While the US lags several other nations in the deployment of wind turbines at sea, it seems to have now set the stage to make up some ground. The Dept. of Interior announced yesterday it is leasing five areas off New Jersey and Delaware to wind energy companies that want to put up test towers and to find which places are most suitable. This is a “major step forward” for proposed wind farms in the region, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Sandy Bauers reports, and are the first such leases issued for the outer continental shelf. He got a nice, understandable but jargon-infused quote from one company executive. “Now we’re truing up the predictions.” He also reports that while such leases were in principle allowed for the last several years, the Bush administration failed to craft the regulatory system to do so. One wonders – did the Obama team whip out a big set of forms and instructions from scratch in just a few months, or what? One doesn’t learn that from this, but does find out some of the strange bureaucratic complexities that have been cleared up since the inauguration.
Other stories:
- AP – Wayne Parry : Leases awarded for windmills studies off NJ, Del. ;
- Reuters – Jon Hurdle: US awards exploratory leases for offshore wind ;
- Financial Times (blog) Sheila McNulty : US catches up on offshore wind ;
- NY Times – Jad Mouawad : First Offshore Wind Leases Issued ;
- New Jersey Star-Ledger – MaryAnn Spoto: US awards four leases to explore wind energy off Jersey coast ;
- McClatchy Newspapers – Renee Schoof : Wind energy companies test waters for offshore projects ; But, she reports, today’s turbines couldn’t take a Class V hurricane. Souces tell her they should be too hard to design.
Grist for the Mill: Dept. of Interior Press Release ;
Some other wind energy stories out now:
- Bloomberg – Mike Anderson: Wind Power Will Overtake Nuclear in UK, BWEA says ; that is the British Wind Energy Association.
- China Daily – Zhang Yu’an: China commits to offshore renewable energy ;
- Bloomberg : Wind energy infrastructure would raise price 20 percent, study says ;
And finally, some grist that may not yet have reached any mills:
- Stanford University News Service: High-altitude winds: The greatest source of concentrated energy on Earth; Tracker would have guessed uranium ore deposits, or perhaps coal fields. The story is about the energy in jet streams that might be tapped via turbines on huge kites.
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