“CLIMATE CHANGE FOR THE BETTER” is not a slogan we hear often, if at all. Any silver lining that can be found in the dark cloud of global climate change seems to be exceedingly rare. But not non-existent, as witness this headline: “Offshore Wind Is on the Brink of Becoming So Cheap, the UK Will Pay People to Use It” by Dharna Noor for the Gizmodo website (“We come from the future”). The article continues:
“The fossil fuel industry and its allies love saying that renewable energy increases utility bills. But in the UK, new research shows that coming offshore wind farms could actually make bills more affordable. In the short term, previous renewable energy projects have increased bills because they’ve been built with government subsidies.
But a study published in Nature Energy on Monday found that the country’s latest approved offshore wind projects will be built so cheaply that they’ll actually be able to pay money back to the UK government. That money will go towards reducing household energy bills.”
According to Malte Jansen, a research associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, “Energy subsidies used to push up energy bills, but within a few years, cheap renewable energy will see them brought down for the first time. This is an astonishing development.”
To read the article in its entirety, click HERE.
Britain’s offshore wind projects will be built so cheaply that they’ll actually be able to pay money back to the UK government. This is an astonishing development! Click To Tweet
FEATURED IMAGE: I found this photo accompanying “Tidal Transit Orders Third Wind Farm Crew Transfer Vessel” on the Offshore Wind website. I chose it because it has a vaguely science-fictiony look and feel to it. Looking at those gigantic three-bladed turbines and I ant to hear the creepy, unsettling horn-like bellow of the tripods in the 2005 version of War Of The Worlds.
Finally, the title of this piece, “Everyone Knows It’s Windy,” is a nod to one of the very best singles of 1967, the Association’s Windy: “Who’s trippin’ down the streets of the city, smiling at everybody she sees? Who’s reaching out to capture a moment? Everyone knows it’s Windy!”
Just writing these lyrics and thinking about this record makes me smile at the Windys that I have known in my life. I hope each reader gets to meet (and maybe even know for a few hours) at least one Windy in her and his life . . .
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
