Friday, January 6, 2012

Giant, floating wind turbines set to conquer deep ocean final frontier - Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

Giant, floating wind turbines set to conquer deep ocean final frontier - Governors' Wind Energy Coalition:
Last month, the first offshore turbine ever to be installed without using heavy lift vessels gently floated away on a platform built at a shipyard in Portugal and was towed by a boat 217 miles to the coast of Aguçadoura for a year-long test. It’s a regular 2-megawatt turbine made by Denmark’s Vestas bolted on one of three columns of a triangular floating platform made by Seattle-based Principle Power. 
“We are making a similar leap towards new energy resources as the oil and gas industry did in the 1970s when it began using floating structures...”

 My objections to wind are primarily economic.  The redundancy requirements are enormous, the grid expansion significant, and, in my province of Ontario, an innovation-stifling Feed In Tariff (FIT regime) seems to me to encourage corruption and keeps pricing very high.
Others have far more immediate concerns re: health, the destruction of communities, and the blight on the landscape.
The floating turbines seem to have potential to alleviate many of the objections.

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