Power East Coast via wind? Doable with 144,000 offshore turbines, study says

Go for it. Navigate boats around them. The world needs this. It would create a lot of jobs too

bird blenders

i am all for wind and offshore wind (i work in solar for a living) but 50% wind is going to be crazy hard to manage. wind is a super complex resource to predict that typically peaks at night, when folks aren't using power.

a healthy dose of offshore wind (25% or more) is resonable, but funny enough, they'll still have to run a lot of natural gas, and potentially coal plants, even if they don't supply electricity, in the event that the wind drops. renewable energy is amazing, and needed, and i love it with all my heart, but if done wrong, it is a nightmare for grid stability.

mark my words, CA is going to feel the effects from all the solar PV going in the desert in the coming years. More so LA than up here but it is going to cause flickering and potentiall brown outs a couple times til they really figure out how to control it.

@zappa- are these the power towers that are going up in the desert?
what do you think of heliostats? these seem pretty kick ass

the power towers (a la Brightsource) are not as big of a deal. they create tons of heat and steam that can continue to provide power for much longer after sun goes away. some of the ones going in for SCE actually use molten salt as the heat medium and can continue to provide power for like 4 hours after sun goes down. effectively storage in the form of heat. very cool. the only problem is, this technology is relatively unproven and is way more expensive that traditional solar photovoltaics (PV) - the simple panels

to put it in perspective, there are about 2 GW of solar PV projects going into SoCal over the next few years. about 25% of that is almost online already. the problem with PV is that it reacts instantly, so if a series of clouds pass over, the output of a system could drop from 250 MW to 100 MW in < a minute and ramp back up just as quickly. that power has to come from / go somewhere - and therein lies the issue.

traditionaly power plants take hours (and for the slow one close to a day) to ramp up / down and that's what grid operators are used to. having that much PV in one place all suscpetible to similar weather patterns is going to be a nightmare to control.

don't get me wrong - I am ALL FOR IT. this is what i do for a living. just trying to show the challenges of saying "we're gonna be XX% renewable energy!"

the nice thing about an offshore windfarm is if a tower collapses, any "wind spills" would be easily cleaned up!

I heard making solar panels is super toxic and the Prius batteries don't last long and no place to "recycle" them and have a stock pile of dead ones in Nevada with no way to compost them,I'm for Wind and tide power

The most common form of wind turbine also uses oil and toxic chemicals to build and maintain them. Wind turbines have a number of challenges. Sometimes they burst into flames. This doesn't make them a bad idea, but it doesn't mean you can say they are truly a non-polluting power source.

Every form of energy collection has it's risks and rewards and challenges. We can't really write off one form as worse than another, but we should still keep trying to make each method better (more reliable, fewer by-products, less ecological impact.)

Sadly I feel like the spirit of innovation with renewable energy is often crushed by the same bottom line driven spirit that guides non-renewable energy.

@TT - yes some forms of solar panels are extremely toxic. Specifically cadmium telluride (first solar) and any CIGS product. CIGS is going the way of the dinasour but First Solar is the company I speak of above who is putting in many millions of these panels out in the CA desert. No major risk of them "leaking" durin operation, but ya, you have to deal with "recycling" them on the back end.

On the other hand, the vast majority of solar panels are just plain silicon (read: sand). They are essentially made of the same stuff that goes into computer chips with a few slight modifications. However, anyone who says they are toxic is false.

As far as Prius goes, who knows. All batteries are difficult to deal with on the back end. There is a reason even a simple Duracell AA isn't supposed to go into the trash can. The same could be said for regular car batteries - somebody has to deal with them, the prius batteries just take a little extra care. Prius or otherwise, EVs are a step in the right direction as long as the grid recharging it isn't all coal.

I also am all for wind but unless we go offshore te US has only so many sites left. The pacific will not work for offshore anytime soon because of the depths - the turbine would have to float. East coast ad the great lakes have Tina o offshore potential that should be exploited.

It is a personal dream of mine to develop tidal / wave power projects. However, the technology is probably at least 20 years from commercial viability. The UK is leading the charge here in term of technology but are far from a long term solution. No one knows how / when will harness the power of the ocean.

Sorry for the rant but I get Stoked on renewables (while trying to maintain a healthy dose of economic reality)