How Do You Plan Ship Navigation Around Future U.S. East Coast Offshore Wind Turbines?

Mariners hear New York offshore wind power plans at SUNY | WorkBoat

Off to starboard, a row of towering wind turbines spun slowly amid low fog and showers, casting flickers on the bridge radar screen. "This is an 18,000-TEU containership," explained Eric Johansson, a professor of marine transportation, standing at the Bouchard Transportation bridge simulator at the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx, N.Y.

 From article, (Off to starboard, a row of towering wind turbines spun slowly amid low fog and showers, casting flickers on the bridge radar screen.

“This is an 18,000-TEU containership,” explained Eric Johansson, a professor of marine transportation, standing at the Bouchard Transportation bridge simulator at the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx, N.Y.

“As these rotors spin, they will create some radar images, so we show that,” said Johansson, as an offshore service vessel emerged from the murky computer simulation, newly built by Kongsberg Digital Simulation Ltd.

The scene imagines a not-too-distant future, perhaps as soon as 2022, after Statoil builds its planned offshore wind energy array between approaches to New York Harbor.

“So this is going to be different,” said Johansson, a third-generation New York tugboat captain, as a visitor tried his hand at maneuvering an articulated tug-barge near the row of the simulated towers. “I don’t know how this will all fit, or how it will work out.”

At SUNY Maritime’s annual towing industry conference, mariners heard about those plans — and even bigger proposals for New York to get much more wind energy out of the ocean by 2030.

“The big takeaway is there’s a huge opportunity with offshore wind for the maritime industry and manufacturing,” said Greg Matzat, an advisor to the offshore wind industry who worked with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the agency leading New York’s ambitious offshore wind planning.

“There’s a lot of users out there,” Matzat added. “Industry wants to work with everybody here to minimize impacts … one of the reasons we know this can be solved is they do it in Europe.”

The Coast Guard is in charge of navigational risk assessment, and working on an integrated approach that anticipates large wind arrays from southern New England to South Carolina, said Lt. Cmdr. Josh Buck of the Coast Guard’s New York Sector.

“It can ultimately cause large effects if those cumulative effects are taken into account,” said Buck. That effort to establish an overall routine system, allowing for federal offshore wind energy lease development and adequate fairways for shipping, is anticipated to take two to five years, he said.

“It is in a planning and analysis stage now,” said Buck, and maritime interests should expect to soon see a “call for information” to help the Coast Guard in that process.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind development, held a meeting in Washington, D.C., last week with the Coast Guard, wind developers and other interested groups, said Buck.

BOEM ultimately calls the shots on approving the location and configuration of offshore wind developments, but the Coast Guard is “the proponent for navigational safety,” he said. If something “really poses a risk, we’re going to do our best to provide that feedback.”

Clearances and setbacks from shipping routes are in that discussion, and distances of two nautical miles along traffic separation schemes, and five nautical miles at their entrances, have been starting point guidelines.

“Each of those will be looked at on a case-by-case basis,” said Buck. “This involves so many stakeholders…we’re going to have to work through it together.”)

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The Stars are Aligning for Electric Car Companies and Electric Utilities.

US utilities have finally realized electric cars may save them

Pity the utility company. For decades, electricity demand just went up and up, as surely as the sun rose in the east. Power companies could plan ahead with confidence. No longer. This year, the Tennessee Valley Authority scrapped its 20-year projections through 2035, since it was clear they had drastically underestimated the extent to which renewable...

From article, (Pity the utility company. For decades, electricity demand just went up and up, as surely as the sun rose in the east. Power companies could plan ahead with confidence. No longer. This year, the Tennessee Valley Authority scrapped its 20-year projections through 2035, since it was clear they had drastically underestimated the extent to which renewable energy would depress demand for electricity from the grid.

But there is a bright spot for utilities: electric vehicles (EV), which make up 1% of the US car market. For years, that market barely registered on utilities’ radar. As EVs find growing success, utilities are building charging infrastructure and arranging generous rebates. Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, and New Jersey’s PSE&G have partnered with carmakers to offer thousands of dollars in rebates for BMW, Nissan, and other brands.

Now utilities are asking Congress for help as they attempt to keep tapping into EV demand. A collection of 36 of the nation’s largest utilities wrote a letter (PDF) to congressional leadership on March 13, asking for a lift on the cap on EV tax credits. The signatories’ include California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, New York’s Consolidated Edison, the southeast’s Duke Energy Company, and others covering almost every state.

At the moment, Americans who buy electric vehicles receive a $7,500 federal tax credit (along with some state incentives) for each vehicle. That full credit is limited to the first 200,000 EVs sold by each carmaker in the US. Six months after that threshold is crossed, tax incentives begin to decline, and disappear entirely after about a year and a half.

Tesla’s customers will likely see their tax credits sunset this year, followed by GM and Nissan. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that puts them at a disadvantage to foreign automakers such as Germany’s Volkswagen and China’s Volvo, which are just starting to sell EVs in the US. That would also dampen sales of EVs just as utilities need customers to plug their cars into the grid. Electrifying US cars and non-commercial trucks would add 774 terrawatt hours of electricity demand, nearly the same as the entire US industrial sector, Bloomberg estimates. Globally, EVs are expected to drive electricity consumption up 300-fold by 2040 (pdf), to about 5% of total consumption.

Politicians, as well as energy analysts, agree that the current arrangement is not ideal (paywall). Options range from lifting the cap entirely to sunsetting the credits for all automakers at the same time, so no company is at a competitive disadvantage. Utilities are lining up behind an effort led by Oregon senator Jeff Merkley to eliminate the cap if Congress passes a spending bill to keep the government open by next week.)

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The Evidence Mounts that Electric Cars are Cleaner than Gasoline Vehicles, No Matter How you are Generating the Power to Charge Them.

Look Here: Even More Evidence That Electric Cars Could Save the Planet

Everyone's saying it: The future of driving is electric. The big-name car companies have plans to start giving Tesla some tough competition. Jaguar's I-Pace electric SUV will be on sale soon, and Porsche is teasing a new concept Mission E Cross Turismo, which looks like an SUV'd Panamera (in a good way).

From article, (“For the US overall, an electric vehicle is much cleaner than a gasoline vehicle, even when you take into account the emissions from natural gas, coal, or however else you’re generating the electricity,” says Dave Reichmuth, a senior engineer in the nonprofit's clean vehicles program. And as the electric grid moves away from dirty fuel sources, the gap is widening.   The UCS study looks beyond driving-related emissions to consider the entire supply chain that goes into making cars go. For the gas guys, that means all the emissions associated with extracting crude oil are included. For electrics, the UCS uses power plant emissions data from the EPA, and includes the environmental cost of mining coal, for example. Because different chunks of the country make power in different ways, the results vary by region.

researchers turned their calculations into a familiar format: miles per gallon. An electric car driver in renewable-happy California is doing as much damage to the environment as a gas car that gets 109 miles per gallon. In Texas, that number drops to 60 mpg. In the center of the country, around Illinois and Missouri, it’s just 39 mpg. Nationwide, under this system, electric cars produce the same emissions as cars that get 80 mpg—making them several times cleaner than the average economy of regular cars, which hovers around 28 mpg.

 In 2009, when the UCS started running these figures, an electric car in California would get only 78 mpg. In Kansas and Colorado, they’d be lucky to hit 35—now those areas have jumped to 46 mpg. Credit the increase to the country's shift away from coal, which in 2009 made half the nation's electricity, and now makes about a third, and toward renewables, which now account for 10 percent of electricity generation. “Even used EVs that are out there are getting cleaner over time, and that doesn’t happen with a gas car,” Reichmuth says.)

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SpaceX is Clobbering the Competition

SpaceX to fly reused rockets on half of all 2018 launches as competition lags far behind

Speaking at SATELLITE 2018, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reiterated the company's commitment to and their customers' acceptance of reusable rockets at the 2018, stating that SpaceX intends to fly reused boosters on at least half of their 2018 launch manifest. Barring unforeseen circumstances, SpaceX is effectively on track to complete 30 separate missions this year ...

 From article, (Speaking at SATELLITE 2018, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reiterated the company’s commitment to and their customers’ acceptance of reusable rockets at the 2018, stating that SpaceX intends to fly reused boosters on at least half of their 2018 launch manifest.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, SpaceX is effectively on track to complete 30 separate missions this year with more than half flying flight-proven Falcon 9 (and Heavy) boosters. 

Thus far, the company has completed five launches – three flight-proven – in two months, perfectly extrapolating out to ~18 flight-proven missions and 30 total launches in 2018. While the middle weeks of March will not see any SpaceX launches, the company is on track to reach 11 flights total in late April/early March, six with reused boosters.

SpaceX’s hard-won solution to rapid and cheaply reusable rocket boosters – is weeks away from its first launch, with something like six or more additional Block 5 boosters in the late stages of construction and assembly at SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. The first prototype of BFR, a rocket designed with a fully-reusable booster and upper stage, has already begun to be assembled, with spaceship test hops scheduled to begin in 2019 and full-up orbital tests hoped to begin as early as 2020. Even with a pessimistic outlook on SpaceX’s BFR development prospects, the likelihood of orbital tests/operational launches beginning before the mid-2020s is incredibly high, barring insurmountable technological hurdles.

Whether or not SpaceX actually manages to begin its first flights to Mars in 2022 (even 2024-2026), BFR and its highly reusable orbital upper stage will swallow the launch industry whole if it manages to be even a tenth as affordable as its engineers intend it to be, and it will likely be in the late stages of hardware development and test launches before ULA, Arianespace, or ILS have even begun to operationally fly their tepid responses to reusability.)

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The Future Plans for Life on the Moon

Moon bases being planned now may show us how to live off-planet

Moon bases have long been a staple of science fiction, but a renewed push for lunar exploration suggests they're on the brink of becoming science fact. Half a century after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, President Trump has ordered NASA to plan a return.

From article, (Experts say the moon’s low gravity and proximity to Earth, along with its natural resources, make it a perfect staging post for missions to Mars and other deep-space destinations as well as a new frontier for humans to settle.

“The surface of the moon is the size of Africa,” says Prof. Bernard Foing, a scientist at the European Space Agency and leader of the agency’s “Moon Village” lunar base concept. “So you could really have a fully developed eighth continent playing a number of roles like a manufacturing hub, a great tourist destination, or a space port hub.”

Eventually, the moon will likely have permanent settlements — perhaps underground cities inside the recently discovered lava tubesthat could protect settlers from space radiation. But plenty of lunar activity is planned for the coming decade.

NASA’s 2019 budget includes plans for a space station in lunar orbit. The station’s first components will launch in 2022, and NASA is working with industrial partners to develop habitats and landers. The goal is to allow astronauts to make regular trips to the surface by the end of the decade.

India and China are planning to put rovers on the moon later this year, and while the Google Lunar XPRIZE — a competition to spur private lunar exploration — announced in January that it would end without a winner, many former contestants say their missions will go ahead.

One former contestant, Japanese start-up ispace (which competed as Team Hakuto), recently raised $90 million to build robotic landers and rovers for the moon. These would be the key elements of a lunar transportation network that could open the door to various commercial operations.

"There are endless commercial opportunities,” says ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada. “Once we identify available resources on the moon, we anticipate the arrival of a wide variety of industries, such as mining, steel, agriculture, medicine, energy, real estate, and more.”

The most ambitious vision for lunar exploration is ESA’s Moon Village. While still just a concept, it would promote collaboration between national space agencies and private companies with the goal of building a permanent base. “You can look at it as a lab for learning how to live off-planet,” says Foing. “Then we can really become a multi-planet civilization.”

Foing says one of the best places to build a base might be be at the Lunar South Pole. High elevations there get almost year-round sunlight, which means it should be relatively easy to generate plentiful solar power. And the pole's permanently shadowed craters are believed to hold large deposits of ice, which could be melted for drinking water and split using electrolysis to provide oxygen for astronauts to breathe and hydrogen to use as rocket fuel.

The water could also be used to irrigate crops in lunar greenhouses. A 2014 study by Dutch scientists showed that carrots and tomatoes can grow in soil similar to the dusty, rocky soil (regolith) that covers the moon.

Lunar soil may also prove useful as a building material. ESA has successfully used simulated lunar soil to 3D print a 1.5-ton building block. “The huge advantage of 3D printing is you don't have to take all the parts from Earth,” says Mark Hopkins, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based National Space Society.

Hopkins says robots remotely operated from Earth or lunar orbit will build basic habitats and other infrastructure before humans arrive, adding that the habitats would likely be buried under several feet of soil to shield inhabitants from cosmic rays and solar flares.

Foing expects that by 2030 there will be up to 10 astronauts on the moon, each spending six months before returning to Earth. What exactly will they be doing? In addition to exploring the environment and building a base, he says, they’ll likely be conducting experiments to gauge the effect of reduced gravity (the moon has one-sixth the gravitational attraction as Earth) on plants, animals, and humans.

Mining is likely to be another major activity. Ice is a valuable commodity in space, and the moon is also thought to have major deposits of iron, titanium, and other metals. Given the reduced gravity, launching a heavy load from the moon takes only one-twentieth as much energy as launching the same load from Earth. Thus mined materials could be used to supply missions to Mars or to refuel satellites to extend their operational lifespans. As Hopkins puts it, “The moon will be a good gas station."

Moon life will be tough. There would be strict limits on time outdoors to limit radiation exposure, Hopkins says, adding that lunar dust is so sharp and sticky that it rapidly degrades equipment and could be dangerous if inhaled.

Isolation would be another challenge. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, and if a medical emergency or some other crisis arose on the moon, help from Earth would take three days to arrive. On the other hand, moon dwellers would be able to communicate with people back home with only a minor delay and have internet access as well. “You’ll still be able to check Facebook,” Hopkins says.

Lunar bases presumably would be governed by the 1967 Space Treaty, which prevents nations from claiming sovereignty over lunar territory or using it for military purposes. And the treaty says any space mission, whether public or private, is the responsibility of the nation launching it. Foing says that makes sense for the foreseeable future, as it promotes international cooperation and helps ensure that lunar development won’t be left to profit-driven companies.

But Hopkins says that as lunar outposts give way to larger commercial operations and permanent settlements, the treaty may need to be modified. Ultimately, he says, lunar colonists might decide that self-determination is best. “They might say we are a lot more similar than these crazy guys on Earth,” he says. “Let's tell them to get lost and set up our own country on the moon.”)

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