Good news from the Obama administration:
The Obama administration signaled a sudden urgency yesterday to resolve the nine-year dispute over building a wind farm off Cape Cod, as US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced he would summon key parties to a meeting next week in hope of concluding the decision process within two months. The announcement was made minutes after the Cape Wind project appeared to suffer an unexpected setback, when the National Park Service agreed with two Native American tribes that Nantucket Sound is eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its cultural and spiritual significance to the tribes…. Salazar directed that “principal parties” meet next week, probably in Washington, to come up with a “common-sense agreement” by March 1 on ways to minimize the project’s impact on the sound’s cultural and historic value. Barring an agreement, the interior secretary said, “I will be prepared to take the steps necessary to bring the permit process to conclusion.”
About time. Suffice it to say that if anything like the process Cape Wind has endured is the future for alternative energy, investing in oil futures looks like the way to go.
As I was walking around my neighborhood the other day, it occurred to me that telephone poles are ugly. The neighborhood sure would look a lot better without poles and wires and transformers all over the damn place.
TX has 9000 MW of wind capacity. MA has ~5 (AWEA 2009Q3 report: PDF)
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p>I guess these tribes don’t mind the air pollution from MA’s several coal plants.
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p>I welcome Salazar’s involvement to end this war of attrition. Even if it results in the shelving of Cape Wind. Opponents have already won the short-term battle of making further nearshore development in MA not worth the effort.
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p>Sad to say, I think that impact will reach further out than just Massachusetts, too. Though, perhaps Rhode Island, with its huge wind project, will show other states that you can have near shore projects and have the state be happy enough about it. Given that their near-shore project will be ‘visible’ from tourist locations, too, and it becomes ever more clear that the millionaires who vacation in their summer homes on the Cape should have nothing left to say (I point out this group because for a long time now, a wide majority of real Cape residents have supported Cape Wind).
I don’t buy the tribal claims of cultural and spiritual significance. Where were their claims for the last 10 years, or even the last 100 years? Of all uses for the shoal, I find it hard to believe that the wind turbines are the use with which the tribal elders would have had beef.
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p>I can’t help but wonder — does Deval Patrick’s reelection have to do with the timing? I think it might, and I don’t begrudge Patrick nor Obama for putting some urgency on this thing.
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p>P.S. Before you go heaping too much praise on Texas, keep in mind that Texans use more total energy than Californians — despite there being substantially more Californians. Texans certainly use more fossil fuel to generate their electricity than any other state in the nation — possibly more than any other two states.
Fine- CA has a ton of wind, too. OR and MN also have over 1000 MW.
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p>Yes, one does wonder about the timing, and why it’s cool to drag otter trawls and shellfish drags around the Sound (which would disturb any artifacts not unlike a bulldozer would on land), but it’s not cool to plant some big sticks in the ground.
Yes, phone poles are ugly. For many years, my town has had a 2% surcharge on Mass Electric NStar National Grid electric bills to fund putting all the utility wires underground. The work has yet to begin. Talking about the work has yet to begin. However, the town has recently approved erection of some huge billboards next to highways, as a revenue source.
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p>Ladybird Johnson’s legacy is evaporating.
that they’ve been using the money to put the conduit underground when doing roadwork for other purposes, setting the table for finishing the job later? I have no info on your town of course, just asking the question…
It hasn’t occurred to anyone with the power to implement it, though.
clean energy is to offer them Dirty Energy. Don’t want to allow beautiful, clean windmills in your area? Let’s try a gigantic, ugly-ass, smog-inducing, cancer-inflicting coal plant on your back in your backyard. Or how ’bout a lovely nuclear power plant? Haveaniceday.
..nuclear power to be on the clean side of the energy spectrum.
It’s clean in terms of emissions, and it doesn’t require us to buy raw materials from people we don’t like. But it’s dirty in terms of waste. Also, the consequences of equipment failure are potentially catastrophic, unlike with other kinds of plants.
if you ignore the destruction that is caused when digging up the material and ignore the fact that its waste is not only extremely dangerous, but also very difficult and dangerous to store (for thousands of years, mind you). It is telling that no country has found a good long-term solution to this problem.
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p>Additionally, there are problems that have nothing to do with whether it’s “clean” or not, but are just as relevant. It’s vastly more expensive to produce… $6-10 billion for a new nuclear power plant in America with today’s prices. Nuclear plants must be manned almost as if it were a full-fledged plant for about as long as they were actually producing electricity – so you get about 60 years of electricity and 60 years of “mothballing” it (though I use that term loosely, since there’s still tons of very expensive staff that will be required), before it’s supposedly safe to dismantle the factory, if it is ever really safe to do so.
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p>Lastly, at the current rates in which we use nuclear energy, there’s only enough mine-able uranium to be used for approximately a century… which is not much better than oil – and that’s if we don’t start using more nuclear energy than we do today.
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p>At the base, nuclear energy should not be seen as even a small part of getting off oil. It is no solution in that regard.
Is certainly a carbon free power source and available independent of weather. Even with a larger amount of renewable power you need a baseline power source. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow – where can we get our power from?
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p>If you follow the N/E power grid – the Nuke plants are almost giving power away late at night – once the plant is operating – the additional cost for power is negligible.
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p>Other countries are experimenting with breeder reactors which don’t produce bomb grade fuel (which is why the US stopped development) the reactor reuse the waste fuel.
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p>New reactor designs are almost fool proof, the current reactors in the US are space shuttle era technology, primative late 1960’s early 1970’s designs.
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They are far more costly. That much is fact. Again, a new nuclear power plant would cost $6-10 billion in America. A similarly sized coal factory would cost between a third and a half of the lower figure, just to build it. It would also cost less to run it and most certainly to shut it down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing for more coal, I’m just pointing out the absurdity of your ‘nuclear is cheap’ argument. It’s laughable.
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p>Furthermore, you totally ignored the very limited amount of uranium that’s reasonably capable of being mined on this planet. Short of some science-fiction-movie device that shoots people down to the earth’s core to get the uranium there… we’re not going to get more. With today’s uranium demand, there’s enough for 100 years. Build a whole bunch of new Nuclear Power Plants and there will be markedly fewer years to “go nuclear” before we couldn’t “go nuclear” if it were the last thing to turn on a light bulb left.
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p>Wind and solar are not perfect, certainly not today, but the technology is getting better and, over the lifetime of the product, is cheaper than nuclear even at present. I don’t think there’s any one solution to getting more renewable sources and getting off foreign oil, but I do know the solution is not nuclear and, at least for America, not even a tiny sliver of the solution. We have enough resources, land, sun, wind and water to solve our end of the problem without building more nuclear power plants, which we’d literally be regretting for centuries upon centuries to come.
I wasn’t saying they are cheap, but they provide a great clean base power load and once they are running they provide a great baseline power source.
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p>Unless we want our lights to go out when the wind doesn’t blow – we need a reliable power source.
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p>We can’t even built solar or wind power in the West – Feinstein Stands in Way of California Desert Wind Power Project
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p>http://www.environmentalleader…
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p>Just for reference Breeder Reactors are very interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…
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*except for its nuclear, radio-active-for-thousands-of-years waste, with no good solutions in terms of permanently storing it.