When power lines get damaged in a storm, it may take up to a couple of weeks to get fixed (depending on how many were damaged; usually it's done within hours or a day or so). Should a hurricane tip over a $150 million, 260 ft tall wind generator, on the other hand...Blowing Out to SeaA Yarmouth, Mass., company plans to build America's first offshore wind farm by the end of 2005. Cape Wind Associates has slated construction of a 420-megawatt wind project on a shallow sandbar known as Horseshoe Shoal, located five miles south of Cape Cod between the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. It would be the world's second largest, after Ireland's recently proposed 520-megawatt farm... Project developers claim that at peak operation the farm will satisfy almost all the electricity needs of Cape residents -- a critical selling point in a region that suffers increasingly from air inversions and smog... If successful, offshore wind farms could solve many problems encountered with land-based wind technology in densely populated regions. Ocean winds are stronger and steadier. Land acquisition is unnecessary. And, perhaps most important, the huge turbines are out of sight and earshot of most people. Initially fishermen worried about their catch volume decreasing, but several European studies suggest that the heavily anchored turbines act like shipwrecks and in fact improve fish numbers... Cape Wind, having already invested several million dollars in planning studies, expects to spend a total of $600 million.
by Wendy Williams
March 2002
Scientific American
A single windmill is more like $3.5 million not $150 million.