Hot air about wind power : Why Mayor Bloomberg's idea won't work.

WorldnetDaily ^ | August 21, 2008 | Earnest Istook

[SeekAndFind]

The visuals are terrific. Imagine the Empire State Building with a windmill on top rather than King Kong. That's how the New York Post depicted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's latest idea. Another illustrator adorned the Brooklyn Bridge with windmills atop its towers.

It's all because Bloomberg proposed that the Big Apple should blossom with windmills to provide at least one-tenth of its power.

What if his idea caught on? Why not mandate that every building taller than a few stories sport a rooftop windmill? We could include the Washington Monument. And every TV and radio antenna. And every hilltop and mountain, including those in national parks.

Don Quixote would be proud. But had Bloomberg done the math, he'd know that even if Manhattan were topped by a solid block of windmills, they wouldn't come close to meeting the city's power consumption.

Wind power has its place as a power source, but it's not a place at the top. It provides less than one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. electricity because it costs more to produce. The wind may be free, but the equipment is expensive.

The costs are even dearer if you follow Bloomberg's other suggestion, namely floating windmills in the middle of the ocean.

How many windmills does it take to meet the power needs of a typical city, much less New York City?

At www.scitizen.com, Kurt Cobb worked the numbers. Generously, he presumed the windmills would use 5-megawatt turbines – generating three times the output of a typical 1.5-megawatt turbine. He compared that with a 500-megawatt fossil-fuel (coal) power plant needed to power a city of 300,000 people. A typical power plant, he noted, would cover 300 acres, but use only 30 of those for the actual facility.

[GOP_Lady]

[SeekAndFind]

I especially found the following insights to be RIGHT ON ( based on actual experience too ):

New York State's largest windmill farm to date, the $400 million Maple Ridge project, features 195 medium-size (400-foot high) windmills, part of a windmill surge in upstate New York sparked by state and federal incentives. That project has generated great controversy even in its rural setting. According to area researcher Dr. Nina Pierpont, it has also created "wind turbine syndrome," a variety of ills such as inner ear problems, headaches, difficulty sleeping, ringing in the ears, mood disorders, irritability, panic attacks and child misbehavior, all attributed to the low-frequency rumblings of the windmills.

There are practical problems, too. If the structures are put totally in the boondocks, massive new transmission lines must be built to carry the power to where the people are.

But such large facilities cannot be totally isolated, so NIMBY takes over quickly. Citizens say "Not in My Backyard" to the idea of an ever-present giant whooshing sound. And they oppose the sight as well as the sound.

Yachting liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., famously took the wind out of the sails to a proposal for offshore windmills in his beloved Nantucket Sound. Walter Cronkite made TV commercials opposing the project, saying, "These massive wind turbines could disrupt the natural habitat for wildlife in the Sound and endanger boats."

[rellimpank]

-bflr-

[Publius6961]

Wind power has its place as a power source, but it's not a place at the top. It provides less than one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. electricitybecause it costs more to produce [and to maintain]. The wind may be free, but the equipment [and the maintenance] is expensive.

There.
Fixed it for them.

Did ya ever notice?
Solar and wind power contributions are never cited individually. The crooks always phrase it thus:

Solar, wind and hydroelectric account for 20% of our country's energy needs!
Whoop-dee-do!

Guess which of the three is 19.8%?

[Admin Moderator]

#4 was removed because of IBD copyright issues.

Reference.

[colorado tanker]

What a stupid, ignorant comment. The tops of these structures were not engineered to be foundations for electricity generating windmills and the stresses they take. Then, of course, there is the aesthetics of it all. Would they really ruin one of the most beautiful buildings in the city, the Chrysler Building, with a goddam windmill, or a historical landmark like the Brooklyn Bridge?

The idea of creating artificial hazards to navigation in the form of floating windmill farms on the high seas is just nutty.

Ridiculous.

[y6162]

One of these days New Yorkers are going to have a moment of clarity and see that Bloomberg is nuts.

[Redbob]

Bloomberg is so full of it, you could power half the city via methane recovery...

[sionnsar]

What a stupid, ignorant comment. The tops of these structures were not engineered to be foundations for electricity generating windmills and the stresses they take.

Agreed!

[sionnsar]

The idea of creating artificial hazards to navigation in the form of floating windmill farms on the high seas is just nutty.

Here I'll disagree. After all, we create artificial hazards with oil wells, for example. To create them and not report them to whoever creates nav charts might even be illegal. But I've flown over at least one large windfarm off the coast of Holland and haven't heard of navigational difficulties with it.

And then there are all the natural hazards we manage to chart.

But liberals aren't really given to thinking things through and the idea of putting windmills on pre-existing structures is either stupid or ignorant.

[colorado tanker]

I should have explained myself.

I don't oppose wind farms that are firmly anchored to the seabed. What I find nutty is the idea of the "floating" farm. To create a stationary "floating" base on the high seas requires some kind of tether or a complex propulsion system. If either fails, you get a hazard wandering around sea lanes until the thing can be brought under control with a tug. Beside that, how do you string the transmission lines to it? Once all these problems are solved, the thing is utterly uneconomical.

I do think offshore wind farms make sense, although when you take away port approaches and what the NIMBY's will block, there really aren't enough sites to make a big dent in our needs.

[sionnsar]

I don't recall seeing plans for these with propulsion systems, just cable-anchored (like some of the deep-sea drilling platforms).

They seem to have solved the problem of transmission lines, since they already have deployed these (I suspect the ones I saw were anchored to the sea bed since the water there isn't very deep I believe).

But you're right, if one gets loose it's a bit of a hazard.

[DungeonMaster]

Wind power is excellent, this idea is just embarrassing.

[DPMD]

Just a thought, and for sale to Bloomberg: Make it a condition of living and/or working in New York, that every person there wear a solar panel vest, and a beanie with a miniature wind-power propeller. This, of course, in addition to gracing Gracie Mansion with a fleet of wind turbines on the roof.