Don't get too exited. This is a fight that's been happening for over 20yr now. Whoever is throwing the political football of any given wind project or who is receiving it in the end zone is just a name. They'll be gone in a few years. The institution of fighting over off shore wind farms in the Boston to NYC area was there before them and will be there after them.

Regardless of the pretext of any given action the the way things generally are is that the people who have a view they want to protect, the tourism industry and the hippie/nature/biology types are on the no-wind side and the climate types, green energy people, domestic energy and big business types are on the other. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes another side wins. But nobody ever gets a win streak long enough to bring anything to fruition.

The area is well suited to wind power but the area but it's also chock full of rich people and moneyed interests that can afford to fight it, likely to the long term detriment of the region, but like locusts they will be gone and cashed out by then so they don't care. That's probably when these things will finally get built.

I'd love to see some wind turbines go up but I'll believe it when I see it. And even then, I bet they'll find some way to make everyone's bill go up instead of down because of it.

Sincerely and with the utmost disrespect,

A cape wind proponent.

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AnthonyMouse 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have a pet theory that the secret to getting energy projects online is faster deployment methods. Make all the turbines/reactors/whatever in a factory so that all you have to do on-site is plop them out and plug them in.

MONDAY: The lower court has denied the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

MONDAY NIGHT: Thousands of wind turbines are hurled off the back of a container ship with a catapult and automatically drop anchor and start generating power.

TUESDAY: The appellate court has reinstated the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

..but they're already all installed.

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throwaway173738 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Energy projects are just a variation of a real estate project. As you might know, a lot of the difficulty in mass producing buildings isn’t making the parts but preparing the site to receive the parts. There’s probably 5 or 10 companies in your vicinity that can ship you prefabricated walls and floors for a house. But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on. The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm. Studying the site and planning the build are unique to each building and limit how fast you can go anyway.

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AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds like a racket.

	▲	potato3732842 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Racket that's spread out over enough people and processes that any one point of it is defensible with a mild enough amount of "lying, but with plausible deniability" that the common man can be hoodwinked. The best kind of racket really.

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potato3732842 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on.

>The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm.

No, you don't. That's purely a figment of how successful the civil engineering lobby was at regulatory-capturing their way into the process.

The people who build buildings and windmills know what kind of foundations they need. If you have even a ballpark estimate of your site conditions they will happily tell you approximately what you'll need to do.

An extra inch of concrete here or there or a foot less of pile spacing or an extra few passed with the dozer costs basically nothing. The only reason you see people designing things to the bare minimum is that when you're being forced to pay a engineer to punch in numbers either way it makes sense to take advantage of that and make them tell you what the bare minimum is so you can at least save a bit on actual construction costs.

You think you hate crony capitalism or the micromanaging nanny state or whatever you want to call it now. Just wait until you engage in any kind of project that doesn't benefit from all the exemptions that residential does.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And this is why partisanship is such an own-goal. Partisan Democrats want wind turbines instead of coal, but to get them they'd have to admit that the thing standing in their way is these excessive rules impeding the construction of anything, which is contrary to the precept that regulations are good and getting rid of regulations is bad. Whereas if you put aside the dogma you might notice that giving the other team what they want in this case and getting rid of some regulations would actually be good and allow you to do the thing you want to do.

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kibitzor 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also a cape wind proponent here, I got carried away with my comment below reminiscing about the "just one more year" feeling for cape wind for the past 20 years.

My wind energy professor[1] assigned everyone the task of arguing against cape wind as one of our assignments (and later, for it). Of course, we found a few valid arguments for and against, but enormous reasons for it. The professor had a despondent take on utility scale wind, even though it was environmentally + economically viable, partially from the decades of fighting against the often irrational public perception.

Example homework:

"Wind turbines will block our sunset"

> no, dune grass will block more of the sunset for you, many turbines won't even be visible (insert math)

"Wind turbines will be too loud"

> no, they're so far away from shore that even your breathing is louder (insert math)

"They won't make energy cheap enough to reduce costs"

> no, even using conservative payback plans and limited life, it still works (insert math)

"The native's sunset ritual will be ruined by the wind turbines"

>no, see above, are you serious? [Yes, this was proposed- https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/article/tribes... ]

It's less about a conspiracy against renewables, you start to feel this conspiracy for pro foreign fossil fuels in the Boston area. The iconic Citgo sign, core to Boston's image [2]-> maybe The iconic Rainbow tank for liquid natural gas[3] -> maybe maybe The fact that Boston receives tanker ships of LNG from Russia[4]-> maybe maybe maybe

[1]I have a Wind Energy Certificate from my university education, but this was not my focus

[2]https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-century-old-citgo-...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Swash

[4]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-lng-coming-4500-miles-...

	▲	potato3732842 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't even think it's that there's a conspiracy in favor of foreign energy. It's that the area is rich enough to indulge in stupidity. They can literally eat cake. Because there's no actual impetus to "not suck" all sorts of stupid emotional "but the seagulls" arguments that would normally not stop anything resonate. And of course the foreign energy interests are happy to fan those stupid flames. Maybe $300+ energy bills (also a result of short sighted let them eat cake policies) will be what finally does it.