Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Stop Delaying Cape Wind Say Unions, Enviornmentalists

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Now the project–which would power up to three-quarters of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket with approximately 450 megawatts of emissions-free electricity-is facing another delay.  Unions and environmental groups are speaking out.

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers President Edwin D. Hill joined two local business managers and several environmental organizations in a letter to oppose efforts by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to declare all of Nantucket Sound a sacred burial ground, thus barring alternative energy development.

The letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, Director of the Minerals Management Service, states:

Following an extremely lengthy and rigorous review, approval of the Cape Wind project now will send a critical message to the renewable energy development community and will help lay the strongest possible foundation for offshore wind energy development in the United States.

The read the whole letter, click here

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Comments

    • Is my memory correct that the windmills were moved out of Nantucket Sound and further out to sea so that they would not be visible along the horizon from the south shore of the lower cape?  Does anyone have a current map of the plan? Did Ted end up supporting the plan?

      • he was one of its most vociferous opponents.  He was not an environmentalist, he was a rich guy with a house on the sound.  Our coast should be ringed with windmills, there is nothing nicer than seeing the Medford windmill spinning day after day generating nice clean energy at the McGlynn School.

  3. I have been told that windfarms that transmit AC over a substantial distance require high voltage. Windfarms do not produce high voltage AC ( I’m told)

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    p>What’s the fix?

      • I believe it is called a “transformer”.

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        p>Example description of a farm in Kansas:

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        The wind turbines used at Smoky Hills Wind Farm generate electricity at 690 volts AC. Each turbine has a transformer that boosts the voltage to 34,500 volts before the power is routed to the main transformer, which pumps it up to 230,000 volts for release onto the grid.

  4. Windmills on the Altamont pass California, East of San Francisco.  You can also see them on a small stretch of I-580. They are not ugly, to me they are a sight to behold.  I love Green Energy.  

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    p>We can put these on Nantucket sound, they will be a sight to behold there too.  There will probably be tourist boats to take people out there to see them.  I thinks it’s very unlikely you will be able to see them from land.  

    • it is quite spectacular.  The Altamont can be extremely windy. If you take the back roads to the highest hills it will nearly knock you over.  Beautiful place.

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      p>Yes, this is coal. The elliptical stacks are cooling towers. The coal emissions make their entrance at 0:26. The coal stacks are designed to maximize their “effective stack height” so as to disburse their effluent over as wide an area as possible — an effort to comply with dated regulations that limit particulate concentration but not total volume.

      • Clean Air Act (which of course created the acid rain problem).  Stick the stacks high enough, and the crap doesn’t settle around your power plant’s general vicinity.  Instead, it carries hundreds of miles.

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        p>That being said (and being a college student in the late 70s early 80s traveling between Vermont and Minnesota who had to listen to all of the crazy Canadians ragging on us Yanks for pollution), anyone ever travel through the slag heap that is Sudbury Ontario?  Pristine country on the TCH, until you enter the dark side of the moon that is Sudbury.  Unbelievable.

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        p>And be very careful of the law of unintended consequences.

        • acid rain is down 20% according to the EPA.  As for the Clean Air Acts from the 1960s and 1970s, the tall smokestacks didn’t create acid rain — even if the stacks were still short we’d have had the acid rain, and local air problems too.

        • As stomv correctly observes, the Clean Air Act did not create the acid rain problem (though to nitpick, it did create a rather strong incentive to push particulates higher into the atmosphere where more intense solar radiation combines with lower gas pressure to make them more harmful).

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          p>The legislation capping concentration rather than volume is a rather good example of how a focused and creative industry can gut meaningful “reform” by playing on the ignorance of the public, the press, and too many legislators. Anybody who understood conservation of mass knew that the regulation was bogus. Apparently too few people knew about conservation of mass.

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          p>It is also a rather good example of how an “incremental approach” can worsen rather than help. In its day, we heard the same arguments — “any legislation is better than none”, “this is just a first step”, etc. After a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting from legislators about their “courageous” step to “protect the environment”, the practical result was “Clean air is done, let’s move on.” In fact, it took twenty years — until 1990 — to address the obvious shortcomings of the Clean Air Act of 1970.

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          p>It’s an instructive historical example for contemplating proposed health care reform strategies.

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