Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts Gains Foothold in Offshore Wind Power, Long Ignored in US (nytimes.com)
New Bedford hopes to soon be the operations center for the first major offshore wind farm in the United States, bringing billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs to the town and other ports on the East Coast. The New York Times: On Wednesday, that effort took a major step forward as the State of Massachusetts, after holding an auction, selected a group made up of a Danish investment firm and a Spanish utility to erect giant turbines on the ocean bottom, beginning about 15 miles off Martha's Vineyard. This initial project will generate 800 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough to power a half a million homes. At the same time, Rhode Island announced it would award a 400-megawatt offshore wind project to another bidder in the auction.
The groups must now work out the details of their contracts with the states' utilities. "We see this not just as a project but as the beginning of an industry," Lars Thaaning Pedersen, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, which was awarded the Massachusetts contract, said in an interview. Offshore wind farms have increasingly become mainstream sources of power in Northern Europe, and are fast becoming among the cheapest sources of electricity in countries like Britain and Germany. Those power sources in those two countries already account for more than 12 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.
The groups must now work out the details of their contracts with the states' utilities. "We see this not just as a project but as the beginning of an industry," Lars Thaaning Pedersen, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, which was awarded the Massachusetts contract, said in an interview. Offshore wind farms have increasingly become mainstream sources of power in Northern Europe, and are fast becoming among the cheapest sources of electricity in countries like Britain and Germany. Those power sources in those two countries already account for more than 12 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.
Champagne Socialists (*cough*Ted Kennedy*cough*) have been fighting this for YEARS, afraid that it will spoil the precious views out of their sea-side mansions...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
They won't be able to build windfarms that close to Marthas Vineyard. If you have ever been there, you know why.
...the State of Massachusetts, after holding an auction, selected a group made up of a Danish investment firm and a Spanish utility ....
And our current administration's policy is to promote 19th century while the rest of the World forges ahead in the 21st century.
Solar cells from China and wind turbines from Europe and other renewable energy.
Cost Rica has wind power - you know, a Third World sh...
Some of us need to get over this nostalgia for an America that never existed and get up to speed because we ARE behind in many areas.
Life changes - it's a fact - and trying to keep the status quo always fails.
What little information I found on the subject when I looked into it pointed to lobbying by special interest groups interested in protecting birds.
Which is one of the more bullshit arguments one can make against wind power since wind turbines kill rather few birds. Cell phone towers actually kill far more birds than wind turbines do but I don't see people complaining about those. And cats kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines.
From the link
"Wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually — a small fraction compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers and the 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion deaths from cats, according to the peer-reviewed study by two federal scientists and the environmental consulting firm West Inc."
I doubt it will happen once they see what a crap hole the place is.
Many fond memories of roblimo from the way early days of slashdot while I was in college. Wonderful open minded being, please watch over us
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Can see it from LAND. They don't want to view ruined when they helicopter over to their yachts.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I know... I complain all the time about not having a beach at my house, and nobody listens. It's so unfair.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
We really need this. Pilgrim power, a nearby nuclear plant that generates a large percentage of MA's power, is set to close in a few years.
No, I will not work for your startup
I don't know much of anything about that section of the country, but what is the magnetic attraction that Matha's Vineyard has for offshore windfarms? I've heard about the NIMBY effect blocking windfarms there for years, but the east coast of the US is an awfully long stretch of "offshore" for there to be such a kerfuffle about this one place. I'd expect strings of windmills to be used as replacements for buoys emmanating from New York harbor to create traffic lanes at this point (the masts would be useful, and with lights mounted on them, they'd keep traffic better organized).
Can anyone explain what is so special about getting an offshore farm going in Martha's Vineyard?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I didn't see any mention of per capita in that article.
You seem to have missed the point. Domestic cats kill 4 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more birds than wind turbines. Two orders of magnitude more birds die from flying into STATIC towers than are killed by rotor blades. There is NO evidence that wind turbines present any meaningfully increased risk to birds especially given that there is zero chance of there ever being as many wind turbines as there are cell towers.
That bit should have been left off the summary, if whomever were really trying to make a case.
The amount of offshore windpower they attribute to the UK and Germany (combined) amounts to 0.0035% of all the electricity produced in those two countries.
In other words, it's a rounding error, not a significant factor....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Offshore is much more expensive. Why deploy offshore when you still have untapped onshore?
In Europe, they live sitting in each others laps, so no room, offshore it is.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"socialist" wasn't one of them. He was yet another "Corporate" Democrat that came out of the Clinton era. He voted right wing on anything economic and, well, didn't vote on much else.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I work for a company that have been installing offshore turbine since 1995, and the first turbines are still running.
The conditions inside a wind turbine nacelle is comparable to the conditions inside a machine room in a large ship.
When the turbine is operating, or have been within the last 48 hours, the temperature inside is higher than outside, and the dew-point.
The intake filters remove salt mists.
Dehumidifiers remove moist from the air when powered up after grid loss.
Surfaces are designed to withstand 6 months in salty conditions, without power.
The generator have a cooling circuit where nacelle air is separated from the windings.
LOL, you think criminal politicians actually prosecute each other.
That's quaint.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Kids change you
Does APK have children? I'd bet against it - while there are all kinds of tastes out there, there must be a limit to how much craziness that women can put up with. Mustn't there?
Solar is dirt cheap, cheap enough for everyone's roof,
For values of "everyone" that excludes those who don't have a south facing roof, those who have trees, mountains or buildings around them, or those who live far enough from the equator that sunlight is weaker due to the atmosphere, and scarce in the winter half of the year.
offshore wind is a scam
Eppur si soffiare.
Denmark currently produces around 42% of all the country's electricity through wind, most of it offshore. By 2020, this is expected to pass 50%.
Vastly?
No. They both suck, as far a capacity factors go.
There are some onshore locations with better wind then some offshore locations. You general point isn't true.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Trump is the odd guy out. The DNC and RNC have enough to send each other to prison, at any time. They are just trying to add Trump to the MAD circle.
Nothing will come of it. Because the libs wet dream is: 'As much dirt on Trump as on Clinton.' Even if they get that, they are just back to where politics started.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Also, salt spray drops off very quickly with altitude. Typical offshore turbines are more than 100 meters above sea level, and the biggest are over 200 meters ASL. Up that high, the amount of salt in the air is negligible.
(B) I guess Germany is paying a lot more for electricity than they realize.
Electricity in Germany is hecka expensive. They are a shining example of what NOT to do: Don't let politicians make technical decisions, and don't do massive roll-outs of immature technology.
Shutting down their nukes was insane. Building new nukes may not make sense, but the main reason is the enormous capital expense in the construction and startup, and the costs of the shutdown and cleanup. But for Germany, those were all sunk costs. They had stable, operating nukes, generating clean reliable power. They threw all of that away to go back to burning filthy brown coal.
Once the NIMBYs stick their oars in.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Exactly; "If we prosecute them, they might turn around and prosecute us!"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
just that he's not a socialist. I'm a socialist myself, and I'm tired of people taking some random jerk ass Democrat and pinning the name 'socialist' on him just because they don't like them. As Bernie said, words have meaning. Socialist isn't just a slur. And if you ask folks in the rest of the developed world what they think about socialism you'll find they're pretty damn OK with it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, please. The copy editor at the Times ought to know this. Sheesh, the quality of journalism these days.
(Trivia contest time: how many other commonwealths are there and what are their names?)
OK, get back to ranting about NIMBYs, Kennedys (live or dead), wind farm subsidies, fossil fuel cronys, and how the Illuminati are poisoning the oceans.
Off-shore wind farms are a good thing to do once you've depleted the potential for on-shore ones. Most of the United States isn't built-out with on-shore wind power yet. Lots of on-shore wind generation here in California. I drove across Ohio the other day and saw very few of them, miles of open farm fields with nothing to stop the wind, and not a single turbine, though there seemed to be no absence of wind. More going in California every day. And solar is going to be required on new homes in California (except where it obviously won't work).
Bruce Perens.
Rich cunts get progressively more inbred with each generation. And the Kennedys have been rich for a lot of generations.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I wouldn't be too sure. I see some guys who are absolutely nuts and impossible to get along with, and they seem happily married. I suspect part of the cause is that they don't talk about "work". She doesn't understand what a hosts file is or how it's better or worse than adblock, and she's not on slashdot, so she doesn't know about the crazy. I've also seen couples where both are bonkers. Or women who just put up with it because they were raised to always be submissive to their husband and never question anything and who didn't get any viable job skills to allow them to be independent.
Whale oil was good enough for great granddad, so it's good enough for me!
Every power source requires expensive maintenance. They're all extremely expensive, and clearly not viable if you think about it too much. Ie, hydro is extremely expensive to build for the first time, and they constant maintenance. Coal fired plants are not as expensive the first time but they are very hard to maintain, dangerous for the workers (unless you spend even more money on silly safety issues), they've got turbines to keep running, toxins to figure out where to dump, and these days you need to do carbon capture which is expensive.
Initially, almost all major power plants were amazingly expensive, and many did use government help to get things going. Or at least they got big tax write-offs, nothing makes some utilities happier than to bitch about taxes in public and then accepting tax breaks under the table.
Don't forget the non-monetary costs, because some cheaper power options are not good for the public as they pollute too much. Only feasible if you assume the fossil fuels will last forever and that you never have to pay for cleanup or mitigation. They won't last forever so alternatives MUST be found and used.
The machine room on a large ship requires a lot of maintenance and has a crew to do it. I spent almost as much time chipping and painting as I did operating the reactor. Good on you though, you'll have plenty of work for years to come. After a couple generations, they will get the engineering right, but your description differs very little from land base windmills. After the 1st generation they probably discovered that the cooling coils should be Monel, like the use in heat exchangers on ships, but were probably copper or aluminum because they are better heat conductors and cheaper. I bet plenty of copper bus bars corroded in the first gen too. Keep up the progress though. The only thing worse than failing is not ever trying.
Initially, almost all major power plants were amazingly expensive, and many did use government help to get things going. Or at least they got big tax write-offs, nothing makes some utilities happier than to bitch about taxes in public and then accepting tax breaks under the table.
Also, what they always fail to mention, is that a wind turbine plant needs the full (100% uptime) backup of a traditional (fossil driven) powerplant. Because with a calm, wind turbines do not generate electricity, and the gap needs to be closed by a support plant. In order to be operative at demand, the plant needs to be up 100%, because starting up and closing down a plant takes too much time. http://www.theenergycollective...
That report seems to only point to retail prices so if the power companies are not passing on the cuts in generation costs, thats where the fault lies. But then again, i'd guess the first generations of fossil powered power supply was only available to the rich.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Not when there are alternatives like solar, hydro, battery, nuclear etc. If you are just replying on one power generation source, you are doing it very wrong. I'd expect the power generators will be advised of "calms" due to happen by the weather stations then allowing them to crank up a traditional power station. Gas is only minutes to start up and get to full power, coal and nuclear will take hours to get to be useful so they are normally on 24 hours a day.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
but don't forget those subsidies are coming out of your pocket. they are definitely useful to get new tech off the ground and running. subsidies for old fossil should have died years ago.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Ted is dead, thus not fighting the plan.
Big standing turbines like they use in wind farms wouldn't really work in cities for safety reasons and helicopters, but you could a bunch of smaller ones in long tubes and mount those on the sides of the roof.
Electricity is expensive but only part of the price is due to the feed-in tariff for renewables. That this is paid for from the electricity price was intentional to reduce demand and avoid a rebound effect. It was also highly successful strategy as Germany is credited for bringing down the price for renewables. Nuclear also got a lot of subsidies from general taxes - this is not better. The energy transition in Germany is supported by large parts of the population, was discussed for decades, and well planned (with lots of research and large-scale simulations, e.g. by Fraunhofer which is a renowned engineering society). Also most nukes were not shut down directly, but based on life time - so old plants first. Coal use is lower than ever before. That Germany increased coal use is just a myth.
Utilities have always used "peaker" plants. These only run during peak usage, or for unexpected demand, they are being turned on and off on a regular basis. There's experience in turning on and off these plants with short delays, and experience in estimating additional capacity is needed. These are generally the dirtiest plants also as well as being expensive. If they can use fewer peaker plants due to occasional wind power then that's a good thing.
Solar for sure reduces the need for turning on more peaker plants since solar works best during peak usage hours (ie, high demand for air conditioning). People who complain that solar is useless if you can't use it at night seem to miss the point that there's a diverse selection of power generation that can all be shuffled around, and that electricity demand in a location is not constant.
They did that in the past. NIMBY.