Anything that close to shore is going to cause, and in this case has already caused, a lot of NIMBY backlash. I can't say I really blame them for it either. We're going to have to find locations suitably far offshore to put these things, as the article suggests.
The standards that NIMBYers advocate in this context, e.g. "if it's within X miles I might be able to see it" would be laughable in any other. Not to mention that wind generators are among the most beautiful useful things ever built, so it's odd to claim that seeing them is some sort of hardship. If windswept shorelines weren't occupied by old-money assholes, these facilities would already be common in USA.
I seem to remember the UK also had some fishermen protests until the fishermen found out fishing was better among the wind farms. Old article, I wish I could find now.
[edit] also, isn't 7 miles offshore pretty much close to out of site?
Pretty much, if the observer is standing down on the beach. If he is standing on high cliffs he might be able to see them if he really tries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon
It's easy to point the finger and call people assholes when its not your home value that is being impacted by the project. For better or worse, most people don't move to places like cape cod so they can stare at wind turbines all day. Placing them there will obviously negatively impact home prices where they are dominant on the horizon.
That's not to say that it's a bad idea to put them there, and the overall public good may make it worth it, but to brush off the concerns of the actual residents (who I would guess is not you) as stupid is not very productive.
They're not assholes because they live/vacation on the shore, they're assholes because they've arranged for a different set of rules to apply to them. Offshore petroleum extraction equipment has been a common sight offshore in other regions of USA for decades. That equipment is much uglier, and has more disturbing associated traffic, than wind generators. I don't own any shoreline property, but if I claimed some right to regulate what can be done in sight of the property I do own, the only result would be well-deserved derision.
I don't think anyone in that situation is claiming a right(which would indeed be preposterous), just an interest in using their political power to deny, degrade, and disrupt the process of getting these sorts of projects approved if they are within sight of shore. They are perfectly within their rights to do that, and it is and will have a strong effect on the ability of these projects to get both funds and regulatory approval, which is why I suggested that they should be looking at sights not visible from land, of which there are plenty suitable locations.
That obviously won't work, since laws are subject to the whims of elected officials and constituents that can change them through NIMBY lobbying, and they need to get past those NIMBYs in the first place. See: SF Bay Area development restrictions.
Their home prices aren't impacted by this. Their asset is already rare enough that it is insulated from minor issues like this. I mean, who is going to come out to an area like this and not bother buying because they see a turbine? No one. If only one home was impacted, I could see that home suffering...but there is no choice here. You will either see turbines or you find a house fifty miles away. The homes fifty miles away will have more disadvantages than advantages.
Santa Barbara has some of the most expensive coastal real estate in the US and they have line-of-site of numerous oil platforms. Santa Cruz beachfront homes have tripled in value since I moved to the Bay Area in 1994 even though they have line-of-site to a PGE plant with huge smokestacks. etc etc
Why the assumption that a view with wind turbines would /negatively/ impact a property's value? If there are enough people who like wind turbines, the property value will stay put and perhaps increase.
Indeed. Until very recently, people looking along the beautiful coast from Edinburgh could see a coal fired power station on the beach. And still a few people managed to complain about turbines on distant ridgelines.
Even more beautifully, one of the proposed uses of the site of the demolished power station is as a launching site for offshore wind turbine construction.
I like seeing the turbines off the Essex coast in the UK. They look quite small and close to the shore, until a boat sails in front of them and you can see their true size.
It's a weird feeling the way it plays with your perception of scale, like forced perspective in reverse.
You didn't think they would catch on in the ocean or on land? I drove through rural Minnesota and South Dakota on a road trip last week and was amazed at how many turbines are out there these days. Xcel energy in Minnesota offers a program for customers to get their energy from wind sources (obviously it still comes from the grid but I assume they offset any coal generation). We've had it for a few years and the average cost has been ~ $6/month. $6/month to support the local economy and the development of renewable energy production is a great deal considering the environmental and social costs of coal generation. Frankly I wish they would make it opt out rather than opt in.
I also caught the start of an interview yesterday about how the state of the national grid is a major limitation in our ability to consume these forms of energy (http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/490932307/aging-and-unstable-t...). Hopefully our elected official will start working on that problem soon rather than bickering about bathrooms and building walls...
I'm not sure how accurate the data is but the USGS have a GIS map of turbine locations - http://eerscmap.usgs.gov/windfarm/. This website (http://www.awea.org/resources/statefactsheets.aspx?itemnumbe...) also states that "Every state in the United States has either an operational wind energy project, a wind-related manufacturing facility, or both. Approximately 1,000 utility scale wind projects – which represent 74,512 megawatts (MW) and over 48,800 wind turbines – are installed across 40 U.S. states plus Puerto Rico and Guam. There are also more than 500 wind manufacturing facilities spread across 43 states."
It already caught on in EU, just not in USA yet. We just need to get it built for Americans to see it is not a bad thing and who "cares" about seeing it in your vision (ref to Cape Wind).
Also, land windmills is already taking off slowly as mentioned in the article:
> If that sounds ambitious, consider that the country has installed some 50,000 wind turbines on land over the past two decades. They now supply roughly 5 percent of the nation’s electric power, a figure that reaches double digits in particularly windy states like Kansas and Iowa.
> The technology has been proved in Europe, where offshore wind farms as large as 300 turbines are being developed, with each turbine costing up to $30 million to build, install and connect to the power grid.
Please don't be so pedantic. It's quite clear what GP was talking about and strongly likely that they're also aware that nothing is being milled by the structures. Jumping in with an unnecessary correction to terminology doesn't add anything to the conversation.
I thought the consensus at this point was that "windmill" basically meant "wind turbine", at least colloquially, in the same way that a "battery" really should be called a "cell".
I'd got the impression that "windmill" was the deliberately wrong use of terminology by people opposed to wind power to trivialise or ridicule it. But that may just be me reading the Telegraph.
>> 75% of this planet is difficult/impossible to live on; why not use it for a clean form of energy?
Because of that 75 74.999999 of it is too deep to be practical. The cause of so much conflict is the need for these turbines to stand in the relatively shallow water, often within sight of expensive ocean-viewing residential properties. If we could place them just anywhere, they'd be just over the horizon from everywhere.
The real issue isn't lack of viable location but the legions of old people for whom a windmill in their view is an ugly reminder that times change. In europe they are part of the landscape. Where I am (BC Canada) they are fought against tooth and nail by retired landowners who blame them for everything from night terrors to cancer. Vancouver has _one_ visible turbine and even that rarely actually turns. It's more disney ride than power generator.
I had figured there were technical limitations and my question wasn't meant as "why don't they get off their lazy asses and do it" but more of a "I think it'd be really cool if we figured out how to put them all over the ocean", though I realize now how my wording could be confusing.
I would so love it for the US to adopt them more, but we have reality-star presidential candidates that are telling us their an eyesore with huge applause.
There are floating wind farms. The world's largest (according to [0]) is due to be built off the north east coast of Scotland next year.
Incidentally, this is not far from the site of another offshore wind farm which a certain Donald Trump waged a lengthy legal battle to try to prevent, because he thought it would spoil the view from his golf course[1].
Bear in mind that you can already see large numbers of offshore oil rigs off the coast of parts of north east Scotland.
Which brings up the great physics question: Does a floating turbine need to be anchored, or can it harvest enough energy to keep itself stationary? Does the turbine create enough energy that it can overcome its own drag? Enough to have some spare energy for moving around?
I'd guess that this sort of bulk wind power is going to increasingly find favour with the big utilities over time. They don't like thoughts about homeowners buying in to a future with Tesla powerwalls + roof solar at plunging costs (e.g. the situation in Hawaii [1]). Big offshore projects let the utilities supply clean electricity without decentralisation of the grid.
I don't know who Tesla expects to sell to, but I agree that utilities could be very interested. They benefit from smoother demand more than just about anyone.
In many places, the utilities aren't allowed to charge different rates over time (or if they do, it has to be in the form of a discount/incentive vs. the single-rate price, it can't be punitive) even though power costs more to produce at some times. Smoothing out demand by pushing storage out to the edges of the grid seems like it would be a benefit to them.
Utilities need fast-reacting ways to deal with rapidly changing generation from sources such as wind and sun. Large users can get a big benefit from reducing their theoretical peak usage, reducing their grid connection charge. Both of these usages are economic today.
Utilities have to have excess capacity available to spin up instantly to meet demand. So you have to compare the cost and maintenance with a natural gas peaker plant. I think there is a place for Tesla's PowerPack to replace the least used peaker plants.
You can see their position. The infrastructure isn't cheap to maintain, and if a lot of people move from on-grid to off-grid the costs don't decrease for them, they just have less revenue.
This wouldn't be so bad in places with non-profit power companies, but the for-profit power companies are going to feel some pressure.
A neighborhood can share a neighborhood sized grid in a much cheaper way than an utility managing city-sized one. Even more if the only function of the grid is connecting into the nearby big battery and sharing some energy when one of the houses has a problem.
Not really. Offshore wind only production electricity 5% more of the time than onshore wind (see the capacity factors here: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...) Offshore only slightly mitigates the problems with wind--ie. the unreliability. You still need a grid to balance supply and demand with wind.
I always see people commenting about the negative visual impact of a windmill. I feel like I'm the only one who thinks they are beautiful to look at. Obviously we shouldn't be plopping them down directly in front of houses, but wind farms are pretty hypnotic to see.
What's amazing is that only five wind mills are capable of providing power to 17,000 homes per this article. That's 3400 per windmill. Doing the math on 124,000,000 homes in the US. That's only 36,470 total windmills. Something can't be right here if that's ALL it takes.
As I said, plopping them in front of your face, probably not a great idea. But let's be realistic here, the US has A TON of space, and a lot of smart people. I'm sure we can figure it out.
This is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett, MA.
It is inside Boston Harbor, and receives liquified natural gas to generate electricity.
The arrival of gas ships in Everett is a big security event, and is greeted with a general closure of shipping lanes, chopper patrols over the harbor, and patrol cars at every point in the harbor that are close to the ship. Because each of those ships is a floating fuel-air bomb able to take out the whole city.
Every wind turbine, every solar panel, and every bicycle dynamo hooked to a hamster wheel in New England, lengthens to time between visits from these ships.
First of all if I could get oceanfront property for $700K in this area (Block Island or Cape Cod) I'd think that was a bargain.
And anyway, yes, I would still feel that they're beautiful. There's something deeply satisfying for me when natural resources are harnessed in this sensible and attractive way.
Given that the Netherlands uses its windmills as a tourist icon to attract people and their dollars, it does seem weird that wind turbines are considered such an eyesore by some.
One small quibble - wind turbines produce electricity, wind mills mill grain. I know it's pedantic, but people in the industry get really irked when the machines are referred to as windmills. I don't know why exactly, maybe due to the marketing difficulties of "mills" versus "turbines" or because engineers like precise terminology.
I guess the avout of Arbre would refer to the distinction as"bulshytt" though, so take from it what you will.
edit: Ah, I see this was discussed below under another parent. Apologies if anyone takes umbrage to the distinction discussion.
People in the industry should realize that by windmill, we mean that big rotating thing. What it does with the rotation is not visible to us for us to need to make a distinction, and for the majority of their existence, those big rotating things were just windmills.
You're just being pedantic at that point. Wind turbine / mill is used interchangeably in the populace, and they are the ones you need to convince that these projects are viable.
(1) This is a 30megawatt plant. An average household consumes 2500watts (including heating). 30,000,000 / 2500 = 12,000 homes ... it's in the same ballpark. But only when the wind farm is operating at 100% capacity. That may be only 25% of the time, with lesser being the norm and zero being a thing at some times.
(2) Homes are not the only energy consumers. US electricity consumption per person = 13,246.27kwh / 2088 hours per year = 6300watts per person. 30,000,000/6300 = 4750. ... These five mills can produce enough power for around 4750 people. But that is only the electricity and doesn't include non-electrical energy such as hydrocarbons burnt for transport/heat. If we all start driving teslas, or switch to electric heat, those five turbines will cover far less than 4750 people.
But let's say this plant does cover 5000 people. 320,000,000/5000 = we need 64000 of these plants, or 320,000 turbines[1]. And again, only when running at capacity. The real number is perhaps triple.
[1]Thanks to dmoy for correcting my decimal error.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_energy_consumption
(2) Google "US electricity consumption per person"
(3) My personal knowledge of wind, that it doesn't blow 24/7. (I've done several off-grid houses and each time have rejected wind in favour of spending the money on more solar panels.)
(4) See 3.
Not even remotely, off shore turbines are much, much more efficient. Newer turbines already have capacity factors of over 40%, newer off shore turbines can exceed 50%.
...but the Wikipedia article you site says 2kW, not 2.5kW, and adding heating seems irrelevant, because the vast majority of homes in New England do not use electricity for heating. The 17,000 homes figure that you're fact-checking is referring to 17,000 homes with today's actual electrical use, not energy use in general.
If you add up the numbers in the wikipedia chart, it's actually 2310, which I round up to 2500 to simplify the math. Either way, these are "household" numbers more dependant on the definition of household. I'd stick to the more solid numbers per capita for the entire country.
This sort of calculation is missing the forest for the trees. Right now, wind is providing 5% of the US power supply. Plants are becoming substantially less expensive as technology improves and economies of scale come to the fore. That's mostly Midwestern ground power. Sea-based wind plants are more efficient due to more consistent wind.
Nuclear power provides about 20% of the US consumption, and there's no need to shut down existing nuclear plants as wind comes online. So just increasing wind output by 15x would more or less cover America's needs. With lots of untapped shoreline and lots of untapped Midwestern plains (not to mention new tech making previously unviable locations viable), it doesn't seem outrageous.
The missing key here is energy storage, not energy generation. Storage is how you optimize utilization. When plants produce excess power, capture and store, and release when the wind isn't blowing. Even with thermal losses, this gets us in the ballpark of 100% utilization. And there's a ton of investment in this field right now.
As for this plant, it wasn't built to make money on electricity. It was built to learn how to build offshore wind in the US, to deal with the technology and political pressures. The goal is to be able to build a thousand times this capacity, or more.
>> When plants produce excess power, capture and store ... this gets us in the ballpark of 100% utilization.
No. That is getting to 100% by changing the measurements. I was talking about utilization of the turbines, total power production, not how the plant regulated its power output. A plant with storage will still generate more or less power as the wind changes. That they use storage to regulate their output doesn't alter the fact that the turbines are not running at capacity 100% of the time. So the math as to how many turbines are needed to generate a specific amount of power holds.
Your math is wrong, because you assume a household consumes 2500 watts 24/7. That's a pretty insane figure. The only things running constantly in our house are the fridge and the modem. Even if you add computer, laptop, lights it's still an order of magnitude less than 2500w.
In vast swaths of the US electricity is used for climate control on a 24/7 basis, and in these locations it is often the largest single energy usage point in the home or office building.
Funny that your username is "overcast," since my main argument for wind as a lesser of energy evils is that I would rather see the hills lined with turbines than the valleys choked with smog.
They don't belong in Yosemite, or peppered on & around Mt Shasta. They'd be pretty awful if they carpeted the entire Great Plains.
But, in isolated groups, I agree they can look pretty cool when set against a barren landscape.
They're also a source of light pollution at night, an army of distant flashing red lights. Definitely put a damper on the Perseid shower when I went out into the Plains for skygazing.
> They'd be pretty awful if they carpeted the entire Great Plains.
They pretty much do in many areas.
And yes, the lights are the worst part. I think the risk of striking a windmill in the Great Plains is low enough that they could probably remove the lights in many areas.
Some better options than brilliant lights shining into the sky in all directions:
1. Use aircraft transponders to turn on lights selectively.
2. Establish a minimum flight level in wind farms, and provide pilots with locations of the towers in the event of an emergency descent.
3. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible from very far away on the ground. This doesn't solve the light pollution problem, and it's only really useful for pilots above the lights who don't need to worry.
4. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible below the level of the tower. This would improve the light pollution situation with regards to astronomy, but probably make it worse for viewers.
5. Network the lights so they fade in and out synchronously, rather than random noisy blinking.
>5. Network the lights so they fade in and out synchronously, rather than random noisy blinking.
or so that they would follow some "visual symphony" or make some other nice image or may be spell some marketing phrase visible from distance/space/planes
A couple important pieces of information were omitted from the article--according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) offshore wind is the second most expensive source of new electricity generation. In fact, offshore wind is 250% more expensive than onshore wind, but it only produces electricity 5% more of the time. https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...
Also, the Block Island project is 50% more expensive than EIA's numbers assume (It was $10,000 per KW while EIA assumes $6,331 per KW for the first few offshore facilities).
Yes it is. But it's going to drop quite quickly the more off-shore wind developments there are. Unfortunately, these prices only drop when people start building them. When the banks get more experience with the risks involved the project costs drop and the same will happen with new foundation technologies.
There seem to be higher costs for offshore wind that aren't going to go away with extra projects. Maintenance is more expensive because the turbines are in a salt water environment, and the electrical interconnect to the shore is an order of magnitude more expensive than equivalents on land.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
[edit] also, isn't 7 miles offshore pretty much close to out of site?
That's not to say that it's a bad idea to put them there, and the overall public good may make it worth it, but to brush off the concerns of the actual residents (who I would guess is not you) as stupid is not very productive.
edit: for some reason I cannot respond to the child of this comment, but I recommend reading this if you think Bay Area NIMBYism is omnipotent:
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-brown-housing-pla...
State and Federal governments override local concerns all the time.
Property deeds give you the right to a piece of land, that's it.
Santa Barbara has some of the most expensive coastal real estate in the US and they have line-of-site of numerous oil platforms. Santa Cruz beachfront homes have tripled in value since I moved to the Bay Area in 1994 even though they have line-of-site to a PGE plant with huge smokestacks. etc etc
Location trumps minor annoyances.
Even more beautifully, one of the proposed uses of the site of the demolished power station is as a launching site for offshore wind turbine construction.
It's a weird feeling the way it plays with your perception of scale, like forced perspective in reverse.
I'll admit that I didn't think windmills would ever catch on, but I'm very happy to be wrong here.
I also caught the start of an interview yesterday about how the state of the national grid is a major limitation in our ability to consume these forms of energy (http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/490932307/aging-and-unstable-t...). Hopefully our elected official will start working on that problem soon rather than bickering about bathrooms and building walls...
Also, land windmills is already taking off slowly as mentioned in the article:
> If that sounds ambitious, consider that the country has installed some 50,000 wind turbines on land over the past two decades. They now supply roughly 5 percent of the nation’s electric power, a figure that reaches double digits in particularly windy states like Kansas and Iowa.
> The technology has been proved in Europe, where offshore wind farms as large as 300 turbines are being developed, with each turbine costing up to $30 million to build, install and connect to the power grid.
Because of that 75 74.999999 of it is too deep to be practical. The cause of so much conflict is the need for these turbines to stand in the relatively shallow water, often within sight of expensive ocean-viewing residential properties. If we could place them just anywhere, they'd be just over the horizon from everywhere.
The real issue isn't lack of viable location but the legions of old people for whom a windmill in their view is an ugly reminder that times change. In europe they are part of the landscape. Where I am (BC Canada) they are fought against tooth and nail by retired landowners who blame them for everything from night terrors to cancer. Vancouver has _one_ visible turbine and even that rarely actually turns. It's more disney ride than power generator.
https://www.grousemountain.com/eye-of-the-wind
I would so love it for the US to adopt them more, but we have reality-star presidential candidates that are telling us their an eyesore with huge applause.
Incidentally, this is not far from the site of another offshore wind farm which a certain Donald Trump waged a lengthy legal battle to try to prevent, because he thought it would spoil the view from his golf course[1].
Bear in mind that you can already see large numbers of offshore oil rigs off the coast of parts of north east Scotland.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/16/worlds-l...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzGCYaJbf0A
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/hawaii-solar-indust...
In many places, the utilities aren't allowed to charge different rates over time (or if they do, it has to be in the form of a discount/incentive vs. the single-rate price, it can't be punitive) even though power costs more to produce at some times. Smoothing out demand by pushing storage out to the edges of the grid seems like it would be a benefit to them.
It might make a little more sense for some consumers due to the excessively high retail rates for electricity in some regions.
The more expensive the peaker, the faster the payback time.
This wouldn't be so bad in places with non-profit power companies, but the for-profit power companies are going to feel some pressure.
A neighborhood can share a neighborhood sized grid in a much cheaper way than an utility managing city-sized one. Even more if the only function of the grid is connecting into the nearby big battery and sharing some energy when one of the houses has a problem.
What's amazing is that only five wind mills are capable of providing power to 17,000 homes per this article. That's 3400 per windmill. Doing the math on 124,000,000 homes in the US. That's only 36,470 total windmills. Something can't be right here if that's ALL it takes.
Perhaps it's just that enough is enough, or rather, too much is too much.
This is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett, MA.
It is inside Boston Harbor, and receives liquified natural gas to generate electricity.
The arrival of gas ships in Everett is a big security event, and is greeted with a general closure of shipping lanes, chopper patrols over the harbor, and patrol cars at every point in the harbor that are close to the ship. Because each of those ships is a floating fuel-air bomb able to take out the whole city.
Every wind turbine, every solar panel, and every bicycle dynamo hooked to a hamster wheel in New England, lengthens to time between visits from these ships.
So yes, I do feel they are beautiful.
And anyway, yes, I would still feel that they're beautiful. There's something deeply satisfying for me when natural resources are harnessed in this sensible and attractive way.
I guess the avout of Arbre would refer to the distinction as"bulshytt" though, so take from it what you will.
edit: Ah, I see this was discussed below under another parent. Apologies if anyone takes umbrage to the distinction discussion.
(1) This is a 30megawatt plant. An average household consumes 2500watts (including heating). 30,000,000 / 2500 = 12,000 homes ... it's in the same ballpark. But only when the wind farm is operating at 100% capacity. That may be only 25% of the time, with lesser being the norm and zero being a thing at some times.
(2) Homes are not the only energy consumers. US electricity consumption per person = 13,246.27kwh / 2088 hours per year = 6300watts per person. 30,000,000/6300 = 4750. ... These five mills can produce enough power for around 4750 people. But that is only the electricity and doesn't include non-electrical energy such as hydrocarbons burnt for transport/heat. If we all start driving teslas, or switch to electric heat, those five turbines will cover far less than 4750 people.
But let's say this plant does cover 5000 people. 320,000,000/5000 = we need 64000 of these plants, or 320,000 turbines[1]. And again, only when running at capacity. The real number is perhaps triple.
[1]Thanks to dmoy for correcting my decimal error.
* "2500watts (including heating)"
* "That may be only 25% of the time, with the lesser being the norm"
* "US electricity consumption per person = 13,246.27kwh"
* "The real number is perhaps triple."
http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/30/how-steady-can-the-wind-blow...
Nuclear power provides about 20% of the US consumption, and there's no need to shut down existing nuclear plants as wind comes online. So just increasing wind output by 15x would more or less cover America's needs. With lots of untapped shoreline and lots of untapped Midwestern plains (not to mention new tech making previously unviable locations viable), it doesn't seem outrageous.
The missing key here is energy storage, not energy generation. Storage is how you optimize utilization. When plants produce excess power, capture and store, and release when the wind isn't blowing. Even with thermal losses, this gets us in the ballpark of 100% utilization. And there's a ton of investment in this field right now.
As for this plant, it wasn't built to make money on electricity. It was built to learn how to build offshore wind in the US, to deal with the technology and political pressures. The goal is to be able to build a thousand times this capacity, or more.
No. That is getting to 100% by changing the measurements. I was talking about utilization of the turbines, total power production, not how the plant regulated its power output. A plant with storage will still generate more or less power as the wind changes. That they use storage to regulate their output doesn't alter the fact that the turbines are not running at capacity 100% of the time. So the math as to how many turbines are needed to generate a specific amount of power holds.
They don't belong in Yosemite, or peppered on & around Mt Shasta. They'd be pretty awful if they carpeted the entire Great Plains.
But, in isolated groups, I agree they can look pretty cool when set against a barren landscape.
They're also a source of light pollution at night, an army of distant flashing red lights. Definitely put a damper on the Perseid shower when I went out into the Plains for skygazing.
They pretty much do in many areas.
And yes, the lights are the worst part. I think the risk of striking a windmill in the Great Plains is low enough that they could probably remove the lights in many areas.
Some better options than brilliant lights shining into the sky in all directions:
1. Use aircraft transponders to turn on lights selectively. 2. Establish a minimum flight level in wind farms, and provide pilots with locations of the towers in the event of an emergency descent. 3. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible from very far away on the ground. This doesn't solve the light pollution problem, and it's only really useful for pilots above the lights who don't need to worry. 4. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible below the level of the tower. This would improve the light pollution situation with regards to astronomy, but probably make it worse for viewers. 5. Network the lights so they fade in and out synchronously, rather than random noisy blinking.
or so that they would follow some "visual symphony" or make some other nice image or may be spell some marketing phrase visible from distance/space/planes
Also, the Block Island project is 50% more expensive than EIA's numbers assume (It was $10,000 per KW while EIA assumes $6,331 per KW for the first few offshore facilities).
Can we expect much reduction in cost?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms