New Jersey-based wind-energy company looks westward

NRG Bluewater Wind, the company which is on track to construct the nation’s first offshore wind-energy farm off the coast of Delaware (and is looking to install similar wind turbine clusters off New Jersey, Maryland and New York) is not focusing solely on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Muskegon Chronicle reports today that Mike O’Brien, the Hoboken, NJ-based company’s Great Lakes Director, introduced Bluewater to Michigan business leaders at an offshore wind briefing last week at Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center.

Scandia Offshore Wind — a joint U.S.-Norwegian development company — has proposed a  plan for wind turbines in Lake Michigan that has generated a well-organized and well-funded opposition group, the newspaper reports.

O’Brien seized the opportunity to note that Bluewater has a different “methodology” than Scandia and believes that ‘stakeholder outreach’ is the most important and critical factor in developing such a project. He added that, while Bluewater it has no specific site in its cross-hairs, it definitely is interested in developing in Michigan.

State legislators are working on on a bill, expected to be introduced in the fall, that will lay out regulatory rules for any wind-energy projects in Michigan waters. O’Brien said Bluewater will not propose specific projects until those rules have been established.
 
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Study reveals tainted groundwater in northern Delaware

Tainted groundwater is spreading across thousands of acres in northern Delaware and has reached the Potomac Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to people across much of Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey.

In some areas of the upper Potomac near Delaware City and New Castle, concentrations of benzene, vinyl chloride and chlorinated benzene are so high that exposure poses an immediate health threat. Elevated levels of these industrial byproducts significantly increase the risks of cancer. Sustained exposure could kill.

These two, powerful paragraphs are the introduction to a must-read environmental news series launched yesterday by the (Wilmington, DE) News Journal. It’s based on a year-long investigation by the newspaper that uncovered “a damning history of corporate mistakes and lax government oversight, especially in the corridor bordered by the Delaware River, DuPont Highway and the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.”

The newspaper says its report is based on thousands of pages of corporate documents, consultant reports, hydrology and geology studies, well-water monitoring reports and ecological tests on fish and plants. The majority of the documents, it says, were gathered through state and federal Freedom of Information Act requests and most have never been distributed to the public.

The opening story, Delaware Drinking Water at Risk, provides this backdrop to the report.

Northern Delaware is home to some of the worst chemical dumping grounds in America, a legacy of broken promises and corporate misdeeds. Regulators working for Delaware and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have long claimed that the deep clay layers above the aquifer protected it from the foul waters discharged by chemical and petroleum manufacturers.

“Those assurances have proved false.

The protective layer over the aquifer, scientists now say, is full of holes.

To prevent a public health disaster, the state has banned public use of groundwater under or near the Delaware City petrochemical complex.

Toxic pollutants, though, are now moving near the edge of that containment zone, outside the properties of Metachem, Occidental Chemical, Formosa Plastics and the Delaware City Refinery, and toward schools and houses.

One plume of chemicals has traveled a mile south of the refinery’s main production area and has seeped 190 feet into the earth.


We recommend that you read the entire series. It’s going to ruffle corporate and political feathers. Good journalism does that. It takes time, talent, experience, money, commitment and political courage to produce such an investigative report.  Like all valuable news series, the News-Journal’s contains sidebar stories, photos and graphs that expand the reader’s understanding of the problem and point to possible solutions.

As daily newspapers shrink in number, size and resources, reporting like this is less frequently seen. It may be a fact of current economic life, but it’s regrettable.  An informed public needs efforts like these.

There are some who cheer the demise of newspapers. Bloggers, pundits and  ‘citizen journalist’ will fill the void, they say. 

We say: Don’t count on it.  Long live feisty, independent newspapers like the News Journal.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the opinion box below.  If one is not visible, click on the tiny ‘comments’ line below to activate it.


Related story:
Taxpayers stuck with $100 million mess
The abandoned Metachem plant is the most polluted site in the petrochemical complex near Delaware City. Based on government promises that poisoned soils and groundwater could be cleaned, taxpayers have already spent more than $100 million at Metachem. (News Journal photo by Fred Comegys)

Related story:
Drinking water filtering strongly recommended
Richard F. Davis, a former state representative and a DuPont Co. chemist, relies on a whole-house filter in his Mariners Watch neighborhood. “It’s impossible to know
where all the water comes from.”
(News Journal photo by Jennifer Corbett)

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Solar and biofuel bills clear NJ environment committee

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Will mysterious NJ entrant delay DE offshore wind?

Bluewater Wind has done much of the heavy lifting needed to put itself and the state of Delaware at the head of a pack of developers and states hoping to build the first wind energy farm off the Atlantic coast.

The company helped steer a funding law through the Delaware legislature, negotiated agreements with the state’s largest utility and others to buy the power its ocean turbines will generate, and is nearing the final hurdle–winning a federal lease for the site it has chosen 11 miles off Delaware’s coast.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a mysterious rival from New Jersey has appeared and is seeking to win a federal lease for its own wind farm at the very same location. 

What makes it a mystery is the fact that Occidental Development & Equities LLC, of Bayonne, N.J. has managed to shield virtually all details about itself other than its name.

Occidental was one of five developers that filed in 2008 to build a wind farm off New Jersey’s coast, but it was rejected for funding by the state’s Board of Public Utilities. In the New Jersey case, it also managed to keep its vital statistics out of public view.  

Based on that track record and Bluewater Wind’s long head start, the mysterious stranger does not appear to pose much of a danger to Bluewater Wind as a competitor, but it could delay the federal review and approval process–especially at a time when the federal focus is on offshore gas drilling.

Everyone loves a mystery. Is Occidental a serious wind energy developer?  If not, what game is it playing? 

Use the opinion box below to share what you know–or suspect. If one isn’t visible, click on the tiny ‘comment’ line below to activate it.

Related:
Bluewater faces competition for lease from secretive firm
Md., Del. govs ask feds to join wind energy pact

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Google searches and purchases big stake in green energy

Lots of corporations talk a good green game, but Google, the internet information giant, is using its checkbook to make environmental news.

The Guardian reported today that :

“Google is officially in the green energy business. The search giant announced on Tuesday that its Google Energy subsidiary signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with NextEra Energy. Google will begin buying 114 megawatts of electricity from an Iowa wind farm on July 30.
Google, of course, cannot directly use the clean green energy generated by the wind farm; that power goes into the local grid. So Google Energy will sell the power on the regional spot market, where utilities and electricity retailers go to buy power when demand spikes and they have a shortfall. Google will use the revenue from spot market sales to buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) which will offset its greenhouse gas emissions.

Many companies buy RECs in an attempt to be carbon neutral, obtaining them from third-party brokers. But by purchasing RECs directly tied to the renewable energy it is also buying, Google is getting a bigger bang for its buck.

“By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president for operations, wrote on a blog post Tuesday.

“The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy,” he added. “We’ve been excited about this deal because taking 114 megawatts of wind power off the market for so long means producers have the incentive and means to build more renewable energy capacity for other customers.”

In a statement on its site, Google also noted that its motivations for signing long-term renewable energy contracts are not entirely altruistic.

“Through the long term purchase of renewable energy at a predetermined price, we’re partially protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices,” the company stated. “This is a case where buying green makes business sense.”

NextEra Energy Resources, the company that will supply Google with its wind power, is itself an alternative energy success story, having expanded its wind fleet from fewer than 500 megawatts a decade ago to more than 7,600 megawatts–the largest wind fleet in North America today.

NextEra hs more than 9,000 wind turbines in operation at 77 wind farms in 17 states and Canada. It boasts that the wind energy it generated in 2009 was he equivalent of removing some 2.4 million cars from the road.

Google’s green energy purchase will come from NextEra’s Story II Wind Energy Center in operation in Story and Hardin counties in Iowa. The company says in a news release that it has “nearly 700 wind turbines in operation in Iowa with a nameplate capacity of more than 1,000 megawatts that are capable of generating enough power to serve more than 250,000 average homes.”

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Even a cure hurts oystermen in the Gulf–and in NJ, too

A discouraging but instructive story in today’s Wall Street Journal relates how:

“In April, soon after the oil spill started, Louisiana officials started opening gates along the levees of the Mississippi River, letting massive amounts of river water pour through man-made channels and into coastal marshes. It was a gambit—similar to opening a fire hose—to keep the encroaching oil at bay.

“By most accounts, the strategy succeeded in minimizing the amount of oil that entered the fertile and lucrative estuaries. But oyster farmers and scientists say it appears to have had one major side effect: the deaths of large numbers of oysters, water-filterers whose simplicity and sensitivity makes them early indicators of environmental influences that ultimately could hit other marsh dwellers too.”

The men and women who make their living from the Gulf just can’t catch a break.

Oystermen in New Jersey–and an environmental organization there, too–are sharing in the painful consequences of the BP oil rig disaster.

The state’s $790 million oyster, clam and mussel harvest faces a possible shutdown by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration which contends that New Jersey’s Department of Health and Senior Services failed to conduct adequate inspections in 2008 and 2009 at plants that process the mollusks hauled in by small, commercial fishing operations.

The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) also failed to conduct mandated patrols of polluted coastal waters to guard against the poaching and illegal sale of contaminated mollusks, federal authorities said.

If the FDA doesn’t see a marked improvement in both, it threatens to shut down the state’s harvest.

The NY/NJ Baykeeper has spent more than $100,000 to build oyster reefs in Raritan Bay to test whether the waters have become clean enough for oysters to survive again in North Jersey.  Now, it’s been ordered by the DEP to remove the oysters.

What’s the connection between Gulf oysters and those harvested in New Jersey?

It has to do with the widespread media attention given to the Gulf contamination which, in turn, heightened public concern over the health of oysters served in restaurants everywhere.

The (Bergen) Record reported on Sunday that:

“In June, the DEP banned cultivation of commercial shellfish in polluted state waters for research purposes, saying the reefs could be targeted by poachers. If the contaminated shellfish got into commercial circulation, and someone got sick, it could create a major public relations nightmare for the state’s $790 million commercial shell-fishing industry, which is based in the cleaner waters of southern New Jersey, DEP Commissioner Bob Martin has said. “

The North Jersey reefs are about 80 feet long by 80 feet wide and lie in water up to 10 feet deep. The Baykeeper group had to use heavy machinery, work boats and scuba divers to get the reefs into place, and will likely need the same resources to remove them.

The Baykeeper organization originally objected to the DEP order and sought the aid of some in the state Legislature to overturn it. On Friday, Baykeeper executive director Debbie Mans said that her organization will comply with the removal order, but she added:

“We’re disheartened the DEP would single out an environmental group in such a public and vicious manner.  We do think they’re just using our program to hide the larger issue of deficiencies in their statewide patrols of polluted waters for poachers.”

Amazing, isn’t it, how a single management decision on the deck of an oil rig could damage not only the lives of so many residents of the Gulf but also people and economies far away. 

Related stories:

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Funding for Delaware River Basin conservation plan

  

Bombay Hook/Delaware Today

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has awarded The Nature Conservancy a $450,000 grant to fund a comprehensive conservation plan for the Delaware River Basin.

The project is a joint effort involving The Nature Conservancy’s Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Eastern New York chapters, the Natural Lands Trust, and the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced the grant award on Wednesday, July 14.

The Delaware River Basin and its surrounding watershed represent one of the most intact freshwater systems in the region. Freshwater systems are inextricably linked to the lands that surround them, and the adverse impacts of threats including development, pollution, and climate change have taken a toll on the health of the Basin.

However, many areas of the basin remain in good condition, and opportunities exist to conserve high quality habitats and restore those that have been degraded, said Andrew Manus, director of Conservation Programs for The Nature Conservancy of Delaware.

The Delaware Basin Restoration Initiative will identify opportunities to protect and improve water quality and habitat, as well as provide a blueprint for the region’s conservation organizations and agencies to implement components of the plan.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that preserves and restores our nation’s native wildlife species and habitats. Created by Congress in 1984, NFWF directs public conservation dollars to the most pressing environmental needs and matches those investments with private funds. The Foundation’s method is simple and effective: we work with a full complement of individuals, foundations, government agencies, nonprofits, and corporations to identify and fund the nation’s most intractable conservation challenges.

For full story see: Delaware River to benefit from environmental grant

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