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.

Comments

Re:Eletrical grid Energy doesn't come from oil

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Let's move into the modern era...

[blindseer]

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.

Re:Underpants gnomes reasoning ?

[Freischutz]

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.