New Report: Offshore Wind Could Power Entire U.S.

[JohnWxy]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/offshore_wind_c.php

There is as much wind power potential (900,000 megawatts) off our coasts as the current capacity of all power plants in the United States combined, according to a new report entitled "A Framework for Offshore Wind Energy Development in the United States", sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and General Electric. The Framework report finds the greatest wind power potential offshore the highly-populated urban coastal areas of the northeast and it recognizes the roles of Cape Wind and the Long Island offshore wind project in creating the momentum to develop offshore wind power in the United States.


“Most of the total potential offshore wind resources exist relatively close to major urban load centers, where high energy costs prevail and where opportunities for wind development on land are limited. This is especially true in the densely populated Northeast, where nearly one-fifth of that national populations lives on less than 2% of the total land area.


Offshore wind energy is also an attractive option for the Northeast because slightly more than half the country’s offshore wind potential is located off the New England and Mid-Atlantic coasts, where water depths generally deepen gradually with distance from shore. This attribute allows for the initial development of offshore wind in relatively shallow waters followed by a transition to deeper waters further for shore as the technology is advanced.”

[kristopher]

1. The article is a bit dated

It looks like the first offshore wind farm will be right in my back yard - 11 miles off the coast of Rehoboth Beach Delaware.

It was one hell of a fight with the coal companies and coal fired utilities to get this approved. Their involvement and use of bought political influence was overt and very revealing of the real nature of the opposition to wind.

[JohnWxy]

6. I'm not insensitive to people not wanting a natural view spoiled. I think they should be able

to site wind farms without spoiling the natural sights of some locations.

[kristopher]

11. It had nothing to do with viewshed arguments

It was a naked attempt to protect profits. The original legislation was intended to lay the groundwork for a "clean coal" plant. Once wind submitted a bid, the 'clean coal' plant was shown to be an open ended money pit. When the utility still objected after wind won the bidding, it became clear they were protecting (invisible) profits from a large scale generating source that has no fuel costs. The common conclusion is that there are some Enron type games being played with pricing that would be revealed with wind as a basis for comparison.

[XemaSab]

2. Good idea!

The albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels, tropicbirds, boobies, scoters, gannets, phalaropes, storm petrels, fulmars, gulls, terns, loons, grebes, frigatebirds, jaegers, eiders, noddies, auklets, puffins, murrelets, guillemots, razorbills, dovekies, and little migrating birdies will just have to take one for the team.

[kristopher]

3. You have no idea if there is risk, so why the hyperbolic statement?

Oh yes, I remember now...

You think nuclear power is a better way to go.

[ElectricGrid]

4. Looks like the planet will have to take one for the team.

[diane in sf]

14. You would be talking about coal and nukes I hope. Wind is rather kind to the

planet in comparison.

[JohnWxy]

5. I wonder what the swept area of a few thousand wind turbines would be compared tothe cubic miles of

airspace over the Atlantic ocean? Let's just take the North Atlantic say one third the area of the whole Atlantic. that would be about 25 million square miles.

maybe there is room for the wind-mills.

I don't accept the notion that most birds are incapable of manuevering easily around wind-mills during the day (wind-mills are not spinning like a table fan). (and At night if they're cleared for flying oninstrument .)

[JohnWxy]

7. do albatrosses frequent the North Atlantic? I don't know any ancient mariners to ask.

I don't think they do. And tropicbirds??

Now boobies, now those I know something about. They aren't ocean migrators. They are typically domesticated and usually found in double pouched nests.

[DCKit]

8. Yay! More fish for MEEEEEEEE! n/t

[glitch]

10. Outdated argument.

Modern windmills don't carry the same threat that the original ones did (and the original threat was very much exaggerated by "competitors" quoted because nuclear is hardly competitive).

[madrchsod]

9. there`s an idea of putting mills on abandoned oil rigs.....

[FiveGoodMen]

12. No one ever seems to ask this...

If you take enough energy out of the planet's circulating air to power the whole country, what does that do to the environment?

[diane in sf]

13. I don't know. I wonder what blowing up every mountain with a coal seam in it

in the South East US will do for the environment?

[FiveGoodMen]

15. Wasn't suggesting that that would be a better approach

If there are significant impacts, we should really try to avoid/prepare-for them ahead of time.

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Not a lot

The power running through ocean and air currents runs to petawatts. There's some very localised 'sapping' - you wouldn't want to build a windfarm a mile downwind from an existing one - but on a larger scale the energy is quite a few orders of magnitude larger than our entire useage.

[JohnWxy]

17. Well, how many millions of tons of CO2 would not go into the environment because of taking all those

coal fired power plants off-line. I WONDER if that would reduce global warming. GEE DO YUH THINK????????


Unless of course you're thinking that maybe all those windmills would stop all the winds and then the world would stop turning and then we'd all die because of the loss of the coreolus effect and oh-my-god STOP THE WINDMILLS THERE KILLING THE PLANET. DON QUIXOTE WAS RIGHT AFTER ALL!!!!! AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

[FiveGoodMen]

18. I was merely asking a scientific question about conservation of energy

[kristopher]

20. The atmosphere is many miles thick,

The atmosphere is many miles thick, and it's bottom layer is dragged across obstacles constantly. Trees, mountains, houses, cliffs bushes, grass, people, autos; you name it and it slows down the passage of wind. Even water in the ocean is dragging across little bitty millimeter sized waves that produce drag.

Just consider the number of trees and how they absorb the shock of the wind - now add a million turbines as if they were large trees. Do you think in the entire scheme of things it is going to significantly impact the tens of miles of air piled above the turbine?

[NNadir]

19. Basically, the "renewables will save us" cults can't write a sentence with a declarative verb.

Every sentence they write has the conditional tense.

Every post they write would be prevented by declaring a ban on the word "could."

It's been that way for years here.

For a brazillion years we've been hearing how renewables will save us, and still the whole shebang can't produce one exajoule of energy.

Tens of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste have been indiscriminately dumped in the atmosphere while this stupid conversation has been taking place, and still they sit and pull lint out their fat occluded navels.

[kristopher]

21. Nuclear energy cannot solve the global climate crisis.

Nuclear energy is not suited to developing third world infrastructure.

Nuclear energy is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to expensive.

Nuclear energy produces far to much waste which is far too dangerous.

Reducing emissions to the necessary levels will require some 14 (modified) “stabilization wedges,” the term coined by Princeton’s Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala for an “activity that reduces emissions to the atmosphere that starts at zero today and increases
linearly until it accounts for 1 GtC/year of reduced carbon emissions in 50 years.” Since the time for action is so short, the wedges probably need to be modified so that they are squeezed into about four decades.22

The most comprehensive report ever done on what one wedge of nuclear power would require is the 2007 Keystone Center Report, “Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding,” which was supported by the utility and nuclear industries.23

The report notes that achieving a (one) wedge of nuclear power by mid-century would require building approximately 1,000 1-GW nuclear plants, which requires adding globally:

An average of 14 new plants each year for the next 50 years, as well as approximately 7.4 plants a year to replace those that will be retired.

11-to-22 additional large enrichment plants to supplement the 17 existing plants.

18 additional fuel fabrication plants to supplement the 24 existing plants.

10 nuclear waste repositories the size of the statutory capacity of Yucca Mountain, each of which would store approximately 700,000 tons of spent fuel.

In short, we need five decades of building nuclear plants at a rate only previously achieved for one decade—20 GW/year during the 1980s.

In fact, since we really need to deploy all this low-carbon power in 40 years, we should build 25 GW of nuclear plants a year.
-Joe Romm

And that is to solve just over 7% of the problem.

[carguy67]

22. Slow

The US seems to have been dragging it's feet for years on offshore wind generators, current generators & wave generators. Finally seems like the ball has started rolling. There are some current generators being tested in NY. Of of the Colleges in Texas has been doing wave generator testing.

Everyone has been pushing solar and wind farms and it seems like other viable options have not been getting enough attention.