Local and Global Community News – Activism / Protests - Animal Advocacy - Animal Rescue- Archaeology/Anthropology/Paleontology/Crypto-zoology , Corporate Assault on our Lives and Our Health, Environmental- Internet/IT - Signs of the Times – Wildlife : News Affiliate of Family Survival Protocol.com
Brandon Baker | February 20, 2014 11:58 am
There’s
clearly a lot of honor in being named the first offshore wind farm in
the U.S., and developers keep that in mind with each deal they strike
and announcement they make.
In the past two weeks, Deepwater Wind announced
deals that it believes keeps its Block Island Wind Farm “on target to
become the nation’s first offshore wind farm.” First, the Providence,
RI-based firm signed a deal with the French Alstom Group
for five, 6-megawatt (MW) turbines that will power the farm to be
constructed on waters near Rhode Island’s Block Island. Next, Deep Wind
tapped Oslo, Norway-based Fred. Olsen Windcarrier to provide the vessel
for the farm’s turbine installation.
Video screenshot: Deepwater Wind
“This
agreement represents a giant leap forward for the Block Island Wind
Farm, and the start of turbine construction just last month marked a
major project milestone,” said Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski.
Alstom’s
6-MW Haliade 150 turbines are 589 feet tall. The company has 2.3
gigawatts of offshore wind farm substations delivered or under
construction around the world.
The 30-MW Block Island Wind Farm
will generate more than 125,000 MW hours annually, enough to power about
17,000 homes. The energy will be exported to the mainland electric grid
through a 21-mile, bi-directional Block Island transmission system that
includes a submarine cable proposed to make landfall in Narragansett,
RI. Read More Here
(Reuters) - Poland could halve its demand for coal
by 2030 with a shift to renewable energies that would end its image as a
laggard in European Union efforts to slow climate change, a study
showed on Friday. The report, by researchers in Germany
and Poland, renewable energy groups and environmental group Greenpeace,
included a foreword by ex-Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki
who called it a "feasible, realistic scenario".
It estimated that Poland, which now generates 90 percent of its electricity from coal, could create 100,000 jobs with a shift to wind, hydro, biomass, geothermal and solar power by 2030.
The scenario would require investment of $264 billion, double the $132 billion cost of business
as usual. Still, free renewable energies would be cheaper in the long
run by eliminating costs of fuel to generate electricity, it said.
Poland
"has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move beyond coal," it said.
"Poland is home to a geriatric energy system, based on coal. Its power
plants are old with about 70 percent of them being over 30 years old."
OFF THE COAST OF FUKUSHIMA, Japan — Twelve miles out to sea from the
severely damaged and leaking nuclear reactors at Fukushima, a giant
floating wind turbine signals the start of Japan’s most ambitious bet yet on clean energy.
The project’s turbines, and even the substation and
electrical transformer equipment, float on giant platforms anchored to
the seabed.
When this 350-foot-tall windmill is switched on next month, it will
generate enough electricity to power 1,700 homes. Unremarkable, perhaps,
but consider the goal of this offshore project: to generate over 1
gigawatt of electricity from 140 wind turbines by 2020. That is equivalent to the power generated by a nuclear reactor.
The project’s backers say that offshore windmills could be a
breakthrough for this energy-poor nation. They would enable Japan to use
a resource it possesses in abundance: its coastline, which is longer
than that of the United States. With an exclusive economic zone — an
area up to 200 miles from its shores where Japan has first dibs on any
resources — that ranks it among the world’s top 10
largest maritime countries, Japan has millions of square miles to
position windmills.
The project is also a bid to seize the initiative in an industry
expected to double over the next five years to a global capacity of 536
gigawatts, according to the industry trade group Global Wind Energy
Council. The Japanese have lagged at wind turbine manufacturing, which
is dominated by European and Chinese makers.
The Japanese government is paying the 22 billion yen, or $226 million,
cost of building the first three wind turbines off Fukushima, part of
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push to make renewable energy a pillar of
his economic growth program. After that, a consortium of 11 companies,
including Hitachi, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Shimizu and Marubeni,
plan to commercialize the project.
“It’s Japan’s biggest hope,” said Hideo Imamura, a spokesman for
Shimizu, during a recent trip to the turbine ahead of its test run.
“It’s an all-Japan effort, almost 100 percent Japan-made.”
What sets the project apart from other offshore wind farms around the
world, consortium officials say, is that its turbines, and even the
substation and electrical transformer equipment, float on giant
platforms anchored to the seabed. That technology greatly expands
potential locations for offshore wind farms, which have been fixed into
the seabed, limiting their location to shallow waters.
For this reason, there have been few great sites for offshore wind
farming in Japan, which lies on a continental shelf that quickly gives
way to depths that make it unfeasible to build structures into the
seabed. But floating wind farms could change the picture in a big way.
All of the wind turbines, rooftop solar panels, hydroelectric
and biogas plants in Germany have not reduced CO2 emissions in Europe by
a single gram.
Germany pretends to be a pioneer
in the green revolution. But its massively expensive Energiewende has
done nothing to make the environment cleaner or encourage genuine
efficiency. One writer argues: Either do it right, or don't do it at
all.
So, perhaps you've heard about Germany's heroic green revolution,
about how it's overhauling its entire energy infrastructure to embrace
renewable energy sources? Well, in reality, our chimney stacks are
spewing out more than ever, and coal
consumption jumped 8 percent in the first half of 2013. Germans are
pumping more climate-killing CO2 into the air than they have in years.
And people are surprised.
ANZEIGE
Why coal, you might ask? Aren't Germans installing rooftop solar panels and wind turbines
everywhere? What's being done with the billions of euros from the
renewable energy surcharge, which is tacked onto Germans' power bills to
subsidize green energy and due to rise again soon? This is certainly
not how we imagined the Energiewende, Germany's push to abandon nuclear energy and promote renewable sources, which Chancellor Angela Merkel's government launched in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
This same government acts as if this coal fever were merely a growing
pain or transitional problem. But that's not true. Instead, it stems
from structural flaws in the Energiewende. Renewable energy and
the coal boom are causally linked. The insane system to promote
renewable energy sources ensures that, with each new rooftop solar panel
and each additional wind turbine, more coal is automatically burned and
more CO2 released into the atmosphere. Counterincentives Galore
Indeed, Merkel's Energiewende is morphing into an environment
killer. It burdens the climate, accelerates the greenhouse effect and
causes irreversible damage.
Take the fluctuation/storage problem: Sun and wind sometimes
provide an abundance of electricity, and then nothing at all --
depending on the time of day and the weather. When they are pumping out
lots of power, however, very little of the surplus can be stored because
there is a lack of appropriate technology and the incentives to develop
it.
Volunteer walks
through a hemp field at a farm in Colorado during the first known
harvest of industrial hemp in the US since the 1950s. Photo: P Solomon
Banda/AP
Ryan Loflin, a farmer from southeast Colorado,
tried an illegal crop this year. He didn't hide it from neighbors, and
he was never afraid that law enforcement would come asking about it.
Loflin is among about two dozen Colorado farmers who raised industrial
hemp, marijuana's non-intoxicating cousin that cannot be grown under
federal drug law, bringing in the nation's first acknowledged crop in
more than five decades.
Emboldened by voters in Colorado and Washington last year giving the green light to both marijuana and industrial hemp production,
Loflin planted 55 acres of several varieties of hemp alongside his
typical alfalfa and wheat crops. The hemp came in sparse and scraggly
this month, but Loflin said he is still turning away buyers.
"Phone's
been ringing off the hook," said Loflin, who plans to press the seeds
into oil and sell the fibrous remainder to buyers who will use it in
building materials, fabric and rope. "People want to buy more than I can
grow."
Hemp's prospects, however, are far from certain. Finished
hemp is legal in the US, but growing it remains off-limits under federal
law. The Congressional Research Service recently noted wildly differing
projections about hemp's economic potential.
However, America is
one of hemp's fastest-growing markets, with imports largely coming from
China and Canada. In 2011, the US imported $11.5m worth of hemp
products, up from $1.4m in 2000. Most of that is hemp seed and hemp oil,
which finds its way into granola bars, soaps, lotions and even cooking
oil. Whole Foods Market now sells hemp milk, hemp tortilla chips and
hemp seeds coated in dark chocolate.
Colorado will nt start
granting hemp-cultivation licenses until 2014, but Loflin didn't wait.
His confidence got a boost in August, when the US Department of Justice
said the federal government would generally defer to state marijuana
laws as long as states kept marijuana away from children and drug
cartels. The memo did not mention hemp as an enforcement priority for
the Drug Enforcement Administration.
"I figured they have more
important things to worry about than, you know, rope," a smiling Loflin
said as he hand-harvested 4ft plants on his Baca County land.
Colorado's
hemp experiment may not be unique for long. Ten states now have
industrial hemp laws that conflict with federal drug policy, including
one signed by California Governor Jerry Brown last month. And it's not
just the typical marijuana-friendly suspects: Kentucky, North Dakota and
West Virginia have industrial hemp laws on the books.
