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Federal officials today designated a large swath of ocean about 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard where they hope to see a massive wind farm built that could dwarf the size of Cape Wind, the long-stalled wind project planned for Nantucket Sound.
After two years of meetings with local and state officials, environmental groups, Native Americans, and others, officials at the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said they are launching an environmental assessment of about 1,300 square miles that could give rise within several years to hundreds of towering wind turbines.
They said the area could produce as much as 10 times the amount of electricity as Cape Wind – which covers about 25 square miles – or enough to power up to 70 percent of homes in Massachusetts.
The boom in cheap natural gas in this country is good news for the environment, because relatively clean gas is replacing dirty coal-fired power plants. But in the long run, cheap natural gas could slow the growth of even cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar power.
Natural gas has a bad rap in some parts of the country, because the process of fracking is not popular. But many people looking at cheap natural gas from the global perspective see it as a good thing.
Henry Jacoby, an economist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, says cheap energy will help pump up the economy.
"Overall, this is a great boon to the United States," he says. "It's not a bad thing to have this new and available domestic resource." He says cheap energy can boost the economy, and he notes that natural gas is half as polluting as coal when it's burned for electricity.February 2, 2012 MIT makes solar panels from plants
MIT researchers said they have come up with a way to make photovoltaic panels from plant material as an inexpensive and easy alternative to traditional solar cells. Andreas Mershin, an MIT researcher working on the project, envisions that within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material.
Mershin said he hopes the system will become a “way of getting low-tech electricity to people who have never been thought of as consumers or producers of solar-power technology.”
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As environmentalists check items off their list of Obama administration victories before this year’s election, one huge item still lingers: curbing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to take one step toward that goal in the coming weeks when it proposes greenhouse gas standards for future power plants. But clear plans to require existing plants to cut their emissions have waned, despite the administration’s stated intentions.
Regulating greenhouse gases from both new and existing plants is “the biggest energy and climate decision the Obama administration is going to make before the election,” said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force.
“They asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, and he said, ‘That’s where the money is,’” Schneider said.
And power plants, Schneider said, are “the largest uncontrolled source of CO2.”
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