The venerable Matt Wald has been covering nuclear power and renewable energy technology at the NY Times since Hector was a pup. He has the lead story today: Offshore Wind Power Line Wins Backing. A high-voltage cable, costing $5 billion and with a 6 GW capacity, would run offshore connecting wind farms from Virginia to New Jersey. Google is on board, adding its considerable technical and financial weight to the project.
I remember a study from decades ago saying that New England could run wholly on offshore wind power. Well, that was just a study, but we’re talking about reality today. The embarrassingly unprincipled opposition to Cape Wind has failed. This project, stalled for nine years, is going into the water. Governors from all up and down the Atlantic seaboard are enthusiastic about offshore. It’s going to be a long time before we catch up to Europe, but there’s just enormous upside potential. Plus, for us effete Eastern intellectual snobs, it’s local. We don’t need to import our wind from the Great Plains. It’s homegrown.
Wald wrote the other day about nuclear power’s financial woes in the US. The headline puts it down to a sluggish economy, but the head of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) says, as Wald reports, “…the nuclear industry will experience no renaissance for the most simple of reasons: ‘nuclear reactors make no economic sense.'” This echoes Amory Lovins’s analysis as well as Citigroup’s view on nuclear for the UK.
As Bob Dylan would say, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
