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

[rjnagle]

I don't know about the fuel mix in the state of New York (and maybe the headline is a mistake), but 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. Cuomo's decision may pre-empt using the land for oil exploration and drilling. That's my two cents anyway.

Marc Jacobson has done a lot of research into the viability of renewables. (Indeed, he presented this very idea to NY a few years ago. https://news.stanford.edu/news... ) He found that using solar and wind are complementary. Wind tends to be highest at night; solar by day.

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

[LynnwoodRooster]

The politics of building offshore wind isn't much better. There will ALWAYS be people fighting any new development, and slowing (or, in the case of Cape Wind, killing) deployment of new power sources. So you might as well go "for the best" because going to a lower-grade solution won't relax the difficulties in the first place.

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

[SoftwareArtist]

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.

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

[nonBORG]

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.

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.

Hello!? This Is NY/NJ We're Talking About!

[BlueStrat]

I expect any projects of this magnitude in NY/NJ to have immense constructions cost overruns, constant delays, labor union disputes, slowdowns, strikes, and lawsuits, along with massive corruption and embezzlement. If I were a betting man, I'd lay odds that at least some of these projects will be virtually forever "under construction" and will be sucking the citizens dry of money for decades beyond the original planned completion date.

Strat

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.

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

[blindseer]

All that next gen BS is always 5 years away for the last 20 years

And it will remain that way unless we start building nuclear reactors.

It's quite amazing this hypocrisy on nuclear power vs. solar and wind. We'll see the government dump all kinds of money into wind and solar. They'll issue permits to build solar collectors. Set aside land for windmills. And they do this because, so they say, that if we don't build these things then it will never get cheap enough to compete with coal.

How do they treat nuclear power? Well we can't waste money on this expensive energy. We need to "know" it's cheaper than coal first. But no one can "know" this until we try. We'll likely fail the first few tries, just like we've been failing to get cheaper than coal with wind and solar for so long. Maybe it will never be cheaper than coal. But we can't know that until we try.

Better off dumping 1 billion into more fusion research for 10 years instead of 1 more nuclear plant.

Right, let's just ignore that there are currently over 400 nuclear power reactors working on the planet right now. Let's just dump more money into that pit so... we can "feel good"? Facts don't care about your feelings. As much emotion you express on this we have in fact proven nuclear power as viable and safe.

Let's just dump more money into research until the lights go out and we all freeze and starve. That's how we can all feel good about saving the planet or something.

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

[geekmux]

Start a nuclear plant today and it won't come online for 20 years if ever.

If you can't get a nuclear plant online in less than 20 years, you have a corruption problem, not a design problem.

Same goes for wind, solar, hydro, or anything else that Trumps the energy mafia. And yeah, that fucking shit gets old. Once again, Greed stands in the way of progress, to the detriment of all.

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

[drinkypoo]

There is only one real solution: Nuclear.

[citation needed]

Not your grandfather's nuclear, TODAY'S nuclear.

I'm looking around, but I don't actually see any of today's nuclear. But what I do see actually being installed today is wind and solar. We should have been ramping up solar in the 1970s, since even the PV panels of those days would repay their energy investment in less than seven years, and most of those panels would still be functioning today. But people like you fought that tooth and nail, and now here we are today, with people like you clamoring for something which doesn't exist: safe nuclear power. There is no such thing, which is why the private sector can not and will not ever insure one. Decommissioning costs are always multiples of estimates and we still have no viable plan for dealing with nuclear waste. Even reprocessed fuel leaves waste behind, and the waste from that is spectacularly nasty. The solution for nuclear waste isn't to double down and produce worse nuclear waste. It's to stop producing it at all, because it's wholly unnecessary.

Re:Oil will only go out of style when...

[angel'o'sphere]

Most numbers you have are wrong.
Gasoline ICE, below 20% ... only rare cases are above.
Coal and gas plants have the same efficiency, around 42%-45%, exception are combined cycle gas plants which reach 60%.
Battery charging is about 95% - 99% ... no idea why on /. people always claim it is lower.
Electric engines are 99.999 (add as much 9 as you want) % efficient. Sine nearly 100 years ...

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

[TheRaven64]

Nuclear power plants need to be big, which means that you're never going to get the same kinds of economies of scale as wind turbines, where a wind 'farm' is a load of identical turbines that can be the same as the identical turbines in the next one.

Nuclear also has a really awkward risk profile. About the worst thing that can happen with a wind turbine is that the blades break and spin off at very high speed. The worst thing that can happen with a nuclear power plant is that it vents nuclear material and makes a large area uninhabitable for a long time. The failure mode for a wind turbine is far more likely, but that actually makes the insurance easier: a fairly likely risk that will probably happen to someone is much easier to deal with than an insanely expensive risk that has a very low chance of happening to anyone. This means that you end up with the government carrying most of the risk, because private insurers aren't willing and able to issue a policy that will almost certainly be a cash cow but will bankrupt them if there's a claim.

This risk profile also means that everything in a nuclear power plant needs to be very tightly regulated. You don't want a contractor cutting corners in a nuclear power plant. If they do in a wind turbine, the risks are fairly low and they're mostly risks to the owner of the plant (i.e. it stops working, it doesn't cause widespread damage). This pushes up the costs a lot, because everything needs to be redundant and independently checked. It's also not something that we're good at: all of the large nuclear accidents to date have been caused by factors that people identified as a problem before they happened, but which were not addressed.

Nuclear also comes with a load of security concerns. Access to things like uranium and plutonium is strictly controlled, for good reason. This adds security to the costs and also has some knock-on effects. For example, the US still doesn't reprocess fuel rods because of proliferation concerns (which, these days, means that they ship the spent fuel to France, where it is reprocessed and shipped back).