Just off Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard would be perfect.
Disadvantages of offshore wind:
The biggest disadvantage of an offshore wind farm is the cost. Offshore wind farms can be expensive to build and maintain and because of their hard to reach locations, they are susceptible to damage from very high-speed winds during storms or hurricanes which is expensive to repair.
The effect of offshore wind farms on marine life and birds are not yet fully understood.
Offshore wind farms that are built closer to coastlines (generally within 26 miles) can be unpopular with residents as it can affect property values and tourism.
Californios and everyone else should be furious about the millions of birds these stupid things kill.
Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who died a few years ago, was a big supporter of wind power until he realized how many millions of birds they killed. California environmentalist will have hissy fits to the max when birds start washing up onshore. I’d be furious too.
Met Pickens once when he was running for Repub nomination for prez, liked him. Personable as all get out and nobody’s fool.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. home uses 867 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per month. The mean turbine capacity in the U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) is 1.67 megawatts (MW). At a 33% capacity factor, that average turbine would generate over 402,000 kWh per month - enough for over 460 average U.S. homes. To put it another way, the average wind turbine generates enough energy in 94 minutes to power an average U.S. home for one month..
If it requires 402k a month to operate 460 average homes, and here are over 128.45 million homes in the US in 2020, then that would mean they would need over 278K of the machines to handled the existing needs for just homes not including businesses.
Another problem is that turbulence the turbines creates so they must be separated.. Each wind turbine creates turbulence in the area behind and around it, so the turbines need to be spaced well apart from each other. The distances in this case are expressed in rotor diameters. The general rule-of-thumb for wind farm spacing is that turbines are about 7 rotor diameters away from each other. So an 80-meter (262-foot) rotor would need to be 560 meters — more than a third of a mile — from adjacent turbines. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have proposed that twice as much spacing would increase overall efficiency. So at nine a square mile, it would take almost 31K square miles to handle enough for the homes alone in the US not including the overlap needs of the outside row. 31K miles is just under 20M acres, again without the overlap of the outside of the placement. To give you an idea that’s roughly the size of South Carolina.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm8_037652.htm
And he final note is who and how are they going to service these machines? Each turbine requires service under normal conditions 2 to 3 times a year. That doesn’t include break downs. The most common reason that turbines stop spinning is because the wind is not blowing fast enough. Most wind turbines need a sustained wind speed of 9 MPH or higher to operate. Additionally, The useful life of these wind turbines is supposed to be 20 years. However, the turbines have been plagued by numerous problems and this 20-year life is rather a utopia than anything else. Gearboxes and bearings in wind turbines, more than those in any other application, tend to fail prematurely. In fact, at some wind projects, up to half of all bearings inside the gearboxes fail within a few years. There are several reasons for this, including the poor understanding of gear functioning during storms and gusty winds, relative immaturity of the technology and industry, the rapid evolution of turbines to extra-large sizes, poor understanding of turbine loads, and an emerging (and largely unexplained) failure mode in turbine bearings called axial cracking.
And since this is just the machines themselves, I did not involve the cost of their installation and operation. Safe to say this is not a safe to say solution. And they want to put them in the ocean making it even more difficult and expensive to service and keep operating.
This is Biden’s Solyndra. Solyndra collapsed spectacularly in August 2011 after Obama tried to create financing to save it and reportedly delivered half a billion in taxpayer money to it. Just another socialist take over.
Wy69.