Coastal jurisdiction can be very complicated. Our town had a dead whale on its beach. The town couldn't touch it. The county couldn't touch it. The state couldn't touch it. The Coast Guard couldn't touch it. The federal government couldn't touch it. Luckily, one of the local tribes was still allowed, by a treaty recently reinforced by a court decision, to hunt whales, and they agreed to move it.
Offshore wind power has a lot of possibility in the US, especially along the eastern coast, an area with a demand for a lot of power. To be honest, I'm glad to see the Jones Act pushing the US to build the appropriate support vessels. That's the kind of thing that the act was set up to do.
Regulations are a response to problems. They're not always the best response, but they usually made things better. It's like the Army's infamous twenty page set of regulations defining a cherry pie. People used to make fun of it, but the reason it cited a specific number, mass, viscosity and volume of cherries is because vendors were selling the Army cherry pies with no cherries in them. Ditto for specifying the size, shape, depth, crust thickness and so on. Each clause was put in because vendors cut a corner at some point. It's what software people call scar tissue.
There are lots of parties that benefit from our coastal waters. There are fishermen, oystermen, sewage processors, shippers, tourists, restaurateurs, power plant operators, bathers and a host of others. There are local interests and more global interests since what is done with the waters locally affects those in a broad area. There are historical factors. Early arrivals tend to get first dibs on resources, so the tribes got the right to fish whales and dibs on half the fish catch.
It is definitely tempting to blow the whole thing up and try to start over with something simpler, but that means renegotiating the existing compromises. Who is expected to give up what and what do they get for it? I'm not saying it can't be done or that it might not improve things, just that there are a lot of parties who could be justifiably aggrieved. Some of them accepted a lot of bad things until recently, and they are not keen on going through that golden age of losing big again.
I agree with you. It would be great to come to a new compromise, but so much of this is about political power. It's like the billionaires in Menlo Park, CA saying they were in favor of more affordable housing, but insisting that rezoning any part of Menlo Park was out of the question.
The construction and maintenance issues are perhaps less severe for floating wind turbines than for fixed offshore turbines. Floating turbines can be assembled at a nearby port, and towed back there for servicing, provided they are not too big for the local port. Jobs!
There might be a de-facto economic upper limit on floating wind turbine size for this reason. A possible side benefit is that making and installing more of smaller turbines might move them down the learning curve more quickly.
The other issues, permitting and NIMBYism, I have no idea about.
Coastal jurisdiction can be very complicated. Our town had a dead whale on its beach. The town couldn't touch it. The county couldn't touch it. The state couldn't touch it. The Coast Guard couldn't touch it. The federal government couldn't touch it. Luckily, one of the local tribes was still allowed, by a treaty recently reinforced by a court decision, to hunt whales, and they agreed to move it.
Offshore wind power has a lot of possibility in the US, especially along the eastern coast, an area with a demand for a lot of power. To be honest, I'm glad to see the Jones Act pushing the US to build the appropriate support vessels. That's the kind of thing that the act was set up to do.
Regulations are a response to problems. They're not always the best response, but they usually made things better. It's like the Army's infamous twenty page set of regulations defining a cherry pie. People used to make fun of it, but the reason it cited a specific number, mass, viscosity and volume of cherries is because vendors were selling the Army cherry pies with no cherries in them. Ditto for specifying the size, shape, depth, crust thickness and so on. Each clause was put in because vendors cut a corner at some point. It's what software people call scar tissue.
There are lots of parties that benefit from our coastal waters. There are fishermen, oystermen, sewage processors, shippers, tourists, restaurateurs, power plant operators, bathers and a host of others. There are local interests and more global interests since what is done with the waters locally affects those in a broad area. There are historical factors. Early arrivals tend to get first dibs on resources, so the tribes got the right to fish whales and dibs on half the fish catch.
It is definitely tempting to blow the whole thing up and try to start over with something simpler, but that means renegotiating the existing compromises. Who is expected to give up what and what do they get for it? I'm not saying it can't be done or that it might not improve things, just that there are a lot of parties who could be justifiably aggrieved. Some of them accepted a lot of bad things until recently, and they are not keen on going through that golden age of losing big again.
I agree with you. It would be great to come to a new compromise, but so much of this is about political power. It's like the billionaires in Menlo Park, CA saying they were in favor of more affordable housing, but insisting that rezoning any part of Menlo Park was out of the question.
There is a very interesting different design from T-Omega. I'd like to hear your comments on it.
https://newatlas.com/energy/t-omega-floating-wind/
Bureaucracies have a tendency to overcorrect. You don't want this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
But, analysis paralysis is often worse.
The construction and maintenance issues are perhaps less severe for floating wind turbines than for fixed offshore turbines. Floating turbines can be assembled at a nearby port, and towed back there for servicing, provided they are not too big for the local port. Jobs!
There might be a de-facto economic upper limit on floating wind turbine size for this reason. A possible side benefit is that making and installing more of smaller turbines might move them down the learning curve more quickly.
The other issues, permitting and NIMBYism, I have no idea about.