Renewable energy
An excellent blog called not watching television has paid Deep Blade Journal a huge compliment. Thank you, cs!
At nwt, cs has an Action Alert concerning a Republican attempt to squash development of the Nantucket Sound Wind Farm, off the coast at Cape Cod, Massachusetts -- where Senator John Warner (R-VA) has a vacation home! Oh, the aesthetics! Some people do hate the thought of turbines in their backyards, apparently including Ted Kennedy.
To me, wind machines would be more beautiful than the natural-gas-fired generating station that is my neighbor down the road a piece. Talk about view! We get to see the steam clouds coming out of that thing all through the cold months.
In comments to nwt's alert, I see that this language, snuck into a larger bill, has been removed. Glory hallelujah!
Now I feel a responsibility to post on renewable energy, a topic I have covered very little in Deep Blade Journal, except to say on a few occasions that there is no renewable source that is even going to come close to replacing liquid petrol products, especially for transportation fuels. David Goodstein makes this argument in Out of Gas. Likewise, Matthew Simmons says frequently in talks that "there is no Plan B" to replace conventional oil.
Electrical generation is another matter. Natural gas much more so than oil is now the Achilles heel of our electric energy supply. Here, wind does have the potential to replace a lot of megawatts. This table on US wind energy potential and utilization comes from Roger A. Hinrichs and Merlin Kleinbach, Energy: Its Use and the Environment, third edition (Brooks/Cole, 2002), a book I assign to my physics students:
As you can see, there could be a great deal of wind energy development in the US. It won't happen with Cheney in office. President Kerry will be much, much better on this front, though I wonder what he thinks of the Nantucket Sound project...anyone know?
I'll post again on the limitations of renewable energy. It's not that it can't be done. It's just that life in currently developed countries will be very, very different in a few decades as the energy picture changes.
