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.'"
that's great but... (Score:1, Interesting)
While I'm all for renewable energy, We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants so it would lead to brown/blackouts in the long run if it was taken up more. What we really need is a renewable energy that can provide a base load, then we start shutting down all the coal/nuclear power plants that create so much pollution.
So while this is good news, we really need to start working more on forms of renewable power creation where we can get a minimum load of them on demand or renewable energy will stay on the fringes.
Re:that's great but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear doesn't produce that much waste. Especially if we could reprocess the fuel. In the end you get a few tons of waste that's hot for a couple hundred years, but that can be dealt with better than the tons of crap coal spews out a day. It's just that we've had 30+ years of people scaremongering about Nuclear energy.
Re:Moron Greens (Score:3, Interesting)
Stupid hippie.
I was sortof following your argument until there...
On the long run, any coal you don't dig up and burn for energy is an ace up your sleeve on the international energy market: "Sure, we are interested in your coal, but better make a new offer else we'll have a closer look at our cubic kilometers of coal still buried under waiting-to-be-blown up mountains. And it would be a shame if something happened to the coal price, right?"
Re:Flashback! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well Nimby is hard to defeat.
Objections for marine deployment of this type of farm are mostly navigational (ships mostly skirt this area beyond nantucket Island but smaller craft and fishing vessels could see collisions), radar interference, and a whole bunch of people that want to push even visual impacts onto someone else. (Bird strikes are for the most part gross exaggerations, long since debunked.)
Driving in the west, I find the wind farms something majestic. I suppose I would not want one directly over my house, which is why the off shore solution is perfect for the eastern seaboard. These things are quiet, and have a proven track record of reliability. Standing up to the salt air may be an issue.
The Indian tribes build casinos on their own ancestral sacred grounds but somehow object to wind farms out on the water. This was never a sea-going tribe. But a few perks from Uncle Ted and sure enough a spirit dreamed up just last night will be annoyed.
Its odd that Kennedy's objections were enough to hold this project off under republican administrations, but as soon as he is dead, even the Democrats decide its good to go.
Re:They only valid complaint about this wind farm (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually thought that was the least reasonable argument. Saying "somebody was buried there once" is not a good argument for, well, much of anything. Spiritual beliefs aside, the one thing we're sure about today is that you aren't using your body any more when you're dead. That pretty much precludes your having any rights regarding it. How many people have been buried at sea? How dare you lay an undersea cable, or eat a fish? The whole thing is ridiculous. Everyone else has to buy land if they want their corpse to stay there, why should they be any different? I think it's been conclusively shown that being somewhere first is not enough, unfortunate or no.
wiff! (Score:5, Interesting)
America's first? Really? Are we that far behind the times?
Sad.
Re:Flashback! (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't use any foreign oil whatsoever to generate electricity.
You got proof of that?
We use oil to generate 3% of our electricity. It's bigger than all "alternative" sources (like wind farms) combined. If we use less oil for electricity, we will need less oil overall, which will reduce demand for foreign and domestic oil alike.
If we have more electricity, we may use more electricity for home heating or cars, so this works on both supply and demand.
So unless you've got a credible citation for your claim, I'm going to say fie.
Re:Good move... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Can you really blame them? Take a look at the estimated visual impact of the wind farm:
/sarcasm
http://www.capewind.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=9&page=1 [capewind.org]
I don't know about you but I'd obviously rather stab my eyes out and burn down my vacation home than see those ugly filthy things on the horizon.
Re:They only valid complaint about this wind farm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:that's great but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been living and working on Air Force bases for the last 15 years. People in the industry know how to find and take advantage of wind conditions as they are absolutley critical to airfield operations both in runway placement as well as ambient wind speeds that assist in the takeoff and landing of aircraft. This has been going on for nearly a century, so I think it is safe to say that the guys spending the big bucks on windfarms know what they are doing.
The down time excuse are pretty weak at best, and are usually held up by the NIMBY crowd.
Re:Flashback! (Score:5, Interesting)
Standing up to the salt air may be an issue.
The Dutch [home.wxs.nl] have had them for a couple of years [nytimes.com], so there's at least some precedent and any issues they encounter are likely to give a 4 - 5 year heads up to this initiative.
Even weirder idea!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Use nuclear waste as ... wait for it ...
radiation shielding.
One of the issues with nuclear energy is absorbing the high energy neutrons to generate heat. We can line the reactors with nuclear waste and the neutron bombardment would transmutate it from 100s of years to safe in decades.
Re:About damn time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually think they are rather beautiful. Certainly not a "natural" beauty, but there is something majestic about them as a feat of engineering. Now the noise is what would bother me, but I think they are planned to be sufficiently far away were that wouldn't be a problem.
Re:Yea! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's insightful because it is claimed that it was largely Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy of wanting alternative energy but not where he could see it (from his family's very expensive island compound) that prevented this project from going forward. flamebait and troll for the same reason, because some moderators feel that it was unfair to blame him, and bringing it up is a sore point among his supporters to stir up trouble.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flashback! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About damn time. (Score:1, Interesting)
Currently, the main reason nuclear "planets" are not being built is not government regulation, but the fact that no insurance company will write a policy for a nuclear plant.
Until the pencil pushers at insurance companies decide that nuclear plants are safe enough to insure, there won't be new plants built. Either that or there will have to be a law absolving the energy providers of any liability in the case of an accident.
I'm not saying the plants aren't safe, the insurance companies are. Personally, I'd love to get cheap electricity from a nuclear power plant, as long as their built far away, say, in Arizona or South Carolina, where radiation can't do too much damage.
Re:nuclear waste not that much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About damn time. (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how far off shore one would need to place a floating nuclear plant so that it is far enough away.
Assuming the worst devastation in the worst case scenario, how far would the damage go, and thus how far it would need to be out at sea to not affect the coast.
It's a crappy thing to do to the ocean, but still.
Another downside is that after a certain distance out, it is no longer US soil.
While I have no doubt at all that if our navy wanted to 'own' a small patch of ocean to park a plant on, they have enough ships to maintain it 24/7/365.. but at a huge cost.
Better us than them? Or very bad idea?
Re:nuclear waste not that much (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad quote. If you stored fuel rods that closely together they'd explode.
I'm not an expert in this sort of thing by any means but I don't think they'd actually explode. They would go critical, though, and possibly start a runaway chain reaction which would be bad enough. So you're certainly correct that it would a bad idea to stack them up that way. Not that anyone ever would. It was just an an example used to allow people to visualize the amount of nuclear waste that has been generated over the last 40 years.
Re:Flashback! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:that's great but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apples and oranges. Scheduled downtime is just that - scheduled. You can plan around it, sometimes months or years in advance. Windpower's downtime isn't scheduled or predictable. Nor do entire plants shut down for accidents with any great regularity. So yes, it is more expensive and more complicated to provide backup power - as you cannot predict the frequency, duration, or level of backup required.
Apples and oranges, and then there are peaches.
Coal power plants undergo unplanned shutdowns about 6% of the time (nuclear plants are more reliable), in addition to the 6.5% of the time in planned outages. Day-night power demand variation is around 30%, and daily peak power demand can vary unpredictably (in the exact same sense that the wind is unpredictable) by 10% due to extreme hot or cold weather.
Wind power doesn't add any new level of grid instability until its use level exceeds 10% (i.e is at least half the size of the nuclear power contribution, and at even at much higher levels production variation can be handled the same way we handle most of the normal 30% day-night variation: throttling coal plants. We don't get into regimes where exotic or unusual backup power solutions are called for until wind grows to more than 20% of the grid (thus exceeding nuclear power's contribution today).
Really, you are greatly underestimating the amount of power balancing already required, and overestimating the severity of the wind production fluctuation problem.
Re:that's great but... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Hundreds of millions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste are getting blown out the top of chimney stacks of coal plants every year?
Bullshit. You're exaggerating quite a bit there.
Radioactive elements in coal are trace elements. Measured in ppm. Most simple case lets say total radioactive content of coal is 1 ppm, that would mean burning one million tons of coal would yield 1 ton of radioactive elements. So to get a million tons of radioactive elements would require burning (1 million)*(1 million) tons of coal. That's a trillion tons of coal. To scale up to "hundreds of millions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste are getting blown out the top of chimney stacks of coal plants" would require burning hundreds of trillions of tons of coal.
That's at 1 ppm of radioactive content.
If it were 100 ppm of radioactive content then burning 10000 tons of coal would yield 1 ton of radioactive elements. A million tons of coal would yield only 100 tons of radioactive elements. To yield 1 million tons of radioactive elements you'd have to burn 10000 million tons of coal containing 100 ppm of radioactive trace elements.
To yield 100 million tons of radioactive elements you'd have to burn 100*(10000 million tons) of coal containing 100 ppm of radioactive trace elements. That still a trillion tons of coal.
We don't burn that much coal a year. In the entire time humans have burned coal we probably haven't hit a trillion tons, but we may get there in a few decades.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
Reprocessing doesn't work as advertised, but ... (Score:2, Interesting)
From the French experience it is possible to an extent but incredibly difficult and expensive so it is very rarely done. It only takes a few moments to think about why it doesn't work very well - we're talking about working metal that is emitting very high levels of radioactivity so everything has to be done remotely and everything that touches it gets contaminated.
You'll notice that only journalists and others outside this field are pushing reprocessing - it's a view that is well and truly stuck in the 1970s and I wish those loud nuclear advocates would actually learn something about nuclear power.
However the existing depleted fuel rods could still be used by more recent designs that are a lot less fussy about their fuel - that's a much better idea than reprocessing. For instance Uranium fuel rods or even expired weapons material could be included with the Thorium fuel in an accelerated Thorium breeder reactor such as the one under construction in India at the moment.
Wind sites in California (Score:5, Interesting)
California has only a few good sites for land wind farms [ca.gov] - Altamont Pass, Pacheco Pass, Mojave, and Solano County are the big ones. All four now have big wind farms. Other than Altamont Pass, which is a big migratory bird corridor and has row after row of windmills, there have been few complaints. There aren't many remaining on-shore sites in California; we're about done with onshore wind. The Cape Cod people have been whining about their wind farm for a decade. Tough.
Offshore of Calfornia looks promising. Take a look at that high-wind area close to shore, west of Humbolt County. There's also a huge high wind zone south of Santa Barbara, and most of it is still on the continental shelf, so the water isn't too deep. I doubt there will be objections; Santa Barbara has already had off-shore oil wells.
Good news. But, dose of reality needed (Score:1, Interesting)
I have always supported Cape Wind. But I need to take some wind out of the sails of some advocates. The truth of the matter is, most wind power is not economically viable. Far from being a negative factor to Cape Wind, this is actually a positive attribute. In most places in the US, the wind simply does not blow consistently enough to make harnessing it competitive with gas fired turbines and nuclear power. Mostly, this is because wind is not available 'on demand', but rather an 'opportunistic' power source. The current model of electric consumption is one of 'on demand' and therefore a surplus of electricity is not easy to harness, and has little value. This may change over time, as industries which consume vast amounts of electricity are reconfigured to be opportunistic consumers. They will enjoy low, bulk rates when that power is available, and otherwise either curtail their use or shut down entirely. It is conceivable that businesses will develop which store electricity when it is available cheaply and sell when it is dear. Though this business model is a difficult one to finance now, with our inefficient storage technologies, in the future it may be viable.
What we need from government and 'big business' is a reconfiguration of the electric grid to intelligently switch electricity to where it is needed (i.e. has the highest commodity cost at the moment), while at the same time being reliable and efficient (i.e. ultra-high voltage. That means bigger towers, folks!).
Net-metering is the start of what I have explained above, but it is a stop-gap measure. This is because alternative energy producers are paid for the energy that they MAY HAVE produced and contributed to the grid, even if the grid is not able to consume it at the time. This cannot continue indefinitely. There needs to be a rectification of the rules, as technology and the installed base of energy production becomes more flexible. Until this is accomplished, expect that projects like Cape Wind, and many others, will be subsidized by those power plants which are efficient in the short term (gas-fired turbines) yet have long-term disadvantages.
Bravo Cape Wind! But supporters need to be informed and honest.
p.s., even though I am logged in as 'drwho', I appear as anonymous when posting. This has been going on for some time. Slashdot mechanix, please fix.
Its a start (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:that's great but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About damn time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've visited the power plant and they have a special visitor center where you can learn all about the specific processes used, from mining the fissionables to storing the waste in huge steel containers. But the best part about the exhibit is the cloud chamber [wikipedia.org], you can see all kinds of different radiation particles in the box of about 1 square meter (really awesome!). It really emphasized the fact that absolutely *no* radiation leaks from the reactor, the only trails you could see were random in all directions. In fact the kind gentlemen who showed us around told us that every single coal plant exhausts more radioactive radiation in one day than a nuclear power plant in a year!
I can also honestly say that I want nuclear power and I want it in my own backyard. Sadly nuclear is still on the decline here, mostly because people are very misinformed by the eco-mafia... If they knew that the alternative (coal realistically) is so much worse for the environment and health of locals (and that modern nuclear is completely different from Chernobyl) they would not protest. So I guess the only way is to properly inform people (so good move by E-On with their visitor center).
aesthetics (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know what everyone else's problem is, I think windfarms look really fucking cool. I was driving an interstate road I hadn't been on for a few years and they've put up some wind turbines, and they're damn impressive! I wanted to stop and take photos but I was in a hurry.
Re:Good move... (Score:3, Interesting)
How many deaths are attributable to pollution from coal power? How many deaths are attributable to diseases that are commonly acquired from mining coal?
Your figures are effectively worthless.