U.S. Approves Its First Offshore Wind Farm (Finally)

You still have to build and run base load power plants. I don't think I will ever be convinced that wind power is anything but stupid.

Nice slant to the article. "Finally" , "(quite expensive) water views", or troublesome tribes. How about regular locals who did their homework and heard from those both in Maine and in Europe about the impact of the wind turbines on their lives? How about the oceanfront being a thing unto itself, and any protest to having it negatively altered actually not being some sort of elitist drive? And all that construction, environmental and social impact, to let televisions run in just 400,000 homes? There is nothing green or progressive about this wind farm, it is a travesty that will have its biggest negative impact on regular folks who have either made their home on the islands, or have lived here for generations, not uber-rich waterfront property owners that only live here 2 months a years.

A two unit nuke plant has a tiny foot print and can produce a gigawatt 24/7.

On the other hand, a billion tiny rats running on a billion tiny running generator wheels could make us energy independent and produce over a 100 billion biodegradable "waste" pellets a day. Each house could house thousands of rats running on small running generator wheels.

Wow! The miserable, negative, oil stock-holders sure got to this quick.

@nonsquid - and how do you propose to feed those 1,000,000,000 tiny rats?

Yeah and nuclear power is limited to how many rods we have. I've heard if we switched to nuclear power right now we only have enough rods to last 20 years. What should we switch to after that runs out? Coal? Again, limited and polluting. Unless you guys have better ideas, I would love to hear them.

It's always this "not in my back yard"/"ignorance is bliss" mentality that holds us from going anywhere

All I want them to do is put the cost of removing them and restoring the area to it's original condition in escrow. I don't want to see them abandoned like their counterparts in Hawaii - leaking oil and slowly rotting away polluting the environment. Twenty years from now they will be history just another bad decision from the best government money can buy.

nice to hear it :D

... meanwhile, oil is spewing from a broken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.
What do you all have against offshore wind power? It can't be any more harmful than offshore oil rigs.

@thatsnotright - If you look at the previous comments made by these guys you'll see that ALL of their comments are negative.

At $2B producing a claimed but unlikely 180 Mw average Cape Wind is a total waste of money.

That same $2B would give 1000 Mw average if the ISO made a deal with New Brunswick Power and contracted for most of the output from a Candu nuclear reactor complex. Boston would be Candu powered by 2015

Instead of unreliable intermittent wind power the Candu's would put out extremely valuable baseload power.

AECL has built so many Candu's they've got new construction down to almost factory efficiency at a sixth the price of wind, half the price of coal or gas, and 4 year construction times.
www.cnnc.com.cn/tabid/168/Default.aspx

AECL is currently returning old PWR rods with DU added into fuel rods at Qinshan, China and could do the same with old fuel rods (nuclear waste) from Vermont Yankee. It can also use thorium and MOX (nuclear waste) fuels.

www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2010/23/c3481.html

Generation 4 reactors like India's new 500 Mw unit could supply all the world's energy needs for hundreds of years burning existing nuclear waste.

thank you seth!

people, if you think nuclear power is dirty, your ignorant.

Oameni buni daca si sa pui o elice pe un stalp e complicat eu zic ca ati evoluat prea mult! Sunteti cam tatze! Va lamentati pentru orice nimic: NU NU NU. Eu as obliga populatia sa alerge 1/2 ora pe zi pe o banda rulanta care genereaza energie. "Mens sana in corpore sano".

"people, if you think nuclear power is dirty, your ignorant."

Nancy, the word you wanted to use was "you're".

@ expatinasia... haha that was awesome.

@ nonsquid... A new 2 unit nuke plant would produce about 2700 MegaWatts. Not 1000.

@ Thatsnotright... Oil isn't used to produce electricity so it has no place in this discussion.(a marginal amount maybe - who cares)

@ Gajumaru... there is plenty of fuel. Don't you worry about that.

The only thing holding back wind power are "people" who say it won't be enough or that it makes the landscape ugly. Each of those towers produce 1.2 Mwatts nominal with a peak of 2 Mwatts. We have more than enough real estate and water to put them on. Combine that with nuclear and we've got more than enough power. Coal fire and natural gas turbines are a dying breed and power producers know it. You'll find where ever people are complaining about renewable power that coal fire and natural gas interests are usually behind it.

America never stops amazing me (sarcasm).
Do half of you even know what you are saying? The general thought I'm getting from most of you is that Nuclear Power Rocks!
Ok, sure it produces the most energy and has a relatively low footprint while operating. What about the waste? Are any of you around it to know about it? I live in the Tri-Cities, wa, home of Hanford. This area is now littered with nuclear waste and by product. Yes, if we start using the waste as fuel we can eliminate most of the enviornmental issues, but there will still be waste. What do we do with it? Well out here they have a vitrification plant that turns old waste into glass for disposal. We still have to dispose of it somewhere. Think about it.
Also, we are always behind the curve. Look at the Netherlands. They have tons of off short wind farms and I can guarantee you the air there smells better and is easier to breathe. Everything is green as well. On top of that, you can't even see the wind farms from the shore.
C'mon America, take some freakin' lessons and stop being so bullheaded about things.

@dtothe_p... as others have pointed out, we can make far more efficient reactors that can utilize the waste better.
And if you can keep using the waste until it is nearly gone, isnt that a better practice than just dumping it after the first round?

Secondly, the Netherlands only gets up to 9% of their power from so-called "green" tech (Read this recent article: www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61N4MX20100224).
Their primary fuel source is natural gas and petroleum. Their second fuel source is oil (which provided about 45% of the Netherlands' primary energy needs in 2000).
Production of electric power in 2000 totaled 88 billion kWh, of which thermal power plants using oil and coal as fuel supplied 90.3%, nuclear power plants 4.2%, and other sources 5.4%, and hydropower less than 1%.
Granted...while good, it is not all roses like you suggest.

Also, not that I am opposed to wind farms, but has there been any study on the impact to weather patterns from these farms? I mean, a dam changes the flow of rivers..could large scale wind farms have some subtle effect on wind flow too? Just a thought.

Wind can never be the solution (or at least will never be the solution). That does not mean that it cannot be a part of the mix.

Electricity use is generated in base and peak.

Base is the energy used 100% of the time. It is easily and best generated from sources that work best when run continually - such as nuclear and hydro-electric - neither of which can be efficiantly turned on or shut off (with hydro, shut off just means that the water is released without generation - but you cannot just stop the flow and "store" the energy behind the dam - that would quicly lead to flooding and bank erosion that would fill the resevoir with sediment and defeat the purpose of holding water back).

Peak is the variable use electricity that varies throughout the day. This is normally met by sources that can be turned on and off to meet demand (fossil fuels like coal and natural gas are the most common).

Wind and Solar do not fit into either category. They produce intermittantly, and thus add further instability to the grid (and instability is the party that demands fossil fuel flexability).

However, so long as they only make up a small percentage of power generation, this is not a problem. True, they do margionally reduce baseload production, but in most places a good deal of baseload production is fossile fuel based. However, since the production is intermittant, for every crash during peak, which increases fossil fuel use there is a peak during peak, which reduces it (creating a balance of replaced fossil with renewable).

This balance only works, however, where renewables make up a small percentage of total generation and do not reduce sustainable baseload - only fossil fuel based baseload.

Thus, a "wind based grid" or a "solar based grid" would be terrible, a 10% renewable grid would reduce fossil fuel use.

You have to produce a certain amount of electricity for a base load at all times... When the wind blows, it just means you waste electricity from baseload plants that is already being produced and replace it with wind electricity.. THINK ABOUT THIS... WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY. The electricity is already there with our without the wind turbines...

Nuclear waste is valuable nuclear fuel Gen IV reactors in service and planned around the world except the USA.

After powering the world on existing nuclear waste for hundreds of years the tiny amount of low level waste from these units would fit in a toolshed, stored for 30 40 years then burned up in a fusion reactor.

Much less money should be spent to power our future needs. I believe aneutronic nuclear fusion reactor could produce much more energy using much less area, without any type of radiation risk, expending few millions instead of billions.
www.crossfirefusor.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html

I do like the future look of nulcear as in using the waste. it seems like a long overdue idea to me and I'm glad we're getting close. As to what we'll do with the waste from that , well it will simply continue to reduce in size and radioactivity if we can continue to use it. Thats the beauty of using radioactive "waste" as a fuel.

As for the wind farms I am all for them. They just put up 25 of them 3 miles from my house, and another 50 are planned. According to the people we've talked to they are acting more as a base load since they are positioned atop a ridge and the wind blows nearly constantly in our area (southwest Minnesota). However, about an hour away where there are several hundred windmill atop another ridge they are testing a large scale battery. By routing the power form the windmills through the battery they can control its flow, thereby minimalizing that unpredictable behavior. So while today, a windmill may look like an erratic source of power, as battery tech improves and becomes cheaper they seem like a pretty sensible solution.

Yes I'm always negative about wind power, because you wind believers just don't know the truth. In the 1960's California went on a big wind campaign and were supposed to be generating most of their electricity by the turn of the century. Well if you read the statistics California generates about 1% of its power from the wind. Sounds like a lot of wind to me, but very little power. I'd like to see the cost per kilowatt hour figures. I'm not a proponent of nuclear either because it's a tough sell with all the antinuke people running around. I like fusion and I KNOW that is the only real solution to our energy problems. The US government spent 35 billion dollars on the Yucca Mountain waste dump and all they dumped was 35 billion dollars. If that 35 billion was put into fusion research we would have had it by now, inertial confinement looks very promising. If we had fusion power and manufactured and sold hydrogen for fuel the fossil fuel problems whether they exist or not would just fade away.

Instead we should invest in wormhole technology and send the one mouth of the wormhole into the sun and the other mouth inside a powerplant....or a rocket engine

Hey oil Lovers While your flappin your lip about how wind is bad why don't you get your sorry asses down to that oil spill and get to work on your companies Fukk-Up! wind at least preserves the sanctity of our ecosystems your coveted oil just screwed over hundreds of helpless animals!!! YOU MAKE ME SICK!!!!!!

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.......oil kills....hahahahahahahaha

I see that the output of the first New England off-shore turbines has been contracted.

20 cents/KW-hr... wholesale

This is 15x the wholesale cost of power from a coal or nuclear plant, at least what Dominion Power pays for its own generation in the PJM system.

Imagine the retail price for this power.
And imagine paying that much for your home every month.

Imagine those businesses who could afford to remain in business paying this rate.

Insanity amidst applause.

It's no good asking people if they want to live next door to a wind farm. Ask them whether they would prefer to live next door to a wind farm or a nuclear power plant. And when they say neither.... ask them how much they will cut their energy consumption by instead.

Oil is much too precious to burn in our cars or our power plants. It's the feedstock of our entire petrochemical and plastics industry.
Natural gas is the main feedstock of artificial fertilizer and with 9 billion people to feed by mid century, we are going to need plenty of that.
There is no such thing as 'clean' coal - cleaner maybe...but not clean.

Nuclear, wind, geothermal and solar are the future. Welcome to the 21st century. I hope we make it to the 22nd.

We will need plenty of electricity to run our desalination plants as well, because over much of the the world fresh water is in short supply too.

this is a good start for wind in us

I'm not going to sit here and act like I know everything about wind power because I don't, but I have over heard a lot of conversations about the small wind farm we have in Northern CO and it seems to me that it actually takes more energy to build a wind farm than what it produces. The amount of time, materials, and earth that is uses amazes me. But I could be entirely off. Even though I live in the middle, I still would not like to see a wind farm when I'm on vacation....

If it really works then I see no problem, I need to read up more on the problem I guess.

"OH NOES! WIND POWERS ARE BAD! GO NUKEULAR!"

A nuclear power plant hasn't been built in the US for at least the last 25 years.

Trying to get an extension on an existing nuclear plant's operating license is a bureaucratic Olympics.

First, please try to take into account practicality when bashing wind power (which has actually gotten approval from Ken Salazar) as opposed to nuclear power, for which *proven* designs have not been used (don't even think about trying to get a new design/process for a nuclear power plant approved).