Earth Equity News

Wind-Power Politics. By Mark Svenvold, NYTimes Magazine, September 14, 2008. "For years, [offshore Delaware] wind-farm projects had stalled in the face of local political opposition. Then an entrepreneur named Peter Mandelstam [founder of Bluewater Wind] came up with a new and energizing approach... In 2005 Willett Kempton, a University of Delaware professor in the school's College of Marine Studies, began teaching a course on offshore wind power... a team of students, led by Amardeep Dhanju, became curious about measuring the winds off the coast to determine whether they might serve as a source of power. What he found was that Delaware's coastal winds were capable of producing a year-round average output of over 5,200 megawatts, or four times the average electrical consumption of the entire state... [At] Dhanju's [class presentation]... Mandelstam [the only invited entrepreneur to show up] had his eureka moment. The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what's known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight. This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity... May 2007, after the longest and most exhaustive review process in its history, the Public Service Commission unanimously selected the Bluewater Wind Park as the winner of the open competition and ordered Delmarva Power, the same company that had been actively campaigning against the wind farm, to begin negotiating a contract... Delaware's project, it turns out, joins more than a dozen offshore wind projects in the United States, the largest among them aimed toward the Mid-Atlantic Bight. A report released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory National Renewable Energy Laboratory suggests that the technological challenges of wind power will not, in fact, prevent it from becoming an important part of the nation's energy supply... Nonetheless, many hurdles remain. Federal regulations governing the construction of offshore wind farms, for instance, haven't even been written. In the absence of a coherent federal energy policy, moreover, the states have begun to shape America's energy future. The result is a hodgepodge: 50 different states with different energy resources and utilities with varying degrees of receptivity to new forms of power generation. 'What we need,' says Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, 'is the grid equivalent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.'"