Thursday, April 21, 2011

Wind Power

This kind of shocked me -- the first U.S. offshore wind farm has been approved:
I'm not sure how this slipped under the radar, but on Tuesday, the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound cleared its final hurdle -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) approved a Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted by Cape Wind Associates back in October of 2010.
What is all means:
The project consists of 130, 3.6 megawatt wind turbine generators covering approximately 25 square miles in federal waters offshore Massachusetts with the maximum capacity to produce about 468 megawatts. The average expected production from the wind facility could provide about 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. At average expected production, Cape Wind could produce enough energy to power more than 200,000 homes in Massachusetts.
Seriously, America, this is the first?

I guess that puts us still well behind Europe.

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