New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is doing his best to make the city as green as possible. He’s so obsessed with this fad (going green) that he wants to install windmills in strategic locations around the city, chiefly along the Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island coasts; skyscrapers and bridges could also see them. They’d be expected to generate as much as 10 percent of the city’s energy in 10 years.
And that sounds fine, sure, until the “not in my backyard” lobby gets its mitts all over the proposal. It’s the same thing with offshore drilling: sounds like a good idea (not really, but that’s for another day) until you tell people that their pretty white sand beaches could be adversely affected.
via Drudge
I applaud this idea. New York already has a pretty low per capita carbon footprint, and if we were able to harness some of the renewable power around us it’d be even lower. There’s no reason that we couldn’t put solar panels or wind turbines on every rooftop in New York – in fact, with the skyscrapers around NYC the advantages of wind would be tremendous. Of course there would have to be some low-impact designs to make sure the visuals and noise don’t impact too much, but I think there’s a real chance that something like this would be beneficial in the long term. And people will get over having turbines on buildings – it’s not like most people look up anyway, and the rooftops here are already littered with water towers.
I applaud the idea of reducing carbon footprint and finding more efficient methods of producing energy, but not at the expense of changing one of the world’s iconic skylines. Skyscraper rooftop turbines are fine, offshore windfarms placed a few miles out in the ocean is fine (ex. like Delaware is doing), but not right near the downtown at eye level.
Couldn’t NY’s skyline become iconic for its wind generation? I’m not talking about putting a turbine on the top of the Chrysler Building…
Worth a try. Kudo’s for hanging his ass out for potential ridicule.