Speaking at the Las Vegas conference on alternative energy last night, Mayor Bloomberg envisioned a New York skyline that had wind turbines from the Hudson River to Jamaica Bay and beyond. Bloomberg is known as a man with big ideas and as the Times points out, ideas that have failed. However, except for some feelings of NIMBYism, wind power is not the same as congestion pricing or a West Side stadium.
From The NY Times:
Mr. Bloomberg said he would ask private companies and investors to study how windmills can be built across the city, with the aim of weaning it off the nation’s overtaxed power grid, which has produced several crippling blackouts in New York over the last decade.
Mr. Bloomberg did not specify which skyscrapers and bridges would be candidates for windmills, and city officials would need to work with property owners to identify the buildings that would best be able to hold the equipment.
But aides said that for offshore locations, the city was eyeing the generally windy coast off Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island for turbines that could generate 10 percent of the city’s electricity needs within 10 years.
The Times author Michael Barbaro goes on to talk about the problems of the plan, such as the price of setting up a turbine system, legalities of leasing federally-owned offshore land and that Bloomberg's term will be up at the end of next year. Yet as I stated from the top, this isn't congestion pricing or a stadium, we are talking about the long-term health of our planet and what the nation's preeminent city intends to about it. Bloomberg might not get it done by the end of 2009, but we as a city must make sure that we wean ourselves off of oil, coal and gas.
|