Inherit the Wind

[madokie]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/wind.html

The port of Iberia has never been busier. Situated on a narrow canal leading to the Louisiana coastline, the docks here throb with the sound of tugboats towing oil platforms to and from their anchorages in the Gulf of Mexico. When a drilling site is depleted, the platforms return to port; the docks are littered with rusting steel hulks waiting for their next run.

In December, though, one of these platforms, stripped and refurbished by a local startup, returned to sea with a new mission. The first of a flotilla to come, it carried wind-monitoring equipment as well as radar for tracking migratory birds. Those that follow will be topped not by drilling rigs but by windmills. The turbines are bound for an 18-square-mile area roughly 10 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, where the first offshore wind farm in the US is under construction. That’s right: The flower of sustainable energy is blooming in oil country. Get ready for the Great Texas Wind Rush.

Formed in 2004, Wind Energy Systems Technology (WEST) is on track to commercialize offshore wind power well ahead of more established and better funded contenders with greener credentials. At $240 million and 150 megawatts of peak output—enough to power 45,000 homes—the project is modest. But the eyes of the alt-energy world are upon it. “WEST may not be in the mainstream, but they’re definitely serious,” says Walt Musial at the National Wind Technology Center in Colorado. “They might actually do it.”

Wind energy is the most promising carbon-free, nonnuclear alternative to fossil-fueled grid power. But regions with enough space and breeze for land-based wind farms—mostly in the Midwest—are far from coastal population centers; the cost of running transmission lines between generators and users is a major disincentive. That’s why wind-power entrepreneurs have set their sights on coastal waters. In the Atlantic, off Cape Cod, the 450-megawatt Cape Wind installation has been in the works for five years. But that project is mired in NIMBY activism and has yet to pass its initial federally mandated environmental review. (Ironically, a cabal of local property owners, including green-energy backers like US senator Edward Kennedy, are leading the fight against Cape Wind for fear it will mar the environment off Martha’s Vineyard.) Another project proposed for New York’s Long Island Sound has run into similar difficulties, and plans for wind farms off California have foundered on the expense of sinking pilings in the deeper Pacific coast waters.

[MADem]

1. The Kennedy catching the most heat is actually NOT Ted, it's Bobby JR.

All politics is local...and NIMBY the order of the day, it seems.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_stubble17_02-17-07_KA4D2E3.48eb654.html

FOR AN “environmentalist,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some inconsistent views on how America should respond to global warming...While RFK Jr. is extolling the virtues of liquefied natural gas as a “bridge” fuel out here on the West Coast, he’s simultaneously spearheading the opposition to a carbon-free wind farm proposed by Cape Wind Associates LLC on the East Coast, even in the face of virtually categorical endorsement by most environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts chapter.

Cape Wind wants to build America’s first offshore wind farm at Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow part of Nantucket Sound. On a really windy day, Cape Wind estimates that its project will produce up to 468 megawatts of electricity (the maximum expected peak demand is 454 megawatts), with absolutely zero emissions.

On a typically breezy day, the project will produce about 170 megawatts, which is 75 percent of the 230-megawatt demand of Cape Cod and the islands....Does that region really need this energy? The New England Independent System Operator says that it needed it by 2006! But RFK Jr. and his millionaire clientele who have summer homes in the area have fought Cape Wind for the last six years and it’s still dead in the water.

Kennedy’s position on the Cape Wind project is unequivocal: “What Cape Wind is trying to do is circumvent that whole regulations process and privatize a heavily utilized public trust resource and turn it into a private profit-making industrial facility. If you can do that offshore with a wind plant, why not build a hotel on stilts? Why not build a liquefied natural gas processing plant?”

Unfortunately, an LNG facility is precisely what RFK Jr. and Mati Waiya, of the Wishtoyo Foundation, propose for Ventura County, Calif.! It makes you wonder whom they’re working for.....