“50 m” means mean wind speed at 50 meters above the ground or water.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
As usual, whatever the huge environmental and economic benefits of green-energy projects, some people try to block them, especially affluent folks who don’t want to look at them or even if they can’t see them hate the very idea of being anywhere near them. Sometimes the blocking attempts are on their own, and sometimes they get the help of the fossil-fuel industry. (Hey, who wants competition?!) Consider that a far-right (euphemism – ‘’libertarian”) Trump-connected outfit called the Caesar Rodney Institute, with ties to the oil industry, is one of the groups fighting offshore wind projects.
The latest example in these parts is a bunch of people in the Cape Cod town of Barnstable trying to stop electrical cables from the offshore wind farms of Commonwealth Wind and Park City Wind from being laid 50 feet under beaches.
The foes like to cite alleged health risks from electromagnetic fields and fires. But in fact putting these cables deep underground is the safest way to go. How many of these opponents have complained about the risks from overhead lines, which produce -- obviously! --far, far more human exposure to electromagnetic fields than can underground cables, require cutting down wide swaths of woods and otherwise disturbing the environment to make space for them and can (albeit rarely) cause fires, of which California is the most dramatic example.
There have long been underground cables all over America that carry the same voltages that would come from these offshore wind projects. And cables from offshore wind farms in Europe have been put under beaches without incident, but it’s a lot easier to do such projects there than here.
Hypocrisy makes the world go round.
And now some powerful folks in Newport seek to block wind turbines in the water far off that city. One foe is self-described “Trumpette’’ Dee Gordon, whose properties, with her husband, include a place on Ocean Drive.
Of course plenty of people, Trumpette or otherwise, don’t want wind turbines near them.
Hit this link, this one and this one. And this one.
And this one. And, finally, this one.
I hope that Massachusetts officials will favor the broad public interest and not let local opposition block what would be an environmental and economic boon for our region. But lots of people still seem to prefer burning oil, gas and coal from outside our region rather than putting up with nonpolluting, locally produced energy.
