Government Approves First US Offshore Wind Farm 432
RobotRunAmok writes "In a groundbreaking decision that some say will usher in a new era of clean energy, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said today he was approving the nation's first offshore wind farm, the controversial Cape Wind project off of Cape Cod. The project has undergone years of environmental review and political maneuvering, including opposition from the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose home overlooks Nantucket Sound, and from Wampanoag Indian tribes who complained that the 130 turbines, which would stand more than 400 feet above the ocean surface, would disturb spiritual sun greetings and possibly ancestral artifacts and burial grounds on the seabed. But George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, hailed the decision, saying it was 'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'"
They only valid complaint about this wind farm was (Score:3, Insightful)
The Wampanoag Indian tribes, I totally respect their position about the burial ground.
Ted Kennedy was just a hypocrite. He was all for green energy EXCEPT when it was in his back yard.
It’s about time this was passed. Now maybe they can put these wind farms on the Great Lakes also.
Yea! (Score:3, Insightful)
All the other objections were just bullcrap political cover for the real reason the project never got off the ground until now; Senator Kennedy didn't want to see the turbines in HIS view. Now that he has went to Hell progress will be rapid.
Re:Flashback! (Score:2, Insightful)
Good move... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know people in the area. They told me the biggest objections came from people living in NYC and Conn. who had summer and weekend homes in the area. The thing is some 15 miles off of the coast. The people most bothered will be on their yachts miles out to sea.
Basically we have some choices;
1) Invest in newer, cleaner forms of energy
or
2) continue to destroy the environment, kill oil rig workers and coal miners, and rely on oppressive regimes in oil producing nations, e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
AFAIAC, this is a sudden outbreak of common sense.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity can be used to power electric cars.
To support a large number of electric cars you need a decent generating capacity and a good network.
If people have electric cars they don't need cars that run on petrol.
Petrol comes from oil.
More electric cars means less oil needed since there are fewer petrol cars.
Less oil needed means less dependence on foreign oil.
Stupid narrow-minded thinker!
Re:Flashback! (Score:2, Insightful)
I love the suggestion that these turbines somehow reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We don't use any foreign oil whatsoever to generate electricity. Sorry Mr. Salazar.
Re:Good move... (Score:2, Insightful)
One simple fact that a lot of people miss. Industrial and contstruction accidents kill people. Has been a fact of life since the pyramids.
You die just as dead falling off a 400 foot tower as you do from a burning oil rig. In both cases it is highly likely the body is never recovered. You die just as badly buried in the earth in some mine as you do when there is a mishap involving a wind turbine or the power grid it is connected to.
This isn't going to save any lives. They might die differently, but these things are going to require maintenance and they aren't going to shut them down for simple maintenance. So you have humans working in proximity with spinning blades. A moment of distraction and you are dead. Just like in a coal mine or on an oil rig.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, if you take a short-sighted view.
But energy is fungible, and it gets more and more fungible as technology advances and energy gets more expensive.
Every bit of coal we save now is a bit of synthetic gasoline we can make 300 years in the future.
Re:Good move... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because it is still possible to die doesn't mean the probabilities are the same. I'm willing to heavily bet that a wind farm is significantly safer for many, many reasons.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
"Why won't electric cars significantly reduce our carbon output?" -- "Because they're still recharged by coal power plants."
"Why won't replacing coal power plants significantly reduce our carbon output?" -- "Because cars are still powered by oil."
Focus on any one solution and of course you'll find that it's not the entirety of the problem. That's why you don't focus on only one solution.
Re:Flashback! (Score:4, Insightful)
How many worthwhile places have you gone in a single step?
AFK
Re:Flashback! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
Except electric cars, even if 100% powered by electricity from gasoline plants, would still be a massive improvement. Internal combustion engines have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 30%, but large stationary plants can afford to be much more efficient. Collecting the energy from a gasoline plant, piping it through wires to a person's home, putting it into a battery, taking it out of the battery, and operating an electric motor adds up (or, rather, multiplies down) to a total efficiency of... 48%. That's right, 60% more bang for your buck, even if nothing else changes.
Re:that's great but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The waste is denser than lead, keep in mind. It sounds like a lot, but in volume it really isn't.
The newest thinking for the waste is really simple and, frankly, surprising it wasn't considered before: Use deep drilling technology to drill a half dozen miles deep, drop it down there, and plug the hole behind it. Problem solved.
Re:Good move... (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL, it's the "all software has bugs, therefore all software is equally buggy" fallacy recycled for safety evaluation.
All jobs involve risk, therefore all jobs are equally risky! Every form of power generation involves the possibility that someone will die, ergo changing forms of power generation will not change the number of people who die.
Yeah.
By the way, unlike monolithic power generation, individual turbines in a wind farm can be shut down without significantly reducing the overall output. Shutting them down for maintenance is exactly what they're going to do.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't really refute the GP's argument. Instead, you switch to an electric-car-as-savior argument. But wind turbines do nothing to address the deficiencies of electric cars (it's not like they're being held back by a shortage of electricity).
Electric cars would be great, if they didn't suck at doing important things that petrol-powered cars do. So until some dream of yours which you can't really articulate comes true, your electric-car-as-savior theory remains no more than an optimist's dream.
And, so, your cute exercise in word logic doesn't [in reality, today] solve our problem, and certainly has nothing to do with wind power.
(And, no, throwing money at a problem is not a sure way to solve it.)
Re:that's great but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hundreds of tons a year... Cry me a river.
As we speak hundreds of millions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste are getting blown out the top of chimney stacks of coal plants every year.
Re:nuclear waste not that much (Score:1, Insightful)
"Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about seven yards deep. "
Bad quote. If you stored fuel rods that closely together they'd explode. There's feedback with nuclear fuel that causes it to super heat, it's where all the power comes from. Ignoring which side of the argument you are on can we at least agree to come up with one, just one storage facility before we build more reactors??? Honestly in all these years there's still not a single long term storage facility and here we are talking about building more plants. Can we at least address the problem before we add to it?
FYI for all the detractors on off shore wind being a real solution. The wind off the coast is steady and strong, it's what sail boats have run on for thousands of years. There actually is plenty of off shore wind power to supply the coastal power needs if we can just stop the rich people with beach property whining about windmills tens of miles out to sea. We can at least shut down most of the coal plants if we take advantage of the coastal wind power. There's plenty of it and it'll be there for millions of years to come long after all the fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are exhausted. Yes nuclear will one day run out. It's not magic people the laws of physics still apply. Gravity essentially creates wind power and that's not going away anytime soon unless something happens to the Sun and Moon then I think we'll have bigger issues if that happened.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country,
The fallacy is that we can remain a "first world" country without reducing our oil consumption past the point where we can satisfy our needs domestically. The question isn't do we stop consuming foreign oil. The question is, do we do it deliberately before we are forced by the depletion of all sources including domestic, or do we neglect the problem until it's too late.
inefficient electricity production
Haha, no.
There's a lot of problems with wind power (mostly in the broad category of logistics), but efficiency isn't one of them. Modern windmills are very efficient.
Re:Flashback! (Score:3, Insightful)
What proof have they that this area was above sea level centuries ago? I think we have more proof to the contrary. We have proof that the backbay part of Boston was BELOW sea level until they brought in fill to raise it. Did they get the fill from the ancient burial ground and thus lower it below the seal level?
Re:Greed Jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Insightful)
My point wasn't that electric cars will solve everything, I was questioning the GP's assertion that being able to generate lots of power cheaply (assuming a balanced network that this build would be a part of) can lead to results that don't always appear to be immediately linked.
He dismissed the "reduce dependence on oil" argument by saying that only a small percentage of power is generated by burning oil.
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil. Not all the barriers - you still need to make them cheaper, improve batteries, practicalities etc, but that's the second issue - these things will all improve anyway as time goes on. You can't state "why provide cheap energy, that's not what's holding back electric cars" and call it done. It's one of the factors to be overcome, but once it's solved doesn't mean the other factors weren't also being addressed.
Creating a solid, reliable power grid with effective generating systems will help to provide cheaper, cleaner electricity. This will have a knock on effect along the line - electric cars, cheaper manufacturing etc.
It was all about options and possibilities. If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
Cheaper electricity can bring down the price of aluminium and make it cheaper to make double glazed window frames, making them closer to the cost of UPVC ones, reducing the need for oil.
Energy is a huge part of everything. Anything that makes generating easier, more efficient or cheaper has a huge impact.
Ocean-side complaints? (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd think that people with ocean-side real estate would want something like this. Either that or we can just burn some more coal or oil and their houses can underwater instead. Would they still be land owners?
I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Cape Wind (Score:3, Insightful)
For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll? And which Kennedy would that be?
Because it is true and simultaneously embarrassing to parts of the electorate. Ted Kennedy [wikipedia.org] is who we are talking about here though the Kennedy family in general matters for this story - Ted until his death was merely the most prominent member of the family in recent years. He ostensibly supported green energy but when it was proposed to put a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts (his home state) he opposed it or at least opposed this particular wind farm. The opposition is more complicated [wikipedia.org] than many here represent but there appears to be some credibility to the claim that significant opposition came from rich people (including the Kennedy family) opposed the wind farm on the grounds it would "ruin" ocean views from their properties.
Re:Flashback! (Score:2, Insightful)
I was wondering myself how many oil fueled electricity generation plants are in the United States. Using this source:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_cannot_replace_oil.htm [mnforsustain.org]
It appears less than 3% of US electric generation is from oil. The argument seems the be "its a start". But is it really a start? What is the environmental impact of Wind turbines? How much electricity from the #1 source of electric generation (aka: coal) is require to manufacture, transport, build, and maintain the wind turbines? How many wind turbines would it take to replace that 2%? What is the net energy gain over the course of the life of the turbine?
Nuclear is the only real answer, all of these purported "green" solutions are horribly inadequate. In fact, I'd call them deliberate distractions. I'd gather that the goal isnt to replace current electric generation means with green ones to meet current needs, but to drive down potential through deprivation of electric production resources.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9x7t8dGwa0&feature=related [youtube.com]
I'm not sure how its "conspiracy theory" when the plan is literally in their own words? Pay attention around 2:30 seconds. Funny enough the only way to put the coal plants out of business is to simply bankrupt 75% of the US and drive the "masses" into life styles similar to sub Sahara Africa. How do you develop new "clean" technology without electricity? Where are these great new ideas going to come from? The magical government idea center while the hordes quiver in the candle light waiting for that great breakthrough???
Re:Flashback! (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is possible argument. Our dependance on foreign oil is clearly for transportation and not electricity generation, but our use of oil for transportation will always be financially motivated. The cheaper we can make electricity by investing in the future of renewable energy, the easier a transition to eletric (hybrid and full) cars can be. It is already possible to recharge your hybrid car with electricity, just as you can refuel it at the pump.
Re:About damn time. (Score:3, Insightful)
It turns out that managing a diverse national power grid has a substantial component of solar and wind power is exactly like managing one that doesn't.
No it really isn't. Adding in intermittent supply to a system with intermittent demand makes the supply/demand balance much harder to get right.
The power fluctuations are no worse than fluctuation in demand
When everyone wakes up and turns on their toaster in the morning power usage goes up. This is highly predictable behaviour and over the course of morning, the demand will trend up. The rate of this change is a little bit variable, but it has nothing on wind farm variability.
Increases of +/- 30% are regularly observed over 15 minute periods on individual wind farms, and with current methods this is mostly unpredictable. In fact, with current forecasting quality the best way to forecast within a couple of hours is to use a persistent forecast (ie what is happening is what you forecast).
I concede that forecasting quality could be massively improved if windfarms were incentivized to do so, but their output will always be more variable than demand, and to suggest otherwise is highly inaccurate.
Wind + Solar = Easier peak power demand (Score:5, Insightful)
There seem to be a large amount of /. posters who don't understand one of the biggest immediate benefits to wind+solar energy. Currently, if you don't want brown outs you have to build an eletric grid that can supply as much power as everyone could every try and use at one time. This causes us to spend way more in for large capacity power plants, and also lose a lot of energy in the distribution of energy itself.
So, when are the peak energy demands for the USA? In the middle of the day, and In the summer. Hmm, when are the peak production times for Wind and Solar (its the same!).
To fully move off things like coal, we would need to have better ways of storing energy, people are already working on this (gyroscopes, batteries, pumping water uphill), but that is the second step, not the first.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good move... (Score:1, Insightful)
Did you include the deaths from coal energy plants, transportation of coal and the construction of coal plants?
Re:Good move... (Score:2, Insightful)
And another flaw in your comparison is comparing US coal figures with world wide wind figures. You thus exclude the highly lethal coal mines in such countries like Russia and China, which probably also have more flexible safety regulations in building and maintaining wind turbines. You also only counted direct death among miners, but fail to account for induced premature deaths by the various diseases that breathing dust for years inflicts (4000 cases of 'black lung' per year in the USA alone!).
I don't think people have to be told that working on a 100m+ pole in windy conditions is dangerous. Just as they know that mining is very dangerous. What they need to be told is the risks they get exposed to by coal.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yea! (Score:3, Insightful)
The people who talk about "extreme leftist tendencies" are themselves very far to the right. They'd be the right fringe of the mainstream right-of-center party in most countries.
The "extreme leftist tendencies" they speak of would be the left fringe of the mainstream right-of-center party in most countries.
The two-party system in the US means there isn't a lot of ideological variety here.
Re:Good move... (Score:1, Insightful)
Consider that most of those wind power related fatalities are related to production of the turbines, installation and/or servicing (for example a tech getting squished in the gears because he forgot to engage the 'rotor lock' while changing oil or whatnot [I work in the industry and that's clearly the most common types of incident]).
To make a fair comparison to coal, you should also tabulate the deaths due to production of coal mining equipment, power plant installations, building works, power plant operation accidents, yadda yadda.
Oh, and don't forget the annualized mortalities from coal dust and radioactive isotopes released by burning the coal, which IIRC is vastly higher than any of the above figures. :)
Re:Good move... (Score:1, Insightful)
> Yep. There's no question that if you pull in all the industries in the coal energy chain, it'll be quite a bit more. On the other hand, if I included all the manufacturing, transportation, etc. that goes into the wind power industry, that'd increase the score on that side.
Er, you've already done that for the wind side; those deaths aren't from people mining wind.
Also, you're calculating deaths per unit of energy produced. A large proportion of the deaths for wind power relate to the creation of capacity, all of which is near the beginning of its life-cycle (i.e. deaths up front, power later). As the plants age, the total energy produced will increase significantly; the total deaths, not so much.
Nuclear Reactors Don't Release Radiation Usually (Score:3, Insightful)
But it really sucks when they do. A non-trivial but undisclosed amount of radioactivity was released from three mile island. It must be significant, as many families have won lawsuits against them.
Modern reactor designs are getting safer but they're certainly not fail-safe. I agree that it's better than coal, but the "eco-mafia" has some legit concerns. Engineers still don't fully understand everything that happens in a pressurized water reactor. Trust me on this, I've heard it first hand from engineers working for one of the two major US reactor companies. Waste is also a huge concern. You can put it into a breeder reactor at extraordinary profit sucking cost to reuse the fuel and create byproducts that can be used for fusion bombs by rogue states if they're misplaced, or you need to bury it somewhere where there is no risk of it leaking for several hundred thousand years.
As much as coal sucks, nuclear is far from safe. While we're pretty much screwed if we stick to coal, the risk of another meltdown is small but non-zero and every new nuke plant increases those odds. Solar and wind offer nice alternatives.