OFFSHORE WIND - GREAT FOR THE GREAT LAKES?
Submitted by New Energy News Blog
Offshore wind installations are a reality in Europe and will sooner or later be a reality in the U.S. The Great Lakes region has really wonderful energy resources and somebody is going to get really rich by taking on the challenges and winning through.
The challenges, though, are daunting. Other U.S. offshore projects have been stymied by environmental resistance, aesthetic objections, enormously costly technical obstacles and the building of undersea transmission. Many of the same challenges are beginning to stop Wisconsin onshore wind installations.
Considering the opposition and the difficulty, it might be hard to understand why wind developers persist - until the thought of global climate change makes the difficulty of building wind seem worth the effort.
Sooner or later aesthetic objections to wind installations will succumb to the much more ominous objections of global climate change and the ugly devastations of coal mining.
Sooner or later the environmental impact of wind installations will be understood as trivial in comparison to that of global climate change and the horrors of a potential nuclear accident.
Sooner or later the readiness of wind installations will emerge as superior to the dangers and difficulties of building LNG terminals.
Sooner or later the offshore wind technology being proven right now in Europe will be put to work in the U.S. while scientists continue to try to figure out how to make “clean” coal something more than an oxymoron, while scientists are still trying to get up to speed on the hydrogen highway, while politicians continue to fight about nuclear waste storage.
Sooner or later. Most likely sooner.
