(no subject)

[commodorified]

Snaffled from ars technica

Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson likes to take current thinking about renewable energy and supersize it. Rather than aiming for 50 percent renewables, like California is, he has analyzed what it would take for each of the 50 states to go fully renewable. It would apparently involve so many offshore wind turbines that hurricanes headed toward the States would be suppressed.

I feel like that's an unalloyed good, am I missing something here?

Comments

[sara]

Yeah, I think they can actually tack a second, longer cable on there if they have to.

There are enough submerged cable projects that I think the engineering is not insoluble; I just don't know that I think the failsafes for this particular application were sufficient. I also didn't think they'd done enough to address visual impacts -- there are coatings you can use in a marine environment that will make things more-or-less disappear visually on an overcast day, but the pilot project wind farm people REALLY want you to be able to see their EXCITING GREEN ENERGY PROJECT from a distance (ohboy).

This is the second phase of the Portugese pilot. It is at a much shallower depth than the proposed project I reviewed, but it's still interesting to watch it built out.

There is no one solution with renewables but it's good to see people playing around with different options.