A couple of wind-related items today … First, Terry Murray takes care of business and sets the table to zone our oceans. This will hopefully give us some regulatory clarity for wind farm development and fishing vs. preservation. Good stuff, and this will likely free up the pipeline for other important legislation, like the green energy bill.
And on the unclean energy side … this is really not any kind of surprise at all.
A new lobbying firm for the group opposing a wind farm off Cape Cod filed a federal document last month reporting that its work for the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound is partially funded and shaped by an international energy conglomerate.
The disclosure represents the first documented financial connection between the group opposing the wind farm and Oxbow Corp., which mines and markets energy and commodities, including coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound immediately decried the filing as a mistake, and the lobbying firm later amended it in the US Senate Office of Public Records to eliminate the reference to Oxbow.
Oxbow's founder, Osterville yachtsman William I. Koch, has been a cochairman of the alliance since 2005, a year that saw a flurry of congressional attempts to kill the wind farm. While Oxbow maintains that its lobbyists monitor Cape Wind because of the corporation's interest in energy and shipping, Cape Wind proponents assert that Oxbow's lobbyists have been doing far more to fight the wind farm.
Ah yes, a mistake. Of course, whether Koch hmself or Oxbow gave the money and effort is a distinction without a difference, but whatever.
Wind or oil. The oil folks understand that's what's at stake.
Update: From the comments, stomv posts this very cool map of megawatt wind generation capacity by state. This should prove a motivating irritant to everyone who thinks we ought to be in front of the pack on wind.
Cape Wind would add 468 MW to our capacity.
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p>This comes from the American Wind Energy Association and is updated regularly.
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p>Note: the 3 MW Massachusetts has under construction will allow us to race past idle Vermont and Ohio all the way up to 27th in installed wind energy electrical generation capacity. If Cape Wind’s 468 MW were installed tomorrow, Massachusetts would be just outside the Top 10 in installed capacity, although it’d fall about 5 slots in the next year or two because states like Kansas, New York, and North Dakota have hundreds of MW under construction right now.
Is that 0.1 MW just some guy with an open window and a pinwheel?
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p>It’s the rightmost picture. A small manufacturing shop called bitworks. I don’t know the story behind it, but I love that an American manufacturing company installed it.
Is there another map somewhere that shows solar or combination? It strikes me that some of the white (0 MW) states might lend themselves to that more.
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p>Makes no sense that they aren’t harnessing more wind from the mountains (and spires) in Utah, though.
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p>But even if you just worry about PV…
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p>2. It’s distributed. It’s fairly easy to count wind turbines since they’re tall, expensive, and require permitting. Solar cells, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, small, and can be done without substantial paperwork. Furthermore,
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p>3. They’re not all tied to the grid. So, if I build a cabin in the middle of nowhere where there’s no power anyway, and I throw on a solar cell, is that contributing to the supply grid? Nope. Same goes for if I put my solar cell on the top of a highway sign device or some other off-grid application.
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p>So, to answer your question, there’s about 85 MW-dc capacity installed on-grid as of 2006. (source)(pdf) Wind is roughly 18,500 MW capacity. What’s nice about solar is that it generates the electricity when demand is highest, but the reality is that solar power is a long way off from making up even 0.01% of the nation’s electricity supply.
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p>Where solar does really well is in heating water. A passive solar hot water heater can do a wonderful job offsetting your oil, gas, or electric bill associated with heating water for showers and cooking.
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p>Massachusetts should put the brakes on applications for new electricity generation plants that burn fossil fuel as their source of energy, and up the incentives for renewable, clean energy projects.
I read a profile of Pickens in a magazine about a year or so ago in which he mentioned being invested in a bunch of different energy projects, outside of oil. And not just a dollar or two here and there. I’ll refresh my memory and report back.
but, yes, disturbing.
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p>I’m glad that little ‘mistake’ was made, because I wasn’t aware of it in the first place.
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p>As for the two comments in this thread, how much of a difference would both Cape Wind and the proposed project off the South Coast be (which would be a little over half the size of Cape Wind in scope – so still pretty darn big)?
would generate about 5% of the electricity Massachusetts consumes. That would allow MA to reduce any of the following:
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p>coal: 24.4 percent
oil: 5.2 percent
natural gas: 51.0%
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p>With natural gas 25% cheaper than a year ago and electricity generation grade petroleum increased 15%, the best bet is that oil will decrease a bit and coal will decrease the rest. In terms of GHG emissions, oil and coal emit far more CO_2 equivalents than natural gas per MWh of production.
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p> * all numbers are from 2006 (source)(pdf)
probably coal most of the time, and not necessarily in Mass. (not that it matters much).
natural gas is the primary marginal generation; coal is more baseload.
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p>Also, despite our best efforts at conservation & efficiency, demand in NE has generally been trending up. So it’s not just displacing existing generation, Cape Wind would also help address the need for new fossil generation, which is going to be expensive, regardless of the fuel.
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p>Cape Wind doesn’t ‘solve’ anything, but it sure is part of the solution. There are no perfect solutions; we’re going to have to move 1-2% at a time toward a more sustainable energy regime.
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p>Wind has arrived because it’s pretty competitive on pure economics. Solar isn’t there yet, but it’s coming. We need both.
because natural gas turbines can be dialed up and down quickly but coal power plants take more time to increase or decrease production, I’d expect that coal would be reduced, and that gap be replaced by wind when the wind is blowing well, and natural gas when the wind isn’t cooperating.
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p>Price is a factor, but so is meeting instantaneous demand. So, my guess is that it will take a chunk out of coal or oil due as much to the ability to react to changes in demand as well as supply [of wind] as to price differentials.
From what I’ve been reading, a wind boom is imminent as wind farm developers snap up land across the country. Pretty soon Cape Wind will be an afterthought and wind farms will be beautiful, clean and everywhere.
they’re just not everywhere.