Ocean County could lose nearly $400 million in tourism revenues if a pilot project with wind turbines is placed 3 nautical miles off its coast, a new state-funded study says.New Jersey is dragging its feet over this plan, and there's absolutely no evidence that these wind farm projects will affect tourism.
But a wind farm farther offshore would have a much lower impact and would have a minimal economic impact overall if it were built off Ocean, Atlantic or Cape May counties. It could have a positive effect in some cases, according to the study by Global Insight, hired by the now-defunct New Jersey Commerce Commission.
A project with dozens of wind turbines could be operating from 3 to 20 nautical miles off the coastline, from Seaside Park to Stone Harbor, in 2012. But most current proposals are for wind farms 8 to 18 miles off Atlantic or Cape May counties.
"Basically, one coastal county gets to be the sacrificial lamb, and I would ask which county freeholder director is going to step forward to volunteer his county to shift their tourism revenues to the next county over," said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a Sandy Hook-based coastal conservation group.
Plus, if you market it right, it could be a tourism draw - showing that wind power projects are not the eyesores that the opposition claims and produces clean and abundant renewable energy.
I suspect this study's authors had a preconceived notion that it would affect tourism, and came to the appropriate conclusion.
Of course, if they moved the wind farms further offshore, the affect on tourism decreased significantly. Moving the wind farm to six miles offshore would reduce the effects tremendously.
Again, we see the forces of NIMBY (not in my backyard) coming into play here, as local officials do not want these wind power projects in their areas, even though they claim that they want to go green. Other New Jersey communities have already imposed severe restrictions that all but ban wind power turbines in their communities, including Wayne, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds notes that hydropower is clean and green. The projects suggested in that article are indeed green and have the potential to help local communities produce power. However, there are significant bureaucratic hurdles, to say nothing of the eco-leftists who will come out of the woodwork to claim that various hydropower projects destroy habitat and they call for the elimination of dams or put such severe restrictions on hydropower so as to make it impossible. Closer to home, there's been opposition to the East River hydropower project because some wonder whether the underwater turbines will turn the fish into sushi and that project has had several technological setbacks preventing it from reaching its peak efficiency.
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