Soooo anyway. It's been a long time sine I posted something. I think that more than two months between posts qualifies me for some type of terrible punishment. The question is what would that punishment be? I don't know. Sigh. This is a side effect of how terrible I am at writing letters to my family as well. I'll try to do better.

So today I was inspired to talk about power generation and by this new project that was just green-lighted by Secretary Salazar. Please read the article found at the link below:

Cape Wind

I am very excited by offshore wind power. For one thing building these towers is a great engineering challenge. The ocean is an incredibly corrosive environment and so we have to factor that into our design. Additionally the ocean is not an easy environment to build in in the first place. Tides must be considered and will have an effect on this project in terms of scheduling. Drilling is a challenge in water anyway but in ocean water, at the depths that will be necessary to place foundation columns, it will be especially challenging. One of the concerns brought up in the article is the archeological concerns of the native tribes. This will add to the challenges as all of the proposed sites will need to be scouted excessively to rule out the presence of native artifacts.

One thing that I hope they will consider in this project is combined power generation. I see no reason to limit the project to wind power alone. The designers should be looking at ways to tap into the tidal forces in the ocean waters as well. Since a large part of the project cost will be in building the means to transmit the generated power from offshore to the existing grid we should not squander that effort by limiting or power generation capability.