The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) held a successful offshore wind conference Oct. 5-7, 2010 in Atlantic City, at which I got to tour the local wind park and solar carport. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar signed the lease for the Cape Wind project, which was a long time in coming; the project is jockeying with several other projects to be the 1st offshore wind project in the U.S. Looks like we may finally start catching up to Europe…
The problem with these, as I was told from an Environmental Science class visit by our LIPA representative, is they were not proposed to save us money but to be able to build more! Be careful your New jersey version does not want the same. As of this writing, Long Island is rejecting the offshore windfarm for viewshed reasons. Our Town of Babylon has a waste-to-energy plant.
That is interesting– yes, the goal would be to build more, because ultimately they do save money. I’m not sure why a LIPA rep would day that. As fossil fuel prices continue to rise, the contract for a wind farm is set for twenty years so the utility does not have to deal with price fluctuation. Though turbines are expensive to install, there is no fuel cost, unlike with a traditional oil/gas power plant. LI had rejected a project that was 4 miles off the shore a few years back (I was involved in that process), but now there is a new wind farm proposed that would be further off shore, I believe 10-12 miles out so it would hardly be seen at all. Thanks for writing.