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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
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 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.
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.
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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.
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?
Answer: Martha's Vinyard's attraction for wind power production is the combination of fantastic winds (capacity factors for similar new builds in Europe's offshore are in the 60%+ range, equal to coal generators), shallow waters even far offshore (i.e., easy construction), and its close geographic proximity to both the Boston and NYC demand hubs.
IOW: high wholesale prices, cheap install costs, and high capacity factors (i.e., high output per wind turbine) = profit!
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%.
Nah, that's Nantucket. Martha's Vineyard is the playground for the pretty rich.
I read your calculated figure and thought "that can't be right".
However, my feeling means nothing, so let's take a look at the 'actual' numbers (Well, I'm going to have to make some simplifying assumptions, because the most recent (2018) data didn't seem to be available):
This page lists the mix of energy generation in the UK, by quarter. I'll use the last entry, Q4 for 2017:
Total (unitless) generated: 90.2.
Total (unitless) renewables generated: 18.33.
Using the spreadsheet linked to on this page shows us that, of the solar, onshore and offshore wind, power generated (in 2016, thae last year for which data is available) roughly 44% came from offshore wind. So
Total (unitless) offshore wind power generated: 8.07
Thus percentage of power actually generated (i.e. not installed capacity) from offshore wind is, roughly, 8.9% of the total power generated in the UK.
Hmm. Maybe, well, almost certainly, Germany's mix of generating capacity is different to that of the UK, but to the degree your figure suggests? Nah, bollocks!
I think you're going to need to provide your sources and calculations for that 0.0035% figure, lest we think you've, charitably, made a mistake, or, rather less charitably, are completely full of shit.
Which flavor of socialist? Many hate each other. What makes you the judge? A Maoist would say: 'you aren't'.
All socialists are _not_ Marxists.
Better idea: Ask folks that lived under socialism what they think about socialism. Yeah, yeah, 'no true scotsman'. Sell it somewhere else. Marxism is broken, the police state is inevitable, built right in.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Better idea: Ask folks that lived under socialism what they think about socialism.
I've lived under socialism, and I really liked it. Free healthcare, free education, no one living on the streets. Quite substantial taxes, but you felt people got something back for the taxes, and especially those who needed it the most.
Of course, as you say, there are many flavours of socialism. This was a social democracy with the socialist worker's party having a clear majority for several decades.
Unless you were being facetious, you're wrong. Nuclear is actually the safest of major energy sources.
The first flaw in the argument you present is that it assumes that the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters are under control when they are not. Flippantly the article discards the destruction of the residents community as "induced stress from the evacuation process" whilst ignoring the other vectors of transgenic disease and pregnancies that fail to come to term.
The second flaw in the article is there is no metric to quantify the damage to the human genome caused by nuclear power as the mechanisms that cause damage takes a long time for people to study and understand. The nuclear industry relies on this complexity to propagate idealistic thinking about nuclear power.
The third major flaw is that time is required to collect data and see the outcome of these nuclear disasters. I have not seen a reliable source of data on the propagation of radio isotopes in the environment and the IAEA's role is to promote nuclear power so its data cannot be trusted. You can look into their charter if you want a citation.
The fourth major flaw is the IAEA has interdiction orders over WHO publications so the WHO's findings on all things nuclear has to be viewed through the same lens you would observe any PR effort. This is an interstitial agreement between the two organizations named WHA12-40 was signed in 1959.
Folks with an idealistic view of Nuclear power are prepared to forgive or paint over the transgressions of the nuclear industry while most of the rest of the population takes a more pragmatic view and simply remembers how many times the nuclear industries claims have been proven false.
Solar, Wind and Geothermal are technologies that continue to evolve at a much faster pace and a much faster ROI than is possible with nuclear and when they fail they don't make thousands of square Kms uninhabitable which is why many communities see this as a better option.
All the best and I hope this brings some clarity to this extremely polarized debate.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
They aren't. They generate very small amounts of power,
Growing faster than any other kind of power.
and require those evil fossil fuel base-load power plants to even be considered.
False, and also, storage systems can do the job as well and are getting cheaper all the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Ask the guy dying of easily curable diseases in the gutter what he thinks of capitalism.
Or maybe just accept that extremes of anything tend to be bad. Right now the best counties to live in are all socialist.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Miniscule? In many countries renewables have overtaken nuclear.
Besides, you've got it the wrong way around. The whole "base load" concept only exists because of coal (and late nuclear) power plants. Everything else is load following in the first place. Without coal and nuclear there is simply no need for base load.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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)
they don't ever mention the commission/decommission costs either or that the taxpayer has to foot that bill
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"And still miniscule." - are you expecting an infrastructure change to happen in a week? get some perspective, it taken decades for fossil power to reach nearly every home and still hasn't managed to get to 100% yet
"So what major power grid relies solely on renewables, doesn't use nuclear, coal, natgas, or other "bad" fuel sources for base load?" - same answer to previous
there are at least 40 cities claiming 100% renewable power which is not bad in such a short time and considering the knock backs renewables get form luddite and ignorant politicians - https://www.fastcompany.com/40...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.