I take it as a sign that I spend far too muc time here, that I had only read 5MW, and instantly knew it was a diary about an offshore turbine.

I'm shocked that they were able to sink this in water 45M deep.  I've written on the wind power potential on Lake Michigan in the United States.  The biggest issue is that Lake Michigan is very, very deep but being able to go out to 50M deep would open up a lot of the lake to developmement.  

And if you can get beyond the horizon, it's a lot less likely to piss off the locals.  I personally think that this is a huge resource that's largely been ignored.  The reason largely being that we in the American Great Lakes region have extremely cheap electricity from coal fired plants in clustered down on the Ohio River.  Illinois and Indiana have large coal mines in the same area, and we have access to even more cheap coal from Wyoming and to a lesser extent the Appalachians.  

It's only been very recently that wind power has come to the area, but construction is starting on a large wind farm in western Indiana.  I've heard that it was going to be 300 MW, but it looks like the plan is for 67 1.3MW?turbines at the moment.

I saw the way that windpower took off in Spain.  I can only imagine the economic impact that something similiar could do in the United States.  There is a large industrial base here in the Great Lakes region that's idling down as the American auto industry is circling the drain.

One of the real problems that I see in my state is that the local government is willing to give tax rebates and other incentives to any business that will open in the state, and there's no reall effort to target this public investment in order to create industrial clusters with suppliers and end users.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg