Vineyard Wind deserves support

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To the Editor:

I am writing with regard to the upcoming MVC hearing on March 21 concerning the Vineyard Wind undersea cable installation off the coast of Edgartown.

I am completely supportive of the Vineyard Wind project, for reasons that I outline below.

It is vital to the future of Martha’s Vineyard that we respond to the need to mitigate the impacts and extent of global climate change. The year 2018 brought new and disturbing predictions regarding global warming. First, new analyses show that a 1.5oC warming is very likely to be as damaging as we thought a 2oC warming would have been only a few years ago. Second, refined models indicate that in order to limit warming to 1.5oC, we must cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030, despite the fact that forecasts are for an increase in emissions in 2019. Global warming has become a near-term crisis, not a far-future concern.

Martha’s Vineyard cannot solve this global problem by itself. However, we can and should contribute to achieving the climate goals of Massachusetts by serving as one of the host communities of the Vineyard Wind project and thereby impacting a much larger region.

As an engineer who has contributed to undersea cable projects, and as a university professor teaching energy systems courses, I have been impressed with both the technical approaches that Vineyard Wind has taken and the extensive efforts that the developers have taken to minimize the impacts of the project on our local environment and contribute to our Island community.

We cannot afford to wait. Offshore wind is a proven technology, and is a key element of the transformed energy ecosystem that we require.

 

Dr. Robert Hannemann
Chilmark

24 COMMENTS

  1. I’m urging everyone to oppose offshore wind. I don’t believe global warming is a man made problem that needs radical taxes and regulations that will cost us all billions of dollars. The planet is a plane as in a Flat Plane. We’re not spinning at 1000 mph. I have never seen the curve of the earth in my whole life. Maps printed before the 1800’s show a Flat Earth.
    Jets fly in straight lines and don’t adjust for the curve of the earth. Ask a Pilot if they have seen the curve of the earth and many have not.
    The point is there has been and still is a whole lot of dishonesty coming from NASA and settled science, why should we buy into the notion that we need to build 100’s of offshore windmills to provide electricity ? History proves that we got electricity from the AIR by way of static electricity and magnetism, so why don’t we just go back to the old technologies of the past and use what’s free to get our energy ? Just because our history has been stolen from us doesn’t mean our future has to be as well. Ask yourself if you have ever seen the curve of the earth by standing on the waters edge, from a mountaintop or while taking a flight at 30,000 feet. You maybe surprised at what you see or don’t see.

      • I haven’t heard the static electricity method mentioned in years. Research on the project came to an untimely conclusion when the designer was caught outside during an electrical storm.

      • vanadium–I would have thought v life’s comment was a joke a few years ago, but since the trump dumb down, I am not so sure.. there are a lot of people who actually believe alternative facts.

    • vineyardlife– lucky you, I have perfected the ‘electricity out of the air app” and am EXCLUSIVELY offering it to you for a once in a lifetime opportunity– all you have to do is send me thousands of dollars to my Nigerian address which I will give you after you give me your birth date , social security number and all credit card and bank account numbers.. Then, you will be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams…

  2. Fisheries are more important than wind here. Keating doesn’t get that either.
    If we were concerned about climate etc we would build a salt nuke plant in the state forest.
    Instead we’re gonna suspend some lube oil and drive steel into major fisheries. Sounds really climate and environmental conscious.

    • Let’s say the outrigger on a trawler is 25 feet long. Two outriggers so double that, a trawler might require 50 feet to navigate safely. Heck, let’s round up to 300 feet, length of a football field.

      The turbine towers are planned to be 2 miles apart. Two times 5280 feet, divided by 300. That’s 35 trawlers can run parallel. Might be a tight fit.

    • whale oil– not to be totally disrespectful, but wasn’t whale oil supposed to sustain us forever?
      And– I am trying to be respectful of you opinion, but with all due respect, building a nuclear power plant in the state forest is not only a really really dumb idea, it is economically unfeasible, dangerous, and legally prohibited on every level of every government agency that would have any level of oversight.
      Please post reasonable comments here–

  3. Kidding aside, Greeks knew the Earth was round 240 BC. Eratosthenes observed a tower in Alexandria always cast a shadow on the Summer Solstice but that sunlight always reached the bottom of a well in Syrene same day. The cities are about 800 km apart, calculating the circumference of the Earth was simple math.

    I told my Dad about the plan for turbine towers 14 miles off shore. Dad was in the Merchant Marine for the six years after WW2 so he knew what was coming and laughed. Without paper, he said 10 miles distance would be more that enough for the towers to not be visible from shore.

  4. I am for the wind farm!!! Electricity is the future of energy and motive power. Let’s generate it as cleanly as possible.

  5. ”a near term crisis” wow. Well if its near term lets just stop all fossil fuels, stop cows from farting, freeze in our homes in winter and elect AOC as our President who will save the planet. and Vineyardlife and your sarcasm, I have seen the curvature of the earth from 60000 ft on a Concorde in 1988.

    • Is your position all or nothing? Have you considered that as current methods of extracting fossil fuel run their course, replacement methods likely will be more expensive? Alternate energy sources reduce dependence on one source so the cost of trans-Atlantic flights and driving the car into town remain affordable.

    • Andrew– Record heat waves , record hurricanes, record droughts, record wildfires,and yes, even record low temperatures occurring with more frequency and intensity around the world do constitute a “near term crisis” Certainly more of a crisis than a few thousand tired and hungry barefoot kids fleeing deplorable conditions in their home countries seeking legal asylum in the greatest country on earth.
      Sooner or later, the cow farts will hit the fan. I hope AOC is our president when it does, or we actually may be broiled alive in our homes.

      • When Congressze Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the Green New Deal earlier this year, she said we had only 12 years to save the planet. In saying this, she contradicted the “scientific consensus.” The prior year, the U.N. had determined that we only had 12 years to go. So, this year, we only have 11 years. It’s simple math. 12 – 1 = 11. Eleven years as of now is actually a generous estimate of the end of the world. In 2017, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis said we only had 10 years remaining to save the planet. Since that was two years ago, we now only have eight years remaining. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tracks the frequency of floods and droughts. According to NOAA there has been no upward trend in extreme precipitation events (floods plus droughts) during the 20th century. Indeed, if there is any trend at all, it is a trend of less frequent floods and droughts. Not a single year in the past decade cracked NOAA’s Top 15 list for extreme precipitation events, and each of the top six years occurred prior to 1985.Today’s media can certainly bring any drought, flood, or other noteworthy weather event directly into our homes, but that doesn’t mean that more such events are occurring lately or that global warming is to blame.
        At the first Earth Day, waa-ay back in 1970, Paul Erlich famously said that four billion humans would perish in a great “die-off” between 1980 and 1989. Next year will be the Golden (50th) Anniversary of that forecast. Will we get “a second warning” of imminent disaster from the environmentalists?

        • We had a full polar ice cap to the north in 1970. Enough has melted to where much of the peripheral is navigable. You don’t consider that 5.4 million square miles of changed planet surface might effect weather?

        • Andrew– there are people who predict all sorts of things– Did Obama take away all our guns? How do like living under Sharia law? Oh, that didn’t happen either– And trump sure is doing a great job of balancing the budget with that tax cut. I would think 11 years is about right– but not the “end” of the world– just the point where it gets unstoppable. For sure , we still have at least 7 years left, since the rapture has not occurred yet. And how many times have christians predicted the end of the world ? And they weren’t even your usual nut cases– they were ministers. Got the news directly from god herself.
          As far as flooding events, could you please cite which bubble gum wrapper you got your info that flooding events are decreasing ? NOAA.gov has the words “historic widespread flooding” in it’s first line this morning.
          And this wasn’t hard to find..
          https://www.aerisweather.com/blog/2018/07/24/flooding-frequency-increasing/
          and yes the media would have you think the “caravans” are full of hardened criminals intent on murdering us all in our sleep.

          • Dondondon those predictions were rendered certain. Al Gore said ten years was the tipping point back in 2006. Prophecy is different than prediction and I am glad you compare some Dems to eschatological nut cases. My citation was the very NOAA that you posted. Keep riding your bike and I will drive my luxury SUV.

          • @Andrew – Don’t mean to pick on you but something happened recently to change the forecast. With Trump eliminating EPA standards, more pollutants are getting into the air and accelerating climate problems.

  6. IF YOU’VE NOT CHECKED this site out, please do. It is a reality check .. it clearly shows that no matter how much wind you throw at it the industrial wind turbine is not a solution but further exacerbates the problem..see what Denmark, Netherlands, Germany use for energy resources ..it is not wind energy that keeps them going .. coal, gas, biomass .. with all their so-called “renewables”, they are not clean and green .. so, why do we want to invest in wind turbines when, as in the case of Denmark, they have, according to the Danish people, 100% backup called Varmekraftværk which is operated 24/7/365 and runs on coal, gas, wood pellets .. not very clean and very expensive for the Danish people who pay for wind and pay for reliables. Monitor this site, you may be surprised .. and question why the U.S. needs this burden .. and then who is supporting it and then why and then who benefits?? ……. electricityMap – Official Site
    http://www.electricitymap.org

    • Excellent site for those supporting wind turbines and other sources of energy production.

      And answering the questions: the people pay for tax credits for fossil fuel exploration and extraction; Big Oil benefits by greater profits because we’ve handed them a monopoly on energy.

    • Thank you for sharing the link to the map. After looking at what “Denmark, Netherlands, Germany use for energy resources,” move the cursor and context click Great Britain, Ireland, and Sweden. Balances the equation, in part. The source of the map in the link is the IPCC 2014. That’s stated on the map website. The full citation is IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland. Looking at the Synthesis Report of the IPCC, one finds: Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmo-spheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic driv-ers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. I am not arguing here for or against windmills. As a two-semester survivor of organic chemistry (the study of carbon) my ears perk up when I hear about carbon.

    • Marie J, please get the facts straight. It’s now the second time I see you post a misrepresentation of facts about Denmark and wind energy. I even checked the link you included and the Danish/French team behind the site you linked to actually advocate for wind and solar energy. What you write about Denmark is not based in facts, your sources are open source, which means that they are not fact-checked or even properly referenced. The site has a full disclaimer that makes this clear. I was born and raised in Denmark. Lived there 28 years, still have family there, and visit regularly. Wind energy has challenges (please see my other response) but is a far better option than fossil fuels. As I wrote in my last response to your inaccurate post on another article, let’s get our facts straight and have a candid discussed based on real evidence. Thank you!

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