Talking More Wind Power at Point Lookout

bay view: Point Lookout wind turbine
Referring to an excellent pictorial from Shaun at Sea By the City, there’s quite a few questions flying around. I see an opportunity to help people who favor renewable energy get more involved through gaining knowledge: one of All Our Energy’s main goals.

A great comment:

MHC on Saturday, January 14th, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Why only ONE turbine?

There’s plenty of room for unobtrusively placing a couple more. Any talk of one or two more?

REPLY

I don’t know. Let’s talk about it!

From a personal

standpoint, I would love to see more. There are some considerations, though.

Disclaimer: none of these are reasons to not have more, we just need to define what we want and what the realities of that are.

Firstly, more is not necessarily better. It is much more cost-effective to go as big as possible under the circumstances..

We know the Point Lookout turbine cost about $600,000 for a 100kw rated potential generator(not going to get into rating vs kW hours etc right here). Although info is sketchy due to privacy, the info we have found is that a 2 MW(megawatts)-that is 20 times the output, approximately 60% taller, and 15 times the “swept area” (square meters/ square footage of rotor circle) would only cost 4-5 times the cost for 20 times the output. This brings your cost of generation down to 20-25% of the smaller size in dollars spent per kilowatt hour produced.

Would everyone feel the same if the additional one(s) were in this modern commercial size which is necessary to make it financially viable? Keep in mind, the next phase are coming in at 5MW, so that will be the “price competitive” size in the near future. If you’ve read this far, you can do the math to figure out the size of that, now!

Secondly, we open up a can of wormy questions: what’s our objective? To generate electricity? For whose use and benefit? How do we use/ sell the electricity? At what price can we sell it? What will it cost to generate each kilowatt hour? Build with what money, at whose expense? On whose land? How big?

We’re not afraid to ask and answer these questions.

We as a society, and here as a locality, need to answer these questions and all the next logical questions the answers to these bring up!

As soon as we answer them, we can start truly moving our energy future forward.

The only reason this hasn’t happened is because we have not gotten together as “the general public” and demanded it, or better: found a way to do it ourselves! Right now, millions who support this are “waiting for someone else to get it done”, but as the famous quote goes, “we’re the people we’ve been waiting for.”
Spearheading this is another of All Our Energy’s main goals, as well.

What do you say? Let’s talk! It can’t happen until We decide what We want! So what do you, yes YOU,want?

Spell it out and comment here!

2 comments

  1. MHC says:

    Size and output are not the only considerations, certainly not at the moment. First, I believe, is acceptance. For local residents to become comfortable with seeing wind turbines and ease them out of their NIMBY mindset. For that purpose, smaller turbines the size of the current one are more likely to be accepted. Seeing a number of them is the next step in acceptance. Moreover, for all I know a 2MW, 60% taller turbine might detract visually or have more of an impact on the Channel. So I’d be happy with just seeing a few more turbines this size.

    • admin says:

      Hi MHC, thanks for the comment. sorry for the lag in response. its a huge, multi-faceted, interconnected, complex, one-solution-leads-to-the-next-problem subject.
      It would be great if we could slowly “acclimatize” NIMBY people.
      Do we have that kind of time?
      Knowing we’ll never get 100% agreement, how far should we go to accomodate people who may never be in favor of it?

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