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Federal judge lifts administration halt of offshore wind farm in New England

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224 points zekrioca | 2 comments | 22 Sep 25 22:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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potato3732842 ◴[23 Sep 25 00:53 UTC] No.45341596[source]▶
Don't get too exited. This is a fight that's been happening for over 20yr now. Whoever is throwing the political football of any given wind project or who is receiving it in the end zone is just a name. They'll be gone in a few years. The institution of fighting over off shore wind farms in the Boston to NYC area was there before them and will be there after them.

Regardless of the pretext of any given action the the way things generally are is that the people who have a view they want to protect, the tourism industry and the hippie/nature/biology types are on the no-wind side and the climate types, green energy people, domestic energy and big business types are on the other. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes another side wins. But nobody ever gets a win streak long enough to bring anything to fruition.

The area is well suited to wind power but the area but it's also chock full of rich people and moneyed interests that can afford to fight it, likely to the long term detriment of the region, but like locusts they will be gone and cashed out by then so they don't care. That's probably when these things will finally get built.

I'd love to see some wind turbines go up but I'll believe it when I see it. And even then, I bet they'll find some way to make everyone's bill go up instead of down because of it.

Sincerely and with the utmost disrespect,

A cape wind proponent.

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AnthonyMouse ◴[23 Sep 25 02:45 UTC] No.45342256[source]▶
I have a pet theory that the secret to getting energy projects online is faster deployment methods. Make all the turbines/reactors/whatever in a factory so that all you have to do on-site is plop them out and plug them in.

MONDAY: The lower court has denied the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

MONDAY NIGHT: Thousands of wind turbines are hurled off the back of a container ship with a catapult and automatically drop anchor and start generating power.

TUESDAY: The appellate court has reinstated the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

..but they're already all installed.

replies(1): >>45342569 #
throwaway173738 ◴[23 Sep 25 03:34 UTC] No.45342569[source]▶
Energy projects are just a variation of a real estate project. As you might know, a lot of the difficulty in mass producing buildings isn’t making the parts but preparing the site to receive the parts. There’s probably 5 or 10 companies in your vicinity that can ship you prefabricated walls and floors for a house. But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on. The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm. Studying the site and planning the build are unique to each building and limit how fast you can go anyway.
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1. potato3732842 ◴[23 Sep 25 10:04 UTC] No.45344971[source]▶
>But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on.

>The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm.

No, you don't. That's purely a figment of how successful the civil engineering lobby was at regulatory-capturing their way into the process.

The people who build buildings and windmills know what kind of foundations they need. If you have even a ballpark estimate of your site conditions they will happily tell you approximately what you'll need to do.

An extra inch of concrete here or there or a foot less of pile spacing or an extra few passed with the dozer costs basically nothing. The only reason you see people designing things to the bare minimum is that when you're being forced to pay a engineer to punch in numbers either way it makes sense to take advantage of that and make them tell you what the bare minimum is so you can at least save a bit on actual construction costs.

You think you hate crony capitalism or the micromanaging nanny state or whatever you want to call it now. Just wait until you engage in any kind of project that doesn't benefit from all the exemptions that residential does.

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2. AnthonyMouse ◴[23 Sep 25 10:55 UTC] No.45345299[source]▶
And this is why partisanship is such an own-goal. Partisan Democrats want wind turbines instead of coal, but to get them they'd have to admit that the thing standing in their way is these excessive rules impeding the construction of anything, which is contrary to the precept that regulations are good and getting rid of regulations is bad.

Whereas if you put aside the dogma you might notice that giving the other team what they want in this case and getting rid of some regulations would actually be good and allow you to do the thing you want to do.