Whitcomb: Offshore Energy; Call in the State Police; Head an Hour East
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Offshore Energy; Call in the State Police; Head an Hour East
till our cries touched invisible fruit,
higher than we could reach.’’
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-- From “A Season’s Edge,’’ by the poet T. Alan Broughton (1936-2013), who taught writing at the University of Vermont.
“Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.’’
-- David Riesman (1909-2002), sociologist and author best known for The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950)
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Ah, March -- cold, warm, cold, warm, and often windy. And then come those still, mild afternoons with their waves of soothing melancholy as the runners and bicyclists go by.
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The wind farm would include 62 giant Boston-based General Electric turbines in the project’s first, 400-megawatt phase. The full project, at 800 megawatts, would be enough to provide the electricity for a total of 400,000 residential and business customers in Massachusetts. The turbines would be spaced more than a mile apart.
This project would mean much more local, and thus more secure, clean energy for New England, boosting its economy and health indices. There would be considerable economic development associated with building and maintaining this $2.8 billion project with, of course, southeastern New England reaping a lot of those benefits. Several thousand well-paying jobs, of varying periods, would be created.
Some have called offshore New England “the Saudi Arabia of wind.’’
Vineyard Wind has tried to address the issues raised by fishermen by putting more distance between the turbines than earlier proposed and deciding to use the GE turbines instead of the originally planned Vestas ones. The more powerful GE turbines mean that fewer would be needed to meet generation goals.
Fishing and big offshore wind farms seem to co-exist well in Europe, though there are bound to be disruptions, especially during construction. Vineyard Wind will attract fish once that’s over: The below-water parts of turbine towers act, as do reefs and shipwrecks, as habitats for the creatures.
Then there’s the bird issue. Some birds crash into turbine blades, as they do into buildings, cars, power-line towers and so forth. (Ban skyscrapers?) But the newer, bigger turbines, such as GE’s, are more widely spaced and spin more slowly than earlier ones, making them less perilous to birds and bats. And it seems that such measures as painting one of a turbine’s blades black help steer birds away, as does broadcasting certain sounds and using certain lights. The industry is still learning how to minimize impacts on wildlife.
Of course, burning fossil fuels pose far wider risks to birds and other wildlife via global warming, ocean acidification, pollution, oil spills, etc., than do wind turbines.
Problems will arise but, all in all, Vineyard Wind and other such projects would be a boon for our region.
Are we ready for such a major new local industry? Vineyard Wind would be the first such big wind farm off southern New England. But others will probably follow. Officials of another mega-project, Mayflower Wind, for example, for south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, hope to start generating electricity in 2025. (The up-and-running Block Island Wind Farm is tiny, with only five turbines, producing a total of 30 megawatts.)
For the foreseeable future, wind and solar power will remain the major non-fossil-fuel energy sources. But hydrogen in fuel cells could become a big deal, too.
A bit of irony: New Bedford would play a major role in the construction and maintenance of Vineyard Wind and other offshore wind projects. For decades in the 19th Century, the city was also an energy center, as the biggest port for bringing in whale oil, which was used for lighting. Getting it caused horrific losses of these marine mammals.
Some people would hate the look of these big wind farms; others would see them as (eerily?) beautiful. In any case, we’ll get used to them.
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The reaction of residents of islands off the New England coast, from big ones, such as Nantucket, to tiny Matinicus, off Maine, to the pandemic has, in a way, been paradoxical. These folks (more than a few of whom tend to be recluses) sometimes feel safer because they are separated by water from the worst COVID case densities, on the mainland, while fearful that a few cases will make their way onto their islands and explode.
Of course, New England’s islands are a big lure in the summer. I wonder how the vaccination surge will affect how many tourists and vacation-home residents visit them this summer as they play travel catchup.
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Will researchers’ study of COVID-19, and their inventing vaccines and treatments for it, lead to vaccines and treatments for other illnesses, even as we look to prepare for the next pandemic?
Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was developed in Germany and Johnson & Johnson’s in Belgium. A cheer for globalization….
It seems that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza’s administration is unwilling or unable to strictly enforce laws against the use of ATV vehicles and dirt bikes on city streets, despite the very serious dangers and quality-of-life issues such vehicles pose, especially given the arrogant, selfish and menacing irresponsibility of some of their riders. Indeed, the mayor has expressed an interest in legalizing their use on city streets, for those who would receive licenses and insurance for such use, although last week he back-tracked on that.
So, as a recent GoLocalProv article suggested, perhaps Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee should send in the State Police to arrest these riders. ATV’s and dirt bikes don’t belong on city streets.
To read the editorial, please hit this link:
Too Far East
As always happens when, as today, we change our clocks to go into or out of Eastern Daylight Savings Time, some New Englanders keep pushing to make DST year-round to lengthen light late in the day in the winter. Or, with the same effect, we could try to join the Canadian Maritimes and go into Atlantic Standard Time, given how far east New England extends from the bulk of the Eastern Time Zone.
Consider that Boston’s earliest nightfall of the year – 4:11 p.m. on Dec. 8 -- is only 27 minutes later than in Anchorage, Alaska, which is much further north than New England!
Ditching EST would provide a psychological (making winters seem less dreary) and economic lift for the region. (Among other things, it would boost retailers’ business.) Of course, adjustments would be needed, such as opening schools later in the morning so that students wouldn’t have to go to school in the dark.
Anyway, enjoy the early-evening light until November.
The New England Council has asked the region’s congressional delegations to back legislation to double the maximum grant in the Pell Grant college-scholarship program. New England, as a college and university center, is more socio-economically dependent on its college-and-university sector than most of the country and its institutions generally pricier. The maximum Pell Grant is $6,495 per student for the 2021-22 award year (July 1, 2021-June 30, 2022).
But this well-intentioned advocacy might end up coming under the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the past, higher-education institutions have tended to use such increases to raise their price floor, in a variant of C. Northcote Parkinson’s adage that “expenditure rises to meet income.’’ (Another nice Parkinson’s observation: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”)
Why Now?
Why have women been coming forward only in the last few weeks to accuse New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment? My guess is that they feel safer in doing so because the tough-guy governor has been politically weakened by the controversy/scandal over the holding back of data about nursing-home deaths in the pandemic.
The celebrity narcissism of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has been a great show. All hail the Therapeutic Society!
Wrote Well About Everything
A.A. Gill (1954-2016), the Scottish-born British essayist and critic/reviewer, was almost always interesting, and sometimes rude and outrageous. He wrote about all sorts of things – porn, TV, history, dyslexia, war, sports, etc., etc. But his food/restaurant and travel writing were, to me, his best stuff. Read the posthumous collection The Best of A.A. Gill, which includes a moving -- and remarkably useful to many patients -- essay on his own fatal cancer. He had a style like no other.
To wit:
“Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawnmowers; vampires and tanning salons, mittens and Braille.’’
“As well as being a vegetative Eden, Uganda is a medical theme park that can send the pulse racing and the temperature rising.’’