The 'World's Largest Floating Wind Farm' Produces Its First Power (cnbc.com) 73
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A facility described as the world's largest floating wind farm produced its first power over the weekend, with more turbines set to come online before the year is out. In a statement Monday, Norwegian energy firm Equinor -- better known for its work in the oil and gas industry -- said power production from Hywind Tampen's first wind turbine took place on Sunday afternoon. While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen will be used to help power operations at oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Equinor said Hywind Tampen's first power was sent to the Gullfaks oil and gas field.
Hywind Tampen is located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway, in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters. Seven of the wind farm's turbines are slated to come on stream in 2022, with installation of the remaining four taking place in 2023. When complete, Equinor says it will have a system capacity of 88 megawatts. Equinor said Hywind Tampen was expected to meet around 35% of the Gullfaks and Snorre fields' electricity demand. "This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year," the company added.
Hywind Tampen is located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway, in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters. Seven of the wind farm's turbines are slated to come on stream in 2022, with installation of the remaining four taking place in 2023. When complete, Equinor says it will have a system capacity of 88 megawatts. Equinor said Hywind Tampen was expected to meet around 35% of the Gullfaks and Snorre fields' electricity demand. "This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year," the company added.
Re:Offshore is dubious. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems mostly about securing sovereign maritime zones and developing technologically-moated turbines at the expense of scalability. It's not exactly a scam, but it's in the ballpark of a scam.
And your evidence for this is what, precisely?
It's Norwegian, thus pumped storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Intermittent power generation is great for.... I don't know what exactly. But not getting rid of fossil fuel. At least not yet.
Intermittent power generation is great for countries which already have a lot of existing hydropower resources that they can convert into pumped storage. This project being run Norway in particular is idea because this country has the perfect geography and existing hydropower setup for this. This means that instead of a major civil engineering project to construct de novo storage locations, they can instead upgrade existing reservoirs with new turbines and pumps. Yes this doesn't work for everyone, but for Norway this is ideal.
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People vastly over-estimate the amount of storage needed.
Old electricity grids without renewables have a lot of over-capacity, because they knew that some of it would be down for maintenance at any given time, and because accidents happen, lines go down, power stations go offline without notice.
Same thing works for renewables, only because there is no fuel the cost of "running" renewables is close to zero. A wind turbine with the brake on doesn't really last any longer than one that is generating power the
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People vastly over-estimate the amount of storage needed.
No, they don't. Where do you people get this crap? There is not a power company on the planet that doesn't know exactly how much energy is being pulled from the gird. There are no "estimates" going on. At any time during the day a power company will know exactly how much power is needed.
Re: Offshore is dubious. (Score:2)
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I actually live in France. Our water reservoirs would product 20% of the electricity need, nowhere near enough to replace nuclear and fossil fuels.
What's more is that our electricity is already 80% decarbonated but we invest billions in wind turbines that undermine our very decarbonated production (nuclear) instead of subsidising heat pumps to replace gas/petrol heaters. We're doing it backwards, it's maddening.
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This cannot be reliably connected to the electric grid without a backup source of electricity.
That is true of any source of power. You always want a variety of power sources.
Can you guess which power source has been the least reliable during Europe's current crisis? Not wind. It is nuclear [reuters.com]. 56 reactors have gone offline.
none most of the time
Have you ever been to 55 N in the North Sea? North of the "Roaring 40s" are the "Furious 50s" and the "Shrieking 60s". At those latitudes, the wind doesn't stop.
it endangers nuclear plants
Norway has no nuclear plants.
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Can you guess which power source has been the least reliable during Europe's current crisis? Not wind. It is nuclear [reuters.com]. 56 reactors have gone offline.
That is because they neglected maintenance and ignored the life cycle. You can have the same problem with wind.
Have you ever been to 55 N in the North Sea? North of the "Roaring 40s" are the "Furious 50s" and the "Shrieking 60s". At those latitudes, the wind doesn't stop.
The wind in North Sea is slower than 13 km/h about 2 days in a month on average. Most turbines will not produce any energy at such a low wind speed. Wind is fine if you have enough storage (or fossil fuel backup). Otherwise it is a way to blackouts.
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The wind in North Sea is slower than 13 km/h about 2 days in a month on average. Most turbines will not produce any energy at such a low wind speed. Wind is fine if you have enough storage (or fossil fuel backup). Otherwise it is a way to blackouts.
Or, as in the Europe, you have wind turbines with a fossil fuel backup and an active plan to transition to increased interconnect and storage. This only brings good things. Take the UK, we had the fossil fuel back up anyway because it was the previous generation, we already had the interconnect but are now reshaping it fit new requirements and we already had some storage and are adding more. The wind turbines replace fossil fuel usage now when they are running. As we build more interconnect and storage, win
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Nuclear is not subsidized much any more in USA. The energy-related tax preferences are divided as:
Source: https://www.cbo.gov/system/fil... [cbo.gov]
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Roaring 40s in the north sea?
Like it's quite windy but you're talking about the wrong hemisphere. The reason the shrieking 69s, fields 50s and roasting 40s is the winds can circulate unimpeded by land around the Southern Ocean, and with very little impediment a bit further north.
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Can you guess which power source has been the least reliable during Europe's current crisis? Not wind. It is nuclear [reuters.com]. 56 reactors have gone offline.
This is not true ether. The nuclear power reactors where not "unreliable." The where turned off on purpose because the irrational fear of nuclear power. This was a political decision, not a maintenance issue.
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The where turned off on purpose because the irrational fear of nuclear power.
Please go back and read the link. The French nukes were temporarily shut down because of corrosion in the pipes and other maintenance issues. Some of them are already back online.
This was a political decision, not a maintenance issue.
Bullcrap.
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Where temporarily shutdown after how many years in service? The key word there is, temporarily. That doesn't mean they are "unreliable", just they needed maintance.
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Re:Offshore is dubious. (Score:4, Informative)
This is not now, and is unlikely ever to be connected to any electricity grid. Nobody (apart from you) has suggested that it might be.
It has one. Actually, several. The oil (and gas) production platforms it is providing power to have, as a large part of their raîson d'Ãtre, equipment for separating produced oil from it's dissolved natural gas load. Currently, this gas is used onboard to drive gas turbines (modified jet engines, typically ; Rolls Royce RB-211 as designed for Concord(e) were popular when I worked in the UK sector) that deliver electrical power to the platform's equipment (with diesel emergency engines and generators for backup power and fire pumps). (These would be typically part of the facilities module, away from the oil processing plant.) Gas not used for power generation is available for export - if there is pipeline capacity for it. The pipeline capacity being the choke point.
If, after trials, this structure has appropriate reliability and power delivery, it might take over some of the base load of the platforms, and they might go down from 3x40% gas turbines engines (which allow one turbine-generator set to be taken down for maintenance while providing 80% nominal power ; during scheduled maintenance shutdowns, for example) to 2x40%(gas)+20%(wind). Then work up to only having one gas turbine, with more wind turbines. But for redundancy, they'd very likely not go down to one gas turbine set.
The problem for "facilities department" would be that, in most cases, it would be practically impossible to remove the (now redundant) turbines from the installation. Most installations I've worked on, you'd have to remove the accommodation blocks to get the turbines out. (Or, for that matter, in ; they do their turbine maintenance religiously because replacing one is a "not gonna happen" thing. I saw a 4th turbine being added on a drilling deck once - it took over a year of work.) Major undertaking.
In theory, you can generally add export capacity to a platform, to use the gas that you've freed-up from the power system. But again, it's a major undertaking, needing pipe-lay barges, diver support (to connect pipe to platform risers), shore terminals ... major undertaking. Which is why they'll go slow on evaluating this.
Gullfaks is a middle-aged field - it's platforms were being installed when I was starting my career. It's unlikely to be worth the investment for such major undertakings. Using it to trial technologies for future oilfields, OTOH, makes good sense. For a start, they've got over 30 years of 24x7 wind data for the area - which you won't have for future development sites.
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>>This is not now, and is unlikely ever to be connected to any electricity grid. Nobody (apart from you) has suggested that it might be.
Um have to ask, then how will it deliver power to customers?
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By the TFA, they will be using the power to perform their gas and oil production.
That can be a separate power grid and don't even need to be that reliable, as we're talking about basically motors, many, many motors.
Still cut the emissions (and costs) because they're not using the own gas and oil to power the operation.
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A wind turbine consumes *a lot* of CO2 before emmitting a single spark of electricity. I'd be interested to know the lifespan of those offshore. Depending on the number, it *might* emmit marginally lower CO2 per kw/h than burning the fuel they have right there.
In any case, using wind turbines to power petrol extraction seems moot at best.
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Intermittent power generation is great for.... I don't know what exactly. But not getting rid of fossil fuel. At least not yet.
It is already displacing fossil fuels for electricity generation. There may be ultimate limits, but it is displacing it.
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The logistical difference between land and offshore wind is massive, while the benefit is modest. The game is to make construction and maintenance the profit center. Which is fine for a small operation, but you could scale a lot faster on land on a dollar-per-power-unit basis. Which means it's a compromise when it comes to renewable energy.
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In Norway, offshore wind farms is the only solution that makes sense in the long run. On land there are few places where wind farms won't create problems for either wildlife or those who live there, and the mountains and valleys create a lot of turbulence. The sea area on the other hand is almost unlimited and has almost constant wind, particularly during the winter months when it's most needed. The main problem is high waves, which regularly reaches 18 meters with peaks of closer to 30 meters during the wi
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No, the main problem is installing the cables to bring the power to where it's needed. Now, that is do-able - I spent the Millennium night drilling on a production platform which got it's power from (IIRC) a 100kW HVDC cable from the Claymore platform - but it's expensive and needs specific hardware (a pipelay barge) to install it.
We've been putting fixed installations into the North Sea and Norwegian waters for nearly 50 years now, and none have collapsed, despite some pretty
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It's greenwash (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of putting a few wind turbines next to their oil and gas installations Equinor could have stopped profiting from pumping oil and gas. But hey here's another "solution which sort of sounds green and allows the company involved to pretend that they're something other than climate criminals. It will of course make very little difference to the environmental destruction due to this company.
Re:It's greenwash (Score:5, Insightful)
Give it a rest, it takes time to transition from carbon fuels to renewables. Admittedly, the world doesn't not have a lot of time left at its disposal to effect a change, but regardless, it won't change on a dime and bankrupting the company won't get us there.
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Give it a rest, it takes time to transition from carbon fuels to renewables.
Big time, but the naysayers are as persistent as old Wile E. Coyote in the old Road Runner cartoons.
Admittedly, the world doesn't not have a lot of time left at its disposal to effect a change, but regardless, it won't change on a dime and bankrupting the company won't get us there.
I'm of the pretty firm belief that we reached a tipping point back in the late 1970's, The roller coaster ride has started, and we are going to go where it takes us. This is in contradiction to what a lot of climatologists publicly say, but there it is.
Now what this stuff about renewables is doing is giving us time to adapt so it doesn't all come crashing down at one time.
Fossil fuels are not in infini
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Yep. That's why I've always considered people who became parents after about then (allow some leeway into the 1980s) to be stark staring insane. Certainly not something I've ever considered justifiable.
Yep. Well, not as an energy source. They'll continue to be used as chemical feedstocks for the plastics and chemicals ind
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Yep. Well, not as an energy source. They'll continue to be used as chemical feedstocks for the plastics and chemicals industries long after they're too expensive for use as a fuel. Which means (and a lot of people don't get this) they'll continue to be drilled fur. Unless some cunning biochemist finds a way to get bacteria to spit out C-20+ chains and benzene rings at a sufficiently low cost.
There's been some successful research into doing exactly that using lignin as a feedstock. Mass industrial processes for doing so at low cost are still in question, but we'll have to wait and see.
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Process plants with a thousand bopd (barrel oil per day)-equivalent output ... I think I can count them on the fingers of one nose. (A 1000bopd well would generally be considered good news if onshore, and a candidate for "plug and aban
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We should have a 100% tax on fossil fuel profits. The only way to avoid paying it is to take that money and invest it in renewable energy.
Fossil fuel companies would have a simple choice. Become non-profit, or spend every penny of profit on building renewable generation that you can profit from.
How does that solve the problem?
The first issue I see is getting this tax-and-spend scheme implemented as voters don't like voting for higher energy prices. Being a non-profit doesn't mean people aren't making money, non-profit entities still have to pay salaries. We can force fossil fuel companies into being a non-profit to avoid not having to dump profits into renewable energy but that just means that money goes into salaries or something instead of paying out profits to shareholders. If fossil fuel co
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The costs of the different sources really depend on where you are in the world. In the UK, it's onshore wind, offshore wind, solar, gas and then nuclear in terms of rising cost, although the cost of gas is at the moment very volatile. While onshore wind is cheaper, offshore wind is less open to NIMBYish and there is lots of space for it in shallow waters.
Of course, you are correct that past results give a good estimate of future performance, but they also give a good estimate of the likely change in future
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You really don't think this shit through do you? So, let's say you tax or ban fossil fuels overnight like you want too. How many dead people is this worth to you? Give me a body count on what you find acceptable for this dream?
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You seem to have not understood the basic premise.
The tax is not on fossil fuels per-se. The tax is on profit. They can sell them for a penny, they can sell them for a pound. It makes no difference, after their costs are covered there is no profit.
So the price of fossil fuels would not go up at all. And if for some reason they tried it, just introduce mandatory pricing. France already has, for example, to limit the pain for consumers and businesses due to recent gas price increases.
There is no god given rig
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The number is negative, given how many lives it would save.
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Let me make the question more plan to you. If you realize your dream of banning or taxing out of existence the fossil fuel industry in a year. A year is a good time frame. How many people are you willing to let die for this dream?
Here let's put some faces on your dream. Africa, there are about 2.1 billion souls there. Some of the poorest on the planet. Shutting down the fossil fuel industry will severally limit our ability to aid them. So, lets just toss a number out there, about 80% would probab
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Where is a year come from? It would certainly take a lot longer than that to make the transition.
Also, how would taxing profits in Europe affect African nations? Did you know that they are no longer colonies of European countries, and set their own tax policy?
I think you are horribly confused about what is being proposed. In Europe several countries have already implemented a "windfall tax" that taxes the very large profits that were made by gas suppliers due to the war in Ukraine. In fact, the boss of BP s
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How many people are you willing to let die for your fossil free dream?
Simple question. Ether answer it or don't bother to reply.
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Your question seems to be based on two false premises. One is that the proposed plan would kill people. The other is that AmiMoJo has not already answered the question. For the latter premise, AmiMoJo already stated a negative number of deaths. You can simply round that to zero if you like.
The main criticism of the plan is really how to define profits. Modern corporations have become experts in hiding profits in executive payouts, stock buybacks, paying fees to other companies that are really just subsidiar
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Fossil fuel companies already have to give a breakdown of profits for legal reasons, and the EU has made progress on taxing a percentage of their global profits based on how much business they did in each member state, so they can't simply move it all to the Caribbean and claim to have made a loss.
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True, but they are huge organizations with Byzantine business arrangements, even within the same company. I think they have a lot of methods available to hide their real profits. Possibly just to obscure them for a number of years through capital investments in hopes of dodging the taxes while they lobby to get rid of them, etc. Overall, I think it's not a bad idea though. It is important to recognize that oil companies are exploiting a public resource. They don't normally go out and actually buy the land t
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Your question seems to be based on two false premises. One is that the proposed plan would kill people. The other is that AmiMoJo has not already answered the question. For the latter premise, AmiMoJo already stated a negative number of deaths. You can simply round that to zero if you like.
Any plan that involves shutting down the the fossil fuel industry or taxing it out of existence as he/she/it/whatever proposes would cause massive deaths from starvation in Africa and South Asia alone.
The number is negative, given how many lives it would save.
This is the statement that set me off. Read it. It clearly states that she/he/it/whatever is willing to sacrifice present day people as long as it would save lives in the future. The people she/he/it/whatever is willing to sacrifice to achieve a fossil fuel free future would be the poorest and most helpl
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Any plan that involves shutting down the the fossil fuel industry or taxing it out of existence as he/she/it/whatever proposes would cause massive deaths from starvation in Africa and South Asia alone.
You do realize that, in order to make an argument you have to actually... make an argument? Specifically, _why_ would it cause all that? Provide some detail.
This is the statement that set me off. Read it. It clearly states that she/he/it/whatever is willing to sacrifice present day people as long as it would save lives in the future. The people she/he/it/whatever is willing to sacrifice to achieve a fossil fuel free future would be the poorest and most helpless on the planet. But it doesn't matter to people like he/she/it/whatever because they don't consider these people important. As long as they get their fossil free dream, fuck whoever has to die for it.
You seem to be reading a lot into AmiMoJo's statements that simply isn't there. Once again, maybe if you elaborate a bit more then it will be more clear what the source of the confusion is.
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It's all very well to label companies producing oil and gas "climate criminals" but they're not the ones who burn it and release the CO2 into the atmosphere.
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You can burn your petrol when you need it. You cannot profit from your wind farm when there's no wind. For that reason, wind turbines will *never* replace oil or gas or coal (at least alone and for now). So the point is moot.
Re: It's greenwash (Score:2)
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You can burn your petrol when you need it. You cannot profit from your wind farm when there's no wind. For that reason, wind turbines will *never* replace oil or gas or coal (at least alone and for now). So the point is moot.
You do know that there are many places where the wind does not stop, right?
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You do know that there are many places where the wind does not stop, right?
There are no places on this planet where the wind does not stop. There are places where the wind blows for extremely long periods of time. A great deal of these places where the wind blows for long periods of time, it is simply not feasible to put a wind farm there. We are talking Antarctica, tops of Himalayan mountains, and the planes of Peru.
Simply put, wind alone will NEVER replace fossil fuel power generation.
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Reading compression is your friend.
"Simply put, wind alone will NEVER replace fossil fuel power generation"
Is a true statement, but the key word here is "alone." That leaves plenty of room for other forms of green energy, such as solar, nuclear, and my favorite, geothermal.
Re: It's greenwash (Score:2)
Go and google, then come back and apologise.
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Way to answer nothing. Congrats.
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Um, batteries can store electrical energy to provide electricity when the wind isn't blowing. Everybody knows this.
Industrial-scale batteries already exist. Tesla is putting them in semis, and they are under development (scale-up) for cargo ships. That's about the scale you would need to power a gas/oil plant, rather than oil-based diesel generators.
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Um, batteries can store electrical energy to provide electricity when the wind isn't blowing. Everybody knows this.
Natural gas and fuel oil can provide electricity on demand. Everybody knows this. Not only are tanks of fossil fuels a store of energy but they are a source of energy. Everybody knows this but they may not realize the implications. We can pump the fossil fuels out of the ground with a very high energy return on energy invested (EROEI), then we can store that energy at very low cost in tanks for when it is needed. The EROEI isn't a perfect measure of value or profit but it is at least a place to start.
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Um, batteries can store electrical energy to provide electricity when the wind isn't blowing. Everybody knows this.
Batteries will never be able to store enough energy to meet demand. Barring some radically advancement in energy storage technology. Even the largest battery farms planned will not supply energy needs for more than a few hours. It's all a matter of energy density.
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Instead of putting a few wind turbines next to their oil and gas installations Equinor could have stopped profiting from pumping oil and gas.
Sure why would a company want to continue to exist? I mean a company other than Facebook, they are doing their best to not exist, but not all companies are run by morons.
solution which sort of sounds green
Is wind power not green? Maybe they should just go back to doing what oil platforms typically do: Power themselves by burning untreated, unrefined oil/gas mixtures, and you should see just how much energy that takes.
pretend that they're something other than climate criminals
Who is a criminal? The people doing what they can to reduce emissions and green their operation? Or the people who buy a produ
Subsidising fossil fuels? (Score:3)
Re: Subsidising fossil fuels? (Score:2)
Marine Rest Stops (Score:2)
A benefit of offshore wind farms that I haven't heard mentioned is that they will provide patches of shade in the open ocean. How much depends upon how much platform surrounds each windmill.
Fish like the shade –– they can often be found hanging around under boats and docks. For whatever reason – lower visibility of schools to predators, I don't know, but they do tend to congregate in shadowy places.
So, offshore wind farms could inadvertently provide little rest stops in an otherwise open o
Anyone find it ironic (Score:1)