Offshore Wind Moves Into Energys Mainstream

[burfman]

Source: NY Times

LIVERPOOL, England — When engineers faced resistance from residents in Denmark over plans to build wind turbines on the Nordic country’s flat farmland, they found a better locale: the sea. The offshore wind farm, the world’s first, had just 11 turbines and could power about 3,000 homes.

That project now looks like a minnow compared with the whales that sprawl for miles across the seas of Northern Europe.

Off this venerable British port city, a Danish company, Dong Energy, is installing 32 turbines that stretch 600 feet high. Each turbine produces more power than that first facility.

All of those factors in concert have helped push costs down. Dong says its anticipated costs of electricity generation have halved. As recently as 2014, they were 156 euros, or $166, per megawatt-hour, a wholesale unit of electricity, on a British project. By last year, they had fallen to €78 per megawatt-hour on a series of wind farms off the Netherlands.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/business/energy-environment/renewables-offshore-wind-green-power-dong.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

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Looks like the air might get cleaner regardless of the politics.

[Dave Starsky]

1. It won't be long until we're viewed as the shithole of the world.

I'm afraid that "Shining City on a Hill" capital we built up 240 years or so ago as a brave democracy has been bleeding out for a while, and now it's going to completely hemorrhage out in the next few months, if not the next few weeks.