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Power United States Government The Almighty Buck

Energy Department Proposes Funding For Ohio's First Offshore Wind Project 137

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
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.'"
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Energy Department Proposes Funding For Ohio's First Offshore Wind Project More

Energy Department Proposes Funding For Ohio's First Offshore Wind Project

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  • Overall, lots of wind on the lakes, and other than superior, relatively shallow ( i.e. cheap to set-up ). At the same time, it would be good to add new nuclear reactors there. Together, they can shut down Murray coal.

  • At least the chopped birds won't be scattered about on the ground creating an unsightly mess.

    • Bird populations figure out how to avoid the blades - I've watched them play around the blades as they spin.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Suki I ( 1546431 )

        Bird lives matter.

        • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Suki I ( 1546431 )

            Cats are nature.

          • The idea that wind turbines kill huge amount of birds is bollocks.
            However the idea (yeah, that was discussed on /. often enough) that cats kill close to 4billion birds per year in the US is bollocks, too.
            If every american had a cat, his cat would need to go outside and kill 10 birds per year. While you now can shift around numbers about how many cats there are in the US, you can shift up the numbers of bird kill per cat.

            I have no clue why people have problems with big numbers. They are just numbers ... lik

            • 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 l

              • 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.

                Yeah, and those who kill birds are the minority.

                Again: to make your numbers fit: every cat would need to contribute a huge deal in bird kills, but they don't.

          • Domestic cats don't hunt bald eagles. Bald eagles hunt domestic cats. Bald eagles are killed by windmills, proven by the wind power industry lobbying the Obama administration successfully for kill permits of several protected species of eagles.

            If domestic cats killing birds bother you then you'd want more windmills. Fewer eagles lost to windmills means more eagles to hunt cats.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Max_W ( 812974 )
            Blades kill big endangered birds which like soaring in the places where wind turbines are installed. Cats do not attack them.

            One pair of big birds may kill two thousand mice per summer. This is why in some areas of Europe there is an invasion of mice nowadays.

          • False equivalence. There are spectacularly more species and variety of birds than one.

            Cats can kill all the starlings and pigeons they want, but those birds are not the ones being smacked by wind turbines. Wind turbines disproportionately affect large birds, which are also more likely to be endangered species.

  • "did not believe that the offshore wind project would cause significant damage to migratory birds"

    None of them do. At least not as much as 0.3 cats.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by voicofsf ( 5555226 ) on Sunday October 07, 2018 @11:21AM (#57441312)
    The project will be located 8 miles offshore, vertically. See the official website: http://www.leedco.org/index.ph... [leedco.org] 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... [energytransition.org]. 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'.

  • Stop the subsidies, it's just corporate welfare. Claiming that wind power has some kind of exemption because it's "green" is only admitting that "green" energy cannot survive competition.

    End all energy subsidies. That means coal and nuclear. What nuclear power needs is permission to proceed, not subsidies. At least end the subsidies on the federal level, that's beyond the powers of the Constitution.

    We're only now seeing some real research into fourth generation nuclear power. The molten salt reactor wa

  • Energy Department proposes funding for Ohio’s first offshore wind project

    There is absolutely nothing in the story about funding anything.

    What this says is that and environmental impact assessment was done and there would be no impact to the human environment.

    Whoop de doo. Give the project momentum and the people that oppose it will find their equivalent of the snail darter before you can say boo. What's more, there still is no mention of dollar one.

    You get this continuously with her just yesterday she had the zero information EU CO2 capture story.

    It's like she holds treats out f

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