oil industry in the long term at it's current levels of production. There is a reason the oil companies are starting to have trouble recruiting young people for the industry and it isn't just because all 'Millennials' and 'Generation Z' is a bunch of lib-tard tree huggers, they just see this coming.
battery technology has not advanced significantly in 10 years.
Battery tech has been seeing a 5%-8% increase in storage density year-over-year. I guess a ~60%-200% increase is not a significant advancement? And that's a very conservative estimate. Someone announced in 2017 they've managed to increase storage density about 2.5x and about a 30x increase in the rate of charging. Working fine in the lab, just need to mass produce. Estimate we'll see these new batteries in the next 5 years. Not that it's far outside the current norm of advancement. Even if this one particular tech doesn't see the light of day, it doesn't matter because so many companies are constantly announcing and actually delivering advancements every year.
Nice, compare the range on a small, lightweight roadster with a Model S. Even nicer that you couldn't bother to look up the range of the Model S. It's 315 miles for the 100D and about the same for the smaller, lighter Model 3 with a battery that is 20% smaller.
Current growth rate in the US is 25%. Project that out 20 years. Growth rate is likely to accelerate as prices decline and range and performance increase. but even 20 years at 25% growth rate completely replaces gas cars.
Worldwide, growth rate is even higher.
Strange that you would say an additional 2.5GW of power coming online "won't help with additional load". Power to recharge EVs is pretty low, roughly the same as three 100W light bulbs kept on 24/7.