It’s pretty hard to find anyone who thinks that wind farms are a flat-out bad idea. But once you start suggesting locations for them, the NIMBYs crawl out of the woodwork by the legion, armed with arguments as to why putting one near their home is a terrible idea. Enter one MIT researcher with a visionary idea for placing huge wind turbines somewhere with lots of wind that won’t spoil anyone’s back-porch skyline – why not float the things out in the ocean?
2 thoughts on “Wind Over Waves”
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Because they require a lot of maintenance. Turns out, these things break down quite frequently (lots of moving parts, harsh weather conditions etc), and it’s just that much harder (and more costly in money and CO2 emissions) to do the inevitable repairs out at sea.
There is one more more place that may work better than all other options…up in the air. Way up in the jetstream.
But tethered wind power is an unproven technology. I would like to see one of the famous tech entrepreneurs pour some seed money into that.