Looks cool as hell. Here in NJ a bunch of NIMBY pricks have been fighting offshore wind because it “ruins the view” which I find laughable. Seeing clean energy being produced makes me smile, who cares if there’s a windmill on the horizon.
Looking on Zillow, it looks like a beachfront house on Long Beach Island in New Jersey is ~$2.5-5 million.
Cross the street, go one house back from the beach – the differentiating factor between the two being whether there’s a view out over the ocean – and the price drops to maybe $1.5-2.5 million.
So you figure that people there basically bought a house plus a window with a fancy picture in it, and that picture cost maybe one to several million dollars.
I wouldn’t pay several million dollars for a fancy picture, but I imagine that if someone has done that, then they’re probably liable to get pissy if people go and fiddle with it.
Yeah that’s definitely a component, although I’m not sure it would even actually hurt the value. The beaches are public so they already cannot control that view. My favorite of their arguments was all of them very quickly becoming whale activists and stating with certainty that windmills kill whales.
I kinda like it too, I don’t t see the appeal of not seeing anything on the horizon.
Don’t get me wrong I’m 100% behind renewable energy but do you seriously not understand someone saying ‘hey I like this beautiful natural scene without machinery all over?’
I think my wording was a bit wrong. I do see the appeal, but I don’t really see a big difference. Either there’s nothing at the horizon, or there are ships and oil rigs, or there are offshore windparks. It really doesn’t matter, to me at least.
I live in the northern part of Germany. North Frisia consists solely of farming plots and nothing else. It’s such a boring landscape. Everything is flat and unnatural. Nowadays we have shitloads of windmills in that area and it makes it a bit more interesting to the eye.
Before the largest things on the horizon were trees and perhaps the odd church or water tower. These windmills tower over anything there is on the countryside.
The point I’m trying to make here is that our definition of tall has significantly shifted over the last 20/30 years. E.g. windmill 5km away is visually still twice as high as the church tower which is 500 meters away from you.
So just for context.
Fixed wind turbines can only really be put in in 60m depth or less. Water that shallow is usually close the coast though there are some exceptions like the dogger bank, but that’s rare.
If you are 100m off the ground you can see 36 km out to sea. (Or be visible 36 km from shore).
The EEZ of countries, where you can install wind turbines, is 370km from shore. Currently (new tech) there seems to be floating offshore capable of operating at 1km deep waters.
If floating wind takes off. Visibility might not be an issue at all. Wind speeds are higher and more constant out out sea. It’s a win, win, win. If it can be made cheap enough.
My favorite memory in video gaming of a waterfront town? FFVIII and the* little water town in the middle of the fucking ocean with its turbines surrounding it. Ahead of its time, but super quaint and fun. People get fucking* defensive about change when they get older, and have enough money to speak with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRgGmH-nCBo
Download that and set it to fullscreen on a 4k monitor on your wall.
