August 25th, 2008 · 1 Comment

By John DeFore

Last Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his desire to turn the city into a wind-power titan, sprinkling the city with turbines and building huge wind farms off the coasts of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, he issued a formal request encouraging green power entrepreneurs to submit plans for a range of sustainable energy projects. But what got the most attention was the suggestion that “perhaps companies will want to put windfarms atop our bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential of powerful off-shore winds miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, where turbines could generate roughly twice the energy that land-based windfarms can. Windfarms located far off our shores, some evidence shows, could meet 10 percent of our city’s electricity needs within a decade.”

Even beyond the inevitable Photoshop gags at the speech’s expense, public reaction hasn’t exactly been effusive. The very next day, the Times trained a skeptical eye on the plan, conducting a series of interviews with engineers and energy experts who felt it “would be complicated and expensive and barely begin to meet the growth in demand for electricity that is expected in the coming years.”

A key problem is that skyscrapers not designed to hold the weight and vibration a turbine creates would have to undergo expensive retrofits that could negate savings entirely; turbines small enough not to require such measures, one interviewee said, “almost don’t pay.” Citing the original design of the building intended to replace the World Trade Center, which prominently integrated large turbines into its structure, the article says even those generators were expected only to supply enough power for the elevators, at most. The Post was even harder on Bloomberg’s vision, saying that “not even windmill manufacturers think it could work.”

(On the other hand, Donald Trump thinks it’s a fine idea, so long as nobody tries to put turbines on one of his own buildings. They’re so architecturally distinguished, the Don sniffs, you wouldn’t want to mess with the design.)

Some observers contended that solar power would be a much more fruitful use of NYC’s green-power opportunities — which, it turns out, is entirely in keeping with Bloomberg’s proposal. Though windmills caught the media’s attention, they were only a small part of a speech that talked also of solar and tide-harvesting technologies and was especially emphatic on the need to upgrade the nation’s power transmission system.

As he has said in the days since the public ribbing began, he never thought windmills would be the whole answer to energy woes, but wanted to jumpstart any and all conversations that might be fruitful. “If you don’t ask” for ideas, he said, “you’re never going to find out.”

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