Article 15 05/02/2010

Offshore Drilling Bill – Passed

The United States government has recently signed a legislative bill that will now, for the first time, allow offshore wind turbines. The bill was passed for a wind farm to be built in the Cape Wind area, off of the coast of Massachusetts. This project is estimated to have a total of 130 turbines. All of the turbines will be linked together, sending all of the generated energy to a holding device, and then it will disperse the energy (electricity) to homes and businesses throughout the east coast bay area. The original article has estimated that the energy produced by the farm of wind turbine generators is estimated to be equivalent to a mid sized coal plant.

If all of these turbines are only equivalent to already existing coal plants, why not just use the technology that is already out there? Coal plants produce large quantities of carbon that gets released into the air we breathe. There is so much released into the air that the unit of measure for emitted carbon is metric tons. It is also estimated that with the installation of the 130 wind turbines, it will save the atmosphere from the equivalent to pulling 175,000 cars off of our American roads.

Although there are a lot of positives to energy produced by wind turbines, there is a list of negatives that are a big issue to this particular case, and they all have to do with the fact that everything will be done in the water. There are not many concerns with the actual installation of the generators in the water; the issues are related to the water eco systems. Although the U.S. government has given the okay to build in the water, there will be a wrath of law suits that will follow. As previously mentioned, disruption to the under water eco systems always lead to big law suits. Additionally mentioned in the original article, something as obscure as cheapening the view from homes on the coast my result in potential law suits.

With so many positives being counteracted by negatives, the likelihood that a wind farm will be built soon is more unlikely than not. But I believe we (our country, and our world) are moving in the right direction. We are putting fourth large efforts to be greener, all in an effort to save our beautiful planet. I hope that one day in the near future we cut our emissions pollution in half. We’re turning greener one step at a time.

Original Article;

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/us-approves-first-offshore-wind-farm-cape-cod

Supporting Articles;

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/04/cape_wind_annou.html

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Cape%20Wind&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Generate-your-own-energy/Wind-turbines