A Better View for Offshore Wind Farms
Good news for those for and against building offshore wind farms in scenic locations: An MIT engineer has come up with a solution to putting those pesky wind turbines in places where they’ll alter views from the coast. He proposes building floating wind turbines which could be placed a hundred miles out to sea, too far to be visible from land. Current turbine designs must be anchored to the ground, requiring them to be placed in shallower waters where they interrupt the smooth ocean horizon. The new turbines would be built on buoyant platforms tethered to the ocean floor, so they could be placed in deeper water where there is plenty of wind and space, and not much in the way of million dollar real-estate. So, rich people in New England, give this man money. Once again, an argument against renewable energy has been removed. Why not make it happen?
shannon rock said,
September 20, 2006 @ 12:09 pm
Recently my girlfriends and I went to Canada. We were driving through up-state NY when we spotted a bunch of these turbines up in the mountains. It is our personal opinion that these turbines added to the view. However, it was pretty funny when I had to explain to one of them what they were.
monkey said,
September 20, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
I think the turbines are pretty too. I find it hard to beleive that some people would rather burn fossil fuels for energy than use wind farms, just because they think that the turbines will interfere with their view. Admittedly, there are also some implications for birds and marine mammals, but these just don’t seem as serious as polluting our air with toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases and spilling oil on our coasts.
Mac said,
September 30, 2006 @ 3:43 am
Great Article!
This line of R&D should be a top spending priority, ahead of the funding for Clean Coal Technology.
Although I love the electricity from wind turbines, I think they are a visual blight on the land. More important, they are murder on birds and genocidal on bats. (Bats have to rely on sonar signals rather than sight, and sound travels much slower than light.)
These floating turbines are much larger than the land-based turbines, so that a few of these are more productive than an entire hillside of land turbines. And they are located out at sea where there are few birds and no bats to slaughter.
Since two-thirds of the globe’s surface is ocean, the potential is staggering. It may even become possible to send thousnds of these turbines into hurricane zones to reduce wind into electricity.
Close the coal mines and let the miners build turbines.