Google helps finance 'superhighway' for wind power. Internet search engine giant Google announced Tuesday that it is investing in a mammoth project to build an underwater "superhighway for clean energy" that would be able to funnel power from offshore wind farms to 1.9 million homes without overtaxing the already congested mid-Atlantic power grid.
The project, dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection, calls for spending as much as $5 billion to create a 350-mile network of underwater cables stretching from northern New Jersey to Virginia. It would eliminate the need for offshore wind developers to build transmission lines of their own, easing what can be a barrier for such projects. Google is partnering with Good Energies, an environmentally focused international investment company based in New York, London and Switzerland, and Tokyo-based Marubeni to finance the project. The project is led by Trans-Elect, an electric transmission company in Chevy Chase. Staff writer Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report. Gulf Oil Spill: With so many oil resources, can't we just drill somewhere else? Economic theory talks about oil prices rising, and substitutes being found, which will tend to bring prices back down.
When oil prices rose, we found substitutes, but they were poor substitutes-- generally more expensive, and hard to scale up. Corn ethanol requires huge land use and imported fertilizers. Wind isn't a transportation fuel--it is a substitute for natural gas and coal in electricity production. Making sufficient electric cars and trucks to replace our current fleet would be a huge expensive project, requiring many years, at best. Welcome. Transition Town: Testfall Totnes - Gesellschaft.