Offshore Score since 2001: Europe 24, U.S. 0

Our country seems to be at the thumb-sucking stage when it comes to off-shore wind development. Other countries are moving ahead while we are looking for excuses for further inaction. Yes, off-shore wind is already proven in Europe but we are still not convinced that it will work here. The real block is a mental one, perhaps the idea that we will have to grow up and graduate some day from the school of coal and nuclear.

adrianakau2aol.com

Some related interesting here and there:

(1) -"wind power was 15 or 20 years ago, with no clearly superior engineering solutions" - Annette von Jouanne - professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University in Corvallis at 2006 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

(2) ". . . What we need are "emerging technologies" that can compete directly with existing technologies on a head-to-head basis, without mandates and rebates (hidden taxes)"- Lucas  (posted on renewableenergyaccess.com)

(3) Media hame make a big, big coverage on Texas Sout Padre Island project of offshore wind farm. then forget tell audient that it failed (not profitable?). Even it's supported by RTC.

Thanks.

 

 

But given the rhetoric which is circling around about alternative energy sources one can see why political interjections can be on the tip of ones tongue.

In the Seattle Puget Sound basin we have the Tacoma Narrows which could be an extreme source of underwater or sea-wind power.  However, even with the State Legislature giving of a $20 million grant for alternative sources in a 2% loan no action has come forth.  With most of our U.S. Representative (Inslee) and Senators constantly touting for alternative energy sources nothing has been done.  Washington State is I believe number two or three center for land wind power and the Palouse region (Southeastern Washington) is benefitting from the new economy.

One investment at a time.  It seems like Washington State is taking care of itself.  The rest of the states citizens need to kick it up a notch.  Phoenix Arizona should have solar and a device from Boeing would help with this endeavor.  You can use it in your backyard.

New alternative sources of energy are still in the discovery stage.  If you have been reading these reports you will realize a company in San Diego is looking at the enzymes from termites to discover if an alternative source of energy can be develeped from this little insect.  Small discoveries like this could make the European market in a few years look dismall.  Don't give up on the U.S. power of innovation and discover.  The next steps in the alternative energy markets have not even been developed as of yet.  Save the money until the real alternative energy sources can be implemented.  I am excited about this.  Running the Europeans off of the economic map through discovery once again will be happiness rediscovered.  All of us in the U.S. will be soon smiling again no matter what political affilition you are in.

The mention of an unsubsidized round of offshore wind in the UK sounded wonderful, almost too good to be true. So I decided to check the BWEA site to see if it was true and found that there are Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) worth £34.30/MWh that the windfarms can sell. I consider that a subsidy of sorts, maybe not directly by the government, but at least by the electricity rate-payers. That's a whole lot more generous than the US PTC.

Geez... we can't even escape a political debate HERE. I turned off CNN and cancelled my subscription to the newspaper because the off-topic opinions of the likes of "Phoenix Woman" (<< not her real name, one can assume; I do).

ON topic would be suggestions & solutions... use of that pent-up anger, apparently directed at the current political administration, toward IMPROVING the knowledge base related to Wind Power -- ON shore and/or OFFshore -- for sites in the USA. We've had enough 'delays' in getting the concept of Wind Power understood and into the mindset of Americans already, that's part of the problem pointed out in this article... we're reminded that we're lagging many other parts of the world. We don't need PW's visceral comments, which might only increase the divisiveness and perpetuates more delays.  

I found Larry's comment interesting and appropriate; the original author didn't need to interject what they had, it was irrelevent, and some will say ignorant, given what Larry pointed out; but PW's energy seemed to be way up there and still aimed at denigrating the current administration's recent and positive efforts in the energy field (that, we're here to discuss); hers was absolute drivel. Now... if instead, there were only some way to harness THAT energy toward a positive and constructive solution... but alas, I'm probably asking too much.

Instead of debating and food-fighting over this, why not help educate someone in Phoenix about the positive benefits of Wind Power. Can you do that without adding any political commentary, PW? Or, is the latter your real intent? This is rhetorical, of course... I really don't care to know, I didn't expect to hear of it here, in the first place.

#2)  The traditional petroleum, gas and oil models we've relied on historically for centralized power generation and distibution are no longer singularly valid because of the new technologies available to us.  We should NOT be forced to continue following traditional models simply because we have an extensive existing power grid infrastructure that needs to be supported in this country, for example.  This only continues reliance on existing (but diminishing) and increasingly vulnerable supplies of strategic feedstocks (oil and gas), or resources that obviously are an increasing environmental risk if used more heavily without more advanced technical solutions (like the case of greater use of coal = greater incidence of asthma, etc.).  We MUST develop ways to support R&D into effective use of renewable resources, and development of local and regionally distributed energy generation.  California's "Million Solar Roofs" initiative for on-site power generation is a good example of thinking outside the box.  Putting scores of underwater turbines in rivers to take advantage of the free currents there for regional power generation is another.  Let's all strive for greater creative thinking, and not necessarily let the 'major's do it for us...!!  And the government MUST be willing to jump-start these alternative initiatives through favorable tax incentives and clearing away regulatory inhibitions to development until these entities are well-established and economically viable.

Bushies are making too much money off oil and coal.  And you can never trust what a Bushie SAYS, only what he DOES.  True, that this last year the U.S. has really started to move forward on renewable energy.  That is great, although much too late in the game.  Remember when America was a leader in technology and ideas?  No longer.  Everything is about money.  We need people in Washington that will make decisions based on the good of the country instead of the good of their pockets.  We need to commit to energy independence by the end of the next decade, and it can be done, but not with our current govt officials.

Seems we may have two agendas operating here....                                      (1) the major international energy companies are horizontally integrating from petroleum-based models into renewable energy areas (like BP's moves into solar and wind) in order to ensure their future continuation as 'major energy companies'.  Their investments are helping to enable and enfranchise alt-energy R&D and technology transfers to the actual marketplace.  But they also tend to be the big gorillas on the block, either subsuming (and buying up) potential competition, or putting them out of business (economic anarchy).  In the absense of a major paradigm shift to a new, distributed energy culture in the U.S. (which the majors would view as 'unmanageable and unprofitable'), these companies can be expected to jockey for continued total control of this industry.  If that grip cannot be broken, we're then committed to paying the price (and the gross profits) that will incur.  (See #2 below) 

Denmark replaced oil generation of electricity with coal throught the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s they reduced coal generation slightly by adding natural gas and significantly by conservation. They are hardly "energy independent" since they make heavy use of international grid connectors to balance their wind generation.

Clean energy, no pollution, whats the holdup?  We should be diligently pursuing

wind technology. I personally think the windmills are awesome.

                                                                  Linda Brock 

It seems we Americans have lost our "just do it" spirit. We are stuck in the quagmire of frivolous litigation and political correctness and need to reassess our prioities. Which is better, give thousands of kids asthma from fossil energy combustion pollutants or kill a few birds and bats?

Very true, offshore wind is not some untested new technology.  The US is far behind Europe.  For a list of proposed offshore wind projects in the US and Canada please see www.offshorewind.net

Oh, and nice effort to blur the line between offshore and onshore wind farms, Larry.

Larry Simpson:  President Cheney (forget  Bush --the Libby commutation and mouth-stoppering showed conclusively who really runs the WH) has made his contempt for alt-energy and conservation quite clear.   He met secretly with the Enron and other energy execs when ther were screwing California and other places foolish enough to privatize their public utilities.  And he still draws a Halliburton paycheck.  And of course there's his "sweaters" comment when he mocked conservation and former President Carter's efforts to both conserve energy and to fund alternative-energy products (funding that Ronald Reagan promptly cut and which Reagan-Bush budget deficits never allowed to be restored).

The UK and Sweden are lagging in terms of wind power in Europe.  The installed capacities in these two countries should be far higher than they are currently.  One could argue that the UK´s permitting process structure only favors large developers and is almost a hindrance for small-scale developers.  Swedish problems in their application process are more focussed on democratic structures: The so-called "most democratic country in the world" tends to at times try rather overzealously to include all "affected parties" to the point where actually has a reverse affect and becomes less democratic.  All this being said, yes, these two countries are doing far better than the U.S. in terms of off-shore development as well as on shore (percentage wise), and they do not have feed-in tariffs.  If the U.S. on the national level could reach a consensus that feed-in tariffs were the way to go then we could see an amazing ramp up in both on and offshore wind power.  Now the U.S. already has a large installed capacity of land based wind power and will in the coming years surpass number one Germany, but we consume so much more electricity in the states that we need stop comparing ourselves and think for ourselves about how to solve the problems.  Cape Cod should have been erected already!

I don't quite understand the Bush bashing at the end of the discussion.  The US has moved to #1 in the world the past two years in new wind installations,  the PTC was extended in the 2005 EPAct, he has publicly called for 20% of our energy from wind, and was governor of the first successful RPS in Texas, which is now the #1 state in wind energy production and the model for the 20 state RPS's that have gone into effect since he became president.

On the other hand, leading opponents to Cape Wind are Democrats Kerry and Kennedy.

It's quite puzzling that the authors want to swipe at a proponent for the policy they are in favor of. 

It seem to me that Phoenix Woman  statements are based on feeling rather than facts. Case in point it is congress that passes the laws and bills. Requiring a greater than 50% vote to pass a bill. It then goes to the president to sign it into law, or veto. If a law is veto congress must get 2/3 majority vote in order to over ride the veto. The real problem is that congress now democratically controlled has not passed a real meaningfull energy bill yet.

It is actually this administration that passed the IRS deduction for solar electric and Solar domestic hot water. You can get a 30% tax credit caped off at $2000. I know about this since I already used the tax credit. Tax credits benifit low income people more than a tax deduction.

It also includeds insulation, windows, on demand hot water heaters. These tax credit amounts are less. So when you say that the President does nothing alternative energy is false. Just that the liberial press, filters the news to thier point of view instead of giving us all the facts.

http://www.ofee.gov/sb/wh_solar.html

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/gore-bush-houses.htm

 

If nothing else, guys, thank you for using the vernacular of our National Pastime in describing our strange wind power situation.  As a Chicago baseball fan, I appreciate the irony.  In response to earlier comments about we're not doing so bad in wind power, we should be circling the bases around Germany, Spain and everyone else, not being content to being only four runs down in the seventh.  Yes, when our Prez was Texas Governor, that state embarked on a nice little RPS.  But he also ran the Texas Rangers.  'Nuff said.

I think that what most people are thinking is that this administration is not doing enough in the arena of renewable energy advocacy. I agree with what Geoff Steele said about it taking a paradigm shift in our politics and thinking about renewables. Fossil energy companies are making record profits right now, wouldn't it be cool if they would reinvest some of those profits (more than they already are) back into renewables?

I would like to see America to lead the world in renewables.

A brief response:



Tom Will makes a good point, one which tends to get lost in the acrimony of the public debate, i.e., that people are all too ready to see only the negative potential of wind farms.  In the Cape Wind case, this includes bogus issues such as property value diminishment, loss of tourism $$, dangers to air and sea navigation, oil spill dangers, interference with PAVE PAWS radar, loss of habitat for fish, birds, seals and whales, etc., etc., as well as more legitimate (although highly subjective) concerns about spoiled views. 



Quite apart from the fact that practically all these fears have been empirically shown to be  misplaced, there comes a point when the reasonable person must ask how the well-being of fish and wildlife, for example, is supposed to compare with that of humans.  At what point do we balance real concerns about a wind farm's effect on the creatures who co-inhabit our environment with its beneficial effect on us?  (Not to mention the effect on the environment of eschewing renewables and continuing to use fossil fuel plants... For every bird or bat that hits a turbine blade, how many are poisoned by SO2 and NO emissions?)  At what point does homo sapiens become more important than the piping plover? 



This is not to say we should ignore potential effects on wildlife.  Bad siting decisions and/or less-than-mature technology have been responsible for infamous examples such as Altamont Pass and Smola Island.  Of course we should take care in our placement of facilities, but let's be rational about it, and not hold Cape Wind to a standard many times higher than was ever imposed on a fossil fuel or nuclear plant. 



Let's also try to get away from our consistent 'Not Invented Here' mentality.  In Denmark, they've done extensive infra-red, radar and visual monitoring of bird activity and found -- surprise, surprise -- that the vast majority of seabirds, on seeing a wind farm ahead of them, go AROUND the thing.  Those that don't, navigate down the middle of the turbine rows equidistant between the towers.  And they have offshore farms on migratory routes and close to bird sanctuaries.  We can learn quickly from lessons that others have taken some time over;  we don't need to impose delays of three years on new projects for extended surveys.

'Dreaming' about alternative solutions can bring change.  The 'dreamers' give birth to new approaches and insights that escape more traditional thinking based on the "box" we've been housed in for so long re: energy development and use. I like the thought, for example, of the sailboat that has no sails, but instead uses a large, variable geometry kite flying out ahead of it, up in the 'clean airflow' undistuburbed by surface waves, to pull the boat across an ocean.  The kite is computer-controlled so that if the windpower azimuth goes any further aft than abeam, the boat automatically begins tacking, using an in-memory track line constantly compared with input from a GPS system to tell the computer when to tack the boat.  The same approach 'could' be used to move much larger ships across open ocean expanses, and save fuel oil to run the diesels only for maneuvering when the ships approach ports.  I agree with other commenters that the same types of creative thinking hopefully will get us past the current hurdles.  But we also have the real danger of complacency here -- thinking that 'science and invention has always saved our bacon in the past and we just know they will in the future.'  They won't, unless we keep dreaming about what 'could be' and turning our dreams into patents and transferred technology. And the government definitely has a role to play and a major responsibility in keeping this country advancing, and competitive in the alternative energy venue.

Anyone trying to suggest that the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney has been friendly to any attempts to increase renewables and / or reduce greenhouse gases (other than questionable ones that allow them to dole out farm subsidies) is practicing revisionist history.  In other words, their purpose is to spin, rather than inform.  Relative to the amount of energy used and its geography, the US is lagging badly, as is Canada. 

And what this article fails to mention is that US CO2 emissions per capita are currently twice as high as those of other rich, highly developed countries like Germany, Japan and the UK and 3 times as high as those of countries like France, Sweden and Switzerland.  So cutting emissions by 50% by 2050 would mean achieving in over 40 years what the most advanced European and Asian nations are achieving today. 

If you want to use productivity, the US currently generates anywhere from 40% to 150% more CO2 per dollar of GDP than the countries mentioned above (Canada fares somewhat worse), so by any measure, it is lagging.  And, the difference is more a measure of how patheticly North Americans have performed to date, rather than how well the others have done.

So you can see that Europe is not exactly asking the US and Canada to take on "stretch targets"; more like the kind of assignment teachers give to the "slow"  class, when they want to put feeling good about themselves above actual achievement.  Feeling good?

Basicly, bush helped build the largest windfarm on land, need to search how long that (!?) permitting took, Bush people now don't care. A "wartime effort" needs to be engaged for the production of mass produced SUPER CAPACITORS. The pure electricity is about 2 to 2.5 times more EFFICIENT than the old touted hydrogen Infrastructure, travels through already exsisting wire at the speed of light (!), and at whatever quantity needed and when (unlike batteries and hydrogen).

Only about 200 times our RE capacity is needed with SC energy storage to power this entire nation!

How do we do that, I don't know (since the permitting issues will litterally fry the planet) Can we ask for executive order against all permitting of any profitable RE endeavor. This needs to be above the Apollo project and rivaling that of a sincere wartime effort. All lawyers in the way needs to be stopped!

A windmill in my backyard, the only way I see it is to build one myself

HELP!

Basicly, bush helped build the largest windfarm on land, need to search how long that (!?) permitting took, Bush people now don't care. A "wartime effort" needs to be engaged for the production of mass produced SUPER CAPACITORS. The pure electricity is about 2 to 2.5 times more EFFICIENT than the old touted hydrogen Infrastructure, travels through already exsisting wire at the speed of light (!), and at whatever quantity needed and when (unlike batteries and hydrogen).

Only about 200 times our RE capacity is needed with SC energy storage to power this entire nation!

How do we do that, I don't know (since the permitting issues will litterally fry the planet) Can we ask for executive order against all permitting of any profitable RE endeavor. This needs to be above the Apollo project and rivaling that of a sincere wartime effort. All lawyers in the way needs to be stopped!

A windmill in my backyard, the only way I see it is to build one myself

HELP!