America's first offshore wind farm is finally here! This experiment is highly influenced by offshore wind farms in both Asia and Europe that have proven to be effective. This a great source of potential energy but it does have some questionable factors.
For instance, it is just still an experiment. Researches first want to know the dangers they face having this offshore wind farm and it not being supervised the 24 hours of the day. Although they are training workers to supervise the wind farms it isn't an all day thing. Also, trained workers face danger supervising these wind farms. They never know when an earthquake or a hurricane could hit the area and being on the wind farms at that time isn't the greatest idea. Even though the workers are being trained to evacuate in case of an emergency, they still face grave danger because the safest way to get out of the area is to go up the helipad, attach yourself to the system, and jump off. Something else to take into consideration is the cost of having offshore wind farms. The cost alone to build 5 wind turbines was $300 million and if this experiment does end up being accepted, the cost would be immense to distribute these wind turbines across the northeast. The cost for a cable from Block Island to the main island was an additional $107 million dollars. Overall, this is a very great step to going green and would be incredible if it passed the experiment phase. Programmed to start sending power to the mainland as soon as January, this Block Island project is being highly considered by states in the Northeastern usually, especially Massachusetts and New York. Source: www.popsci.com/future-energy-is-blowing-in-wind#page-5
2 Comments
Karl Gudino
9/9/2016 07:42:56 am
I do think that it is a good first step to going green, but I'm not sure if it would be much a good idea at this time for building it...from an economic view. I don't think it would be a good decision to do it overall.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
|