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The Wind and the Waves
The "environmental impacts" of a power project can be difficult to identify, much less assess, when the project involves a wholly new technology or will be in a new type of location. So it is helpful to have guidance on the scope of issues to address.
In June 2005, for example, the Bureau of Land Management developed a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for wind development on federal lands in several western states. That PEIS—a broad analysis used to investigate the environmental impacts of a large-scale initiative—laid the groundwork for narrower environmental analyses of site-specific impacts of individual projects. It identified the kinds of impacts for such projects and included some guidelines for the analysis of the potential effects of wind projects in several environmental categories—migratory birds, endangered species, acoustics, viewshed, and so on.
So, instead of each individual EIS beginning from square one, the PEIS provides a more streamlined and predictable licensing process.
The need for guidelines like these is particularly striking for power projects located in the ocean, which for the most part is a new site for the generation of electricity, especially in the United States.
On the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) of the United States, wind, waves, and ocean currents have the potential to provide (by some estimates) more than 1 million megawatts (MW) of energy. The OCS covers an enormous area: As U.S. territory, it is the area of submerged lands, subsoil, and seabed, from the boundary of state jurisdiction (approximately three nautical miles offshore) to the limit of federal jurisdiction (approximately two hundred nautical miles offshore), on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico.
Read the entire article.
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