Featured Offshore

Opposition to offshore wind by the third-party presidential candidate turned Trump supporter began decades ago in the waters off Cape Cod. Project proponents say the fierce opposition by Kennedy, a presidential candidate who recently suspended his campaign but remains on the ballot in nearly three dozen states, had a long-lasting impact on the U.S. offshore wind industry and laid the seeds for opposition that continues today.

“It set back offshore wind over 20 years in the United States,” said Jim Gordon, the former CEO of Cape Wind, the company that tried to build the Nantucket Sound project. Gordon said Kennedy was often the loudest, most combative voice of the well-funded opposition. “You have to understand that they created such a brouhaha and so much fear over the technology and the impacts, which have proven to be unfounded.”

A Windmill Near Brighton By John Constable

Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical.

Smith Putnam Patent Drawings.

This 30,000 word glossary was written by Paul Gipe and Bill Canter in the late-1990s. I’ve added the glossary to my web site for both its historical content—many of the terms were in use during the 1980s and 1990s—and as a reference for the thousands of newcomers to the wind industry since it was first published.

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A dozen more condors are sailing Kern skies as part of a yearslong conservation effort that has recently included local clean energy companies to save the endangered bird.

In a May 1 announcement, energy company Avangrid announced it exceeded conditions set in a conservation plan it created with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2021 to fund the raising of a dozen California condors at the Oregon Zoo.

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Tehachapi Windmill-Wildflower Hike 2024 38th hike Paul Gipe and Georgette Theotig will lead a hike among the wind turbines on … Read more

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It’s also why journalists should avoid treating bird deaths at wind farms as unforgivable sins, rather than as nasty side effects of renewable energy development that we should work hard to minimize but likely can’t avoid entirely.

As part of his study, Katovich used the International Newsstream database to run a comparison. He found that in 2020, major U.S. news outlets published 173 stories about the effects of wind farms on birds — and just 46 stories on fracking impacts.

I wrote last week that it’s time to see the world through climate-colored goggles. That’s true for the media as much as anyone.

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Sunflower Wind is the first in the state to feature an Aircraft Detection Lighting System (ADLS) that uses radar to scan for aircraft. When ADLS is installed on a wind farm, the nighttime lights on the turbines blink only when aircraft are detected, thus reducing light pollution for residents who live close enough to be able to see them.

Approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is required to install ADLS, and the FAA reviews every turbine individually. The FAA requires that the ADLS activate and flash if an aircraft is at or below 1,000 feet above the tallest wind turbine and is approaching a three-nautical mile (3.45-mile) perimeter around the wind farm.

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But I would ask country dwellers still inclined to block them to see that they are in fact beautiful. They are prettier than power stations, less destructive than fracking, certainly lovelier than floods, fires, droughts and other effects of climate change. They enrich the nation with the help of its abundant wind, and make us less dependent on fossil-fuel despots. Wind turbines are in a long rural tradition of robust practical structures that also includes barns, mills, viaducts, canals and others that have become beloved and protected. On those same drives I was always happy to see an old windmill. It shouldn’t be too hard to love their modern equivalents.

Haverigg Air Base, Cumbria, Vestas V27s, Black Mountain In Background.

Ministers are preparing to introduce changes to planning rules that will allow councils to give the go-ahead to turbine proposals where there is broad public support, according to the Telegraph.

The amendment to scrap the ban on new offshore wind was put forward by the former Cop26 president Alok Sharma and has since drawn support from a group of Tories including Liz Truss, who are “confident” that it will pass.

Featured Offshore

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (Leedco) is planning to build Icebreaker, a demonstration wind farm generating 20 megawatts of electricity several miles off the shore of Cleveland. The project would initially be small, starting with six turbines, with construction expected to begin as soon as 2025 and electricity coming online two years later.