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Energy Department Proposes Funding For Ohio's First Offshore Wind Project
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An energy development group has been working for years to put together Ohio's first offshore wind project. That might sound odd for a state so far from the sea, but the benefits of offshore wind (strong, consistent gusts and relative proximity to major population centers) translate to wind turbines that are placed in freshwater, too. Consequently, an area eight miles off Ohio's Lake Erie coastline is slated to see six new 3.45 megawatt (MW) turbines as part of a 20.7MW pilot installation. On Thursday, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued an Environmental Assessment stating that proceeding with the plan would not cause any "impact to the human environment." In an additional finding published by the DOE this week, the department added that it did not believe that the offshore wind project would cause significant damage to migratory birds, either. Finally, the DOE proposed an unspecified amount of funding for the project, which will be the first freshwater offshore wind project in the US and one of the first offshore wind projects overall. The Lake Erie Energy Department Corporation (LEEDCo) and Norwegian investor Fred Olsen Renewables (FOR) will be developing the "Icebreaker" project, as the turbine installation has been called. "Interestingly, the turbines will be secured to the lake using a 'Mono Bucket' foundation, with a suction-based design that's similar to what's been used on offshore oil-drilling platforms in the North Sea," reports Ars. "The design, LEEDCo says, uses 'the best and lowest-cost technology for sites 25 meters and less.'"
Sincerely,
Exxon-Mobile
Most of the Lake Erie economy depends on tourism. These will be a complete eyesore and will take away from the natural beauty the Great Lakes give. Lots of fishing, sailing and boating happen on Lake Eerie and its a way for people to get away and be out in nature. These will only detract and hurt the tourism of the region for the little amount of power they will generate.
Cargo ships are an eyesore, we allow them on Lake Erie.
Bull Shit.
Chernobyl and Fukohama were old systems and not designed to be PASSIVELY safe. IOW, they required ppl along with electricity, to be actively safe.
Chernobyl: A combination of inherent reactor design flaws and the reactor operators arranging the core in a manner contrary to the checklist for the test, eventually resulted in uncontrolled reaction conditions.
Fukishima: However, the tsunami disabled the emergency generators that would have provided power to control and operate the pumps necessary to cool the reactors. The insufficient cooling led to three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the release of radioactive material in Units 1, 2 and 3 from 12 to 15 March.
With the new designs on reactors, they are PASSIVELY safe. IOW, they can not really fail.
NuScale is so safe that it does not require external electricity.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Fukushima was designed at least to prevent a core melt down, and failed at that.
Or more precisely, if a melt down happens: prevent escape of the fuel into the environment, and it failed at that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I see where you're going with this and it's an interesting concept.
We could drain the lake somewhat; fill in some of the shore with, say, plastic debris, and use the new shallows as oil flats much like salt-flat technology.
Peasants (refugees and immigrants) could go out each day with plastic bottles and collect the oil floating atop the liquefied shallows and pour those into the hold of an Exxon (Valdez class) tanker that will sail out to sea, follow the coast line to Port Arthur, Texas and deliver to the Saudi Arabian-owned refinery complex there.
It's a win-win.
The plan does not include the use of coal yet, but that could be worked in somehow.
Perhaps we could ship it in to keep the peasants warm in winter and to provide pot-bellied stoves for nourishment.
Not addressed is the hit corporate prisons will take when we divert the slave trade from corporate prisons to oil farms, but we can craft some laws where it's not only illegal to be driving while Black, we could expand that to walking while Black.
I can't think of everything.
I'll leave that to the fossil fuel lobbyists as I finish my bottle of water.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There's no such thing as a safe car, therefore we should not drive ... There's no such thing as safe food, therefore we should not eat.
Those are silly analogies. What are the alternatives to driving cars or eating food?
But nukes have good alternatives: solar+wind+storage.
The biggest issue is not even safety, but economics. Solar and wind are cheaper and declining in price. Nukes are expensive and getting more so. The "standardized" AP1000 design was supposed to cut costs. Guess what? It didn't.
The project will be located 8 miles offshore, vertically. See the official website: http://www.leedco.org/index.ph... for the map / plan. There's little public or political will for the nuclear energy industry - at least beyond Tennessee's TVA. Per Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States), about 1/2 of the plants are operating at a loss. Shutdown expenses are substantial (https://www.energydigital.com/utilities/what-does-it-cost-decommission-nuclear-power-plant). 2nd, despite the Executive branch backing of the coal industry, it's decline is inevitable. Again, there's little public support beyond the coal producing regions for coal fired plants. Here's an interesting article on that subject: https://energytransition.org/2.... Murray coal is the biggest producer of coal today in the U.S., but like the Saudis, they need to look beyond their current business model. I find it difficult to understand the hostility toward renewables in the U.S., though it seems that hostility is on a decline. Anyone who has a romantic notion of coal and their supported communities must have little familiarity with actually working in the mines, even with contemporary technology. Families have paid a high cost over many generations for coal. And I say this from my own family's history. I've walked those hills, I've visited cousins in coal country towns. I've watched the young move as quickly as their feet can take them. As my dad would say, "it's a done deal'.
Bird lives matter.
Annual bird deaths in America from wind turbines: 60,000
Annual bird deaths in America from domestic cats: 3,700,000,000
Pro-tip: If you grind up cats and put them into an anaerobic digester, you can produce bio-gas.
I am having an honest anonymous debate.
Emphasis mine.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I am concerned about the natural beauty of the region.
They are eight miles out. They are barely visible from the shoreline, even on a clear day.
There is nothing wrong with having that debate.
You really think you are going to win a debate based on the "natural beauty" of Cleveland, Ohio?
Uh, no.
Only a fool thinks that they can contain a true meltdown and nuke engineers are NOT fools. There has NEVER been a single reactor design that can contain a full blown meltdown and yes, NRC never approved something that claims that they were meltdown proof. That is why the original systems were designed to PREVENT meltdowns with active avoidance systems. Now, the new designs are to prevent them with passive systems. NuScale is a great example.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If every american had a cat, his cat would need to go outside and kill 10 birds per year.
I grew up on a dairy farm and as much as Dad hated cats we kept them around to keep the birds and mice out of the cattle feed. We purposefully fed the cats very little as that prompted them to hunt for their food. If we fed them nothing then they might wander off to another farm or simply go feral and become pests, we had to "train" them to behave around people and the cattle. The older and bigger cats could easily eat 10 birds in one day. Many of these birds were not large and so they'd have to eat a lot of them to fill them up.
I have no clue why people have problems with big numbers.
You appear to have your own problems with big numbers if you believe that domestic cats can't kill billions of birds per year. Just 1 cat eating only 3 birds per day is over 1000 birds killed. A quick Google search tells me that there's easily 100 million domestic (not necessarily "domesticated", as in always confined to a house) cats in the USA.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It's easy to show nuclear is cheaper than solar.
https://www.lazard.com/perspec...
Your citation says the OPPOSITE of what you claim:
Cost of grid-scale PV solar: 4.6 cents/kwh
Cost of nuclear: 11.2 cents/kwh
Even that is not a fair comparison, because it is looking at the cost of existing nukes, while the cost of NEW nukes is considerably higher.