Green Options

By Stacy Feldman, originally published June 24, 2009, at SolveClimate.com

Washington is starting to wake up to something that’s been obvious to marine scientists for years. The winds blowing off U.S. waters could be a key to a national clean energy and green jobs revolution.

On Tuesday, the federal government awarded five leases to three companies that want to develop wind turbines off the New Jersey and Delaware coasts for the production of renewable energy.

They’re the first such leases the Department of Interior has ever issued for the Outer Continental Shelf. If this official statement is any indication, they won’t be the last:

“We made the development of offshore wind energy a top priority for Interior. The technology is proven, effective and available and can create new jobs for Americans while reducing our expensive and dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

The declaration comes as the U.S. Congress is in the midst of a debate over a proposal that would create a costly long-distance “transmission highway” to carry land-based wind energy (among other clean and dirty sources) from the Great Plains to the power-hungry cities of the American East.

Scotland plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 42 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, the most by any country.

Cleantech startups have stopped seeing GE as an adversary and have started realizing the company can help them make a difference, Kevin Skillern, a managing director at GE Energy Financial Services, said in a keynote speech at a Thomson Reuters conference called “Financing the Cleantech Vision” in Palo Alto on Wednesday.

In spite of the recession, Skillern assured the audience that the long-term business opportunity for cleantech is still there, though it will require “a strong stomach and a lot of patience” to cash in on it. He also called climate change “one of, if not the biggest, societal challenges of our time” and said technology was an essential part of the solution.

High-altitude winds hold enough energy to power the world 100 times over.

Though harnessing them is another issue.

You’ve heard of commercial wind turbines in farm fields, offshore turbines on the water, even small wind turbines on the rooftops of homes, but high-altitude winds are also being studied as a potential energy source.

The first-ever study of high-altitude winds by the Carnegie Institution and California State University says winds in the jet stream, about 30,000 feet up, would be the ideal source to exploit. And the sky over New York is a prime spot, along with population centers in the eastern United States and East Asia.

The state of Massachusetts is hunting for unusual places to put wind turbines as it looks to meet an ambitious goal of producing 2,000 megawatts of windpower by 2020.

The Associated Press reports that state officials are encouraging municipal planners to look at using capped landfills as potential wind farm locations. Plans were also just announced for a military reservation on Cape Cod.

The state is hoping to jump start development, because right now, the AP reports, there are only 11 commercial scale turbines in the state. But, ther are dozens of smaller ones installed and nearly 200 other projects in various stages of planning.

When it comes to environmental news, doom and gloom often rules the day. And it’s easy to get discouraged. But scientists from Yale University say most polluted ecosystems can recover in as little as 5 or 10 years.

The study means it’s not too late to turn things around if societies commit to cleanup, restoration and sustainability, according to Yale’s analysis of 240 independent studies. The findings appear in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Thinking about installing a wind energy system, but not sure if the payback period on your investment meets your financial needs? I began thinking about this question last week when our old friend (and my real old friend) bobbyb sent me an article about a couple who’d installed a wind turbine at their home in Great Britain. He noted that the numbers provided in the article (a £20,000 initial outlay for £500/year energy savings) didn’t make financial sense: “That’s a forty-year payback period!”

He’s right… that kind of cost-benefit analysis doesn’t really work. If you’re going to put up tens of thousands of dollars for a wind system (or a solar energy system), you probably want to see a return on that investment in years, rather than in decades. I got so interested in the topic that I wrote a post about things you should consider before putting your money down on a renewable energy system at SUNfiltered. Wind energy systems have their own requirements, so here are a few of the things you’ll want to take into consideration.

Will wind energy work on my property?

As with any renewable resource, some areas are better than others for home wind energy. Some of the questions you’ll need answers for include

As the wind energy industry experiences a period of unprecedented growth and demand, a resistance movement has been gaining momentum in response to a reported number of negative impacts of wind turbines on human health.

Right now, there’s no wind in the Great Lakes, but lots of talk.

There’s a bit of money, too, totaling about $100,000 from the federal stimulus package, aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Great Lakes Commission has been granted $99,740 to develop a set of “Best Practices to Accelerate Wind Power in the Great Lakes and Beyond.”

The end result will be a guide to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to protecting the environment, being sensitive to community concerns and … building wind turbines in the water.

This is the first in a series of environmentally focused cartoons we wil be featuring from Seppo Leinonen a cartoonist from Finland. I met Seppo through Twitter @sepponet and loved his business oriented green cartoons - I think you will too!

Wyoming Senator John Barrasso believes that fossil fuels like oil and coal are the future and should be used to power the American economy while the scientific studies clearly state otherwise. American policy makers should accelerate investments in renewable energy.