It's taking longer than I'd like, and is a bit painful right now (as all deals at this stage - hmmm... financial pregnancy) but it will be a big deal.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Debunking the Spanish "study" that claims wind destroyed jobs

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

the "real people" mentioned in my title are a friendly reference to my client's presentations on the project, where he would describe the hard work he had gone through with me and others to put the financing in place, and then say that the "real people" could finally be mobilised and build the wind farm. It was said with the utmost respect for the people he had been working very hard with over the past several months, but real, good-natured, almost-naive, wonderment that you had to go through all that paper-shuffling and talking (because that's what it was) to actually build a windfarm...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Fantastic!

:)

"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms." -Dostoevsky

Construction has already begun on Alpha Ventus, the first German offshore windplant.  The english language version is a bit behind the times...

but from here...

you can navigate to different live webcams of the process.  (On the right are listed the various views from FINO 1, the met and research station installed onsite a few years ago.)

The project will include updated/uprated versions of the turbines J financed, the REpower 5M (5MW), as well as the first use of the hybrid permanent magnet offshore turbine, the Areva Multibrid M5000.  Hybrid turbines attempt to combine the best of both standard geared design and gearless low speed generator design, naturally by compromising in the middle.

The entire Multibrid turbine and tower are pressurized to avoid sea air (salt) contamination, and the electrical components are attached to the tower instead of aloft in the nacelle, to save weight and cost.

As you can see from the photo, the tower is supported by a tripod structure, which rests on the sea bottom (with short piles) instead of the long 20-30m piles drilled into the seabed for conventional turbines.

For Europe (and not currently the rest of the world) offshore windpower is very important.  But it should not and must not be a substitute for the much more needed push for widespread development of the land-based resource first and foremost.  end of sermon.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

And distributed real jobs.

I know you've quoted this before, but once a farm is built, how many jobs are created running it in the community it is built, not to mention the construction trades jobs and the heavy industry jobs making the parts?

We should be embarking, in this morose economy, on a massive building programme, not just as a jobs programme, but as an economic efficiency and growth programme, a regional development motor, and a positive environmental legacy for our kids.

I know you do the math on these things constantly, so you know they usually pay back a tidy return, certainly at a return state-issued debt can support. Would you be for a broad EU-wide, state-subsidised building programme as an economic stimulus?

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

Congratulations!  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Some cultures left us monumental architecture. Now we've these. Beautiful (I suppose the fact it was a gorgeous day doen't hurt, but no matter).

Thanks, Jerome. I knew they were big, but whoa. . . .

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

You'd worked hard and been able to put money into a loan that helped inflate the perceived value of a tranche of paper against the derivatives purchased by a Bahamian SIV and hedged with CDSs issued by companies that had no assets to pay in case of default, all wrapped through some tax avoidance fronts in Antigua?  That would be a real social value.

The thing that finally convinced me that wind power wasn't some meaningless crap we used to distract the hippies while we planned the next reactor was not statistics or reports or whatever - but a picture where a helicopter hovers next to the turbine housing and is looking absolutely tiny, just like in the Youtube clip above.

Because helicopters are Serious, and if that thing is so huge and has helicopters in its service organization, it must be Serious too.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.