What? Offshore platforms and mostly overland flightways. I don't get it.
Posted on 05/11/2006 1:22:17 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
AUSTIN, Texas - The nation's largest offshore wind farm will be built off the Padre Island seashore, a critical migratory bird flyway, Texas officials announced Thursday.
Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson lauded what he said would be an 40,000-acre span of turbines about 400 feet tall able to generate energy to power 125,000 homes.
"The wind rush is on," Patterson said. "We want to be number one. We want to attract the businesses that build the turbines, that build the blades. ... We want to be the leader in the United States, if not the world."
Superior Renewable Energy Inc., based in Houston, would build the farm and pay the estimated $1 billion to $2 billion construction costs.
But some environmentalists say the promise of clean energy may not be worth the deaths of countless birds that migrate through the area each year on their way to and from winter grounds in Mexico and Central America.
"You probably couldn't pick a worse location, unless you're trying to settle the issue as to how damaging they are to migratory birds," said Walter Kittelberger, chairman of the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation. Laguna Madre is the strip of water between the mainland and Padre Island.
The offshore wind farm is the second announced in less than a year for the Texas Coast, joining 50 wind turbines planned off Galveston.
It would have up to 500 turbines looming off Texas ranch land and spinning up to 500 megawatts of electricity.
The nation's largest currently operating wind farm is on the Stateline Wind Energy Center on the Oregon-Washington border, which produces about 300 megawatts of electricity. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the U.S. produces 9,149 megawatts of wind power, enough to power 2.3 million homes annually. President Bush has said wind energy could produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
Wind farm plans have also sparked disputes, including a bitter fight over a proposed 130-turbine wind farm off Cape Cod, Mass., where the residents fear the turbines will be unsightly.
In Texas, the state controls waters up to 10.3 miles off the coast and can make quick deals with developers, Patterson said. He said this project would be located off a remote, unpopulated part of Padre Island National Seashore.
"Those who are concerned about view sheds shouldn't have a problem," he said. "There's nobody there to look at it."
haha... I thought this was "every thread is an illegal immigration thread week" :-)
That statement is preposterous and typical of "environmentalists"
At ground level you could walk through the blades. a bird would have to be blind to fly into them.
I didn't know Ted Kennedy and Bill Koch have winter mansions in Texas.
If he can get this done, he is once again a hero!
We need him in the Governor's office... Perry is an empty suit...
A private developer is willing to pay for it and Texas, which has rights to the property, wants it. Any bird deaths are absolutely irrelevant and anyone who is concerned about birds possibly dying to the point of hindering progress is an intellectual child.
"I wonder what the output will be when a hurricane blows through."
Look at it this way. Production will peg at max just when we need the extra electricity for ac.
Oh really? Maybe you ought to do a little more research.
Pssst... The blades of a fast turning turbine are practically invisible and remember, we're dealing with bird brains.
Yes, really.
They're not "fixed highways," whatever you want to call them. The birds will fly around.
Indeed, there are hundreds of these windmills in Big Spring, Texas. Heard the same B.S. about killing migratory birds and invisible blades.
Have yet to see mass killoffs of the birds going South.
I have seen birds fly over, under, and around them, though.
He may have been a big supporter of it, but the legislator most responsible for passage was the lady who wrote the bill (after having lost both of her parents to the deranged gunman that shot all those patrons at the Luby's cafeteria in Killeen)
From The Chicago Criterian by Chris Naud:
The Luby's Cafeteria shooting is an especially sobering case of "what might have been". One woman in the Luby's lost her father when he tried to rush the gunman, and her mother when she ran to her husband's side. This woman was an expert marksman (she had gone shooting that morning) and had been illegally carrying a handgun several months prior. She almost carried her gun into the restaurant on this occasion, but as she had been told that it was illegal, remembered and left it in her truck, which she could see through the broken plate-glass window of the restaurant through the entire ordeal.Though Naud's article doesn't identify her, this woman was Suzanna Gratia Hupp, who became determined to change the law in Texas, won a seat in the Texas House, and wrote the legislation that legalized concealed carry in Texas.
Suzanna Gratia Hupp remembers reaching for a butter knife as a madman shot her parents dead at a packed cafeteria one cold October day in 1991.Not to take anything away from Patterson, but this lady is a the real Texas hero when it comes to Concealed Carry."I was looking for a weapon, any weapon, because my handgun was 100 feet away, outside in my car. I made an incredibly stupid decision to follow the law, and that cost my family's lives," she says as she reflects on the massacre that ended with 24 people dead inside the Luby's Cafeteria at Killeen, a military town in Central Texas.
The personal tragedy launched her one-woman crusade to permit licensed owners to carry concealed weapons.
In fact, your link calls them a "theoretical construct":
The terms "migration route" and "flyway" are to some extent theoretical concepts, while the latter has, in addition, come to have an administrative meaning. Migration routes may be defined as the lanes of individual travel from any particular breeding ground to the winter quarters of the birds that use them. Flyways, on the other hand, may well be conceived as those broader areas in which related migration routes are associated or blended in a definite geographic region. They are wide arterial highways to which the routes are tributary.
I believe the "flyway" in question (the Mississipi Flyway) stretches from New Mexico to the Mississipi River or so.
Indeed, there are a total of 4 flyways in the united states, each roughly corresponding to a TIME ZONE.
"Flyway" does not equal "Highway" in other words. "Migratory route" (the narrower term) doesn't, either.
If this was smack in the middle of a well-defined migratory route, there might be an issue.
You're missing the point. I'm not implying the flyways are "fixed highways"... duh! That particular flyway is a huge migration zone and regardless of what you've witnessed in Big Spring, it's a dumb idea.
Like I said earlier. Allowing offshore drilling again would answer most of our energy problems. The enviro wackos don't like either idea, but allowing offshore drilling miles from shorelines isn't near as much of an eyesore as hundreds of turbines being erected right off the land.
"That particular flyway is a huge migration zone and regardless of what you've witnessed in Big Spring, it's a dumb idea."
No, it would be a bad idea if was a MIGRATION ROUTE (a relatively narrow band of 20-30 miles). A FLYWAY, in contrast, is hundreds of miles wide. There is no ROUTE nearby.
Any duck hunter could tell you this.
"Allowing offshore drilling again would answer most of our energy problems."
While I agree we need more drilling, that's not a issue in Texas. Unlike Florida, we drill.
That said, we don't generate (much) electricty with oil, so no that will not help our energy problems.
In Texas (which has its own electrical grid known as ERCOT), there is an ELECTRICTY shortage in the Houston-to-Dallas corridor. (Indeed, they had rolling blackouts in Houston a few weeks ago.) More juice has to be generated locally.
That just tells us that the birds are smarter and more intelligent than the idiots who think this will really help the energy problem.
Don't forget that the environmentalists vetoed the plan to put storm surge doors to protect New Orleans because some critter might be inconvenienced.
...and Texas has it's own power grid too...;o) Perhaps we could sell any excess to Nantucket Sound at confiscatory rates.
Let's show them what price gouging really is or if you prefer call it the free market.
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