I wish more people would focus on these positive options for our energy future.
We really need to get moving on– I’ll say it again!- Infrastructure development in order to be energy independent.
But with the GOP- and most of the rest of the government- owned by the Oil Companies, it’s going to be a struggle…
For visions of America’s energy future, we tend to look to the nexus of the current world energy order — the Middle East. That’s how we ended up with America’s worst nickname ever: the “Saudi Arabia of coal.” To the coal-industry shills who coined it, the term was meant to convey ideas of energy independence, security and patriotism. To those of us who know better it means a promise of boiling chaotic doom for the planet, and a future of shattered landscapes and poisoned waters for coal-country communities.
That’s the nightmare energy vision from the Middle East. But thankfully there’s a positive alternative — a vision that goes far beyond rhetoric to encapsulate a future of limitless, clean, healthy, secure and 100-percent American energy. It’s the “Persian Gulf of offshore wind energy” and it describes a little known area of the eastern seaboard otherwise known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight, which runs from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
In the annals of energy discoveries, the discovery of the Bight’s wind energy potential could rank right up there with the discovery of oil beneath the sands of the Arabian Peninsula. A 2007 joint Stanford University-University of Delaware study found that fully developed with over 166,000 wind turbines, the Bight’s waters could produce as much as 330,000 megawatts of power, or effectively one third of U.S. energy demand. Even more exciting, the researchers concluded that full-scale development of the resource was well within the realm of technological possibility. All that was required was the political will to make it happen.
More: Vision: Why the Mid-Atlantic Can Be the ‘Persian Gulf of Offshore Wind Energy’ | | AlterNet.
Lost in the 21st Century 