How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 049: Massive Wind Farm Proposed 15 Miles of California Coast
Renewable Energy is the focus of California for the next 20 years as they want to power the state with 50% renewable energies. A massive floating wind farm is now proposed to be constructed 15 miles off the coast of California.
Listen to the podcast to find out why some people love the idea and others hate it.
Shop for the Ocean:
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10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session49
Welcome to the Speaker for Blue podcast session 49 ladies and gentlemen sustainable energy is on the rise on this episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation and now here's your host he knows dolphins don't care if you have your baby in the water with him Andrew Lewin hey everybody welcome back to another wonderful episode of the Speak Up for Blue podcast your voice for the ocean my name is Andrew Lewin I am your host of this of this podcast founder speakupforblue.com marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer and we've got a great show for you today we're gonna talk about sustainable energy and how people are really reacting to it we'll talk about that in just a sec before I do I want to ask you a question do you feel overwhelmed by the number of ocean issues that the ocean is facing and when you first hear about them do you just kind of feel that overwhelmed where you like you hear about plastic pollution you hear about oil and gas and that and the spills and how much damage it can do to the ocean to the animals and to our own livelihoods in general and you just say you just throw up your arms and say you know what I really don't know what to do I don't know where to begin well we can help you with that that's the whole point of Speak Up for Blue and one of our tools to do that is to support great organizations like one of our partners see turtles forever Speak Up for Blue has built a shop an online store where you can buy ocean swag and the proceeds of buying that those items will go directly to sea turtles forever I'm gonna tell you a little bit about sea turtles forever it's a great organization that works with none other than sea turtles down in Central America and all over the world they go in they work with local they partner with local communities they help local communities understand the fact that poaching eggs from sea turtle nests is harming they are not only their local economy but the populations of sea turtles sea turtles will come to a beach they will lay about you know two to three hundred maybe even four hundred eggs bury them in the beach and then go back out to sea people will post those eat them or sell them and get the money from there however studies have shown and and practical examples have shown that ecotourism we bring people in tourists in to view the sea turtles and be part of that whole experience is actually worth more than poaching eggs sea turtles forever is helping that one by one they're patrolling the beaches to make sure that none of the eggs get poached they're also working with communities to help bring ecotourism to their local community and bring in sustainable money a very sustainable industry into their community and into their livelihoods so that they can live better and live for a better ocean just like we teach here at ocean at Speak Up for Blue so we want to support them there are a small organization there the president is Mark Ward a good friend of mine that I've gotten to know through Speak Up for Blue for the last you know for the last three or four years or over the last three or four years and I want to support I want Speak Up for Blue to have sea turtles forever as our first partner and support them not only financially but we're also going to support them in a lot of their projects that they're working on and I'm working on that that service in a bit and I'll tell you about that in a bit but right now what we want to do is we want to take as a community I want the Speak Up for Blue community to have a tool that they can use to not only support a wonderful organization you know financially but get some ocean swag that has sayings on it like you know you know keep calm conserve the ocean keep calm protect whales keep calm safe shark we have all those designs coming out you can get it on t-shirts you can get on iPhone case you can get on travel mugs or you can get on mugs for home and every time you use one of those every time you wear it or use one of those mugs or wear the t-shirts you're actually speaking up for the ocean to the public you're starting a conversation where people can ask you why you wearing that shirt or what's up with that shirt and you can actually go out and say hey you know I'm really trying to live up for a better ocean and really try and focus on conserving the ocean through my daily life and getting other people to do it as well through this t-shirt or this you know travel mug and stuff like that so you're doing two things at once and it's a really win-win situation for the ocean and I think it's a win-win situation for our community you're supporting a great organization and you're also speaking up for the blue which is what we want to do so you can get to that shop by going to speak up for blue dot com slash shop and and go crazy shop like crazy buy stuff for yourself for your friends there's lots of different sizes there's stuff for men and women all that kind of stuff different colors and it's a great great shop that I really like using that's it for that right now let's get into the show you know we hear you hear a lot on this program where I talk about moving away from you know natural resources like oil and gas you know extractive resources and moving more to sustainable energy sustainable energy comes in some different forms you have solar energy where you get energy from the Sun you have wind energy you have tidal energy so you have all these different forms of sustainable energy and they're just they're really kind of new they're being implemented in different places wind energy and solar energy are probably the most popular of all the sustainable energies there's a lot of push to get those wind farms and solar panel farms up and running and solar panels for the most part haven't really caused any kind of controversy a lot of countries are using them they're being implemented all over the world and you're getting electricity from from it now you're not getting 100% electricity for the for an entire state or entire province or an entire country but you are getting a good proportion of it wind energy is a bit more controversial and it's not controversial in the way it gets its energy but the tools that it used to get the energy so usually you get this big windmill or a number of windmills and massive and I mean like 600 foot windmills 600 foot tall windmills and it's a basically a propeller that goes around and the wind pushes that propeller and from that it makes energy I'm not going to go into the details because I don't know the full details I'm not an engineer but essentially we get this magic of wind hitting the turbines the turbines generating energy and we get the power our homes now they're they're implemented all over the place but they always have some controversy when they're being implemented there when they're being implemented on land which is most of the time you know a lot of people are like oh they're an eyesore or they cause medical problems and I'll be honest I don't know the research behind it I should I should find out more but there are cases where people are finding they're getting headaches and they're getting sick and because and they're blaming the windmills and these are people who rented out their properties to the windmill companies and they're using the property usually it's like old farm land that's been converted to a windmill farm but usually you know people are some people are complaining about this but the biggest thing is an eyesore especially when they're talking about putting windmills out in the ocean windmill farms now traditionally windmill farms have been put out and there's they've basically pot they've basically driven in this huge steel pole that goes into the ocean is buried into the ocean floor to hold up the 600 foot windmill above sea level because you know they they don't want the winds to the winds the gale force winds or storm waves or even waves in general to knock it over because it's obviously a massive structure and it's a huge wind farm so it's it's normal like it's normally a lot of a lot of turbines the problem is is or actually there's a new technology out where they have floating turbines and it's a company in California that wants to put in a number of different turbines I believe it's a hundreds of hundred turbines off the coast of California near Morro Bay this is near Big Sur if you know a lot if you know a little bit about the California terrain it's a very popular tourist area Morro Bay is a very big fishing area fishing village I guess you would call it or fishing town it's off California central coast so it's a very popular area now California is no now they want to put this big windmill farm and I believe it's going to be 15 miles off shore okay 15 miles offshore now normally so to start off it's going to be offshore people are worried that it's going to be an eyesore the big big push in California the big attraction California is its coastline the fact that you can drive up the entire coastline the coastline highway one I believe and you can look out onto the coast and it's just beautiful scenery people don't want to see this big in these this big industrial turbine farm even though it's sustainable energy people think it's an eyesore they think it's a it's a problem the other problem with turbines is normally like I said it when they're driven into the ocean floor to keep them steady it can impact the noise of actually driving them in can actually impact marine mammals around in the area it could also impact just the disturbance in this in the ocean floor can just disturb just the regular habitat animals around that and so forth so people are not usually pleased when that when those turbines are going in they've gone in before but people aren't pleased about it and there's a lot of environmental assessments that have to be done or the big process that has to be done to to make sure that no animals will be harmed or they take their regular precautions of not harming animals that it may be in the area or stopping work when animals are in the area this one this proposed turbine farm is actually gonna be a floating turbine farm so these 600 foot structures actually float on the ocean and I guess it's like a triangular structure underneath but it only has like these anchors that get driven into the into the into the ocean floor not this big steel this big steel pole so it's a little bit different it's supposed to be a little bit better for the ocean for the animals around the ocean and so forth so they are going to be floating which is kind of a new thing now the project they're saying would generate a thousand megawatts of electricity and it's enough to power 300,000 homes currently California is a leader in wind and in wind energy drawing 8% of the electricity from wind turbines and those are wind turbines on land they have it and that so the problem with land is it's restrictive they only have a certain amount of land that they can put wind farms on they feel that using the ocean they have a lot more space and that they can put more wind turbines on it of course that comes with some complications that we'll get in a minute but the governor of of California Jerry Brown governor Jerry Brown has signed along requiring that the state's utilities provide 50% of their electricity from solar wind or other renewable resources by 2030 this is about 15 years from now they want to do it currently they do 20% of electricity from sustainable or renewable resources which is great 20% is awesome it's probably a leader it is a leader and it's probably the highest probably potentially in the world and of course California is always tends to be that more environmentally friendly state that the people there tend to be a little more in tune with the environment so 50% is a big goal they have 30 more percent to do you know this wind farm will contribute significantly to that it'll take a while for this to go in the the owner of the company is Allah Weinstein she's originally from Russia but she's a Honeywell engineer she's you know she's very big and sustainable resources her old company that she used to be a CEO of was a company that actually put that actually designed and developed the floating turbine technology so she's very in tune with renewable resources she understands that this is going to be a long process to put in these turbines she anticipates it'll take six or seven years to get the permits and the reason why is because there's going to be a lot of people who are going to complain about where these turbines are placed or the fact that they're going in now people are kind of 50/50 about this because there's some good things and there's some bad things about this wind turbine and everybody's going to have their own voice because it's going to have to do with their own personal use of the ocean the representative from the Sierra Club Andrew Christie so that's it's actually a pretty good thing he thinks it's a pretty good it's a pretty high goal for energy that they've set in the state of California so they're going to see they're gonna see a lot of projects like this but whenever they do you know they just like you know just like with real estate they're always you know it's always about location where are you going to put it are you going to put in a good area you're going to put in a bad area but the good thing about the fact that these turbines float they won't be ramming any concrete into the ocean floor which is always good because they're always worried about migrating whales they're worried about night lighting they're worried about birds in general the the wind turbine blades have been known if they move fast enough have been known to kill birds migrating birds that go through especially that endangered birds or as you know but anyway any kind of migrating birds so the windmills have to be set at a specific pace so that they don't attract and kill windmill or get windmill attracting kill birds so you got to be careful with that so a lot of environmentalists are very concerned about that however you know a lot of the environmentalists have been telling people that we need to move more towards sustainable energies like this so it's good in a way that we're going more towards renewable resources however you know is this the right location is this the right the floating turbine is the right move how is that how's it going to be going some people say the Susan Jordan director of the California Coastal Protection Network in Santa Barbara says it sounds really really horrible this is a quote-unquote this is a fairly massive project California places a great deal of value on the Pacific coastline and what it looks like when we when you travel there people don't want to look out and see floating industrial facility and that's true I can understand that it's a bit of an ice or however the ala Weinstein says that people that are on beaches will not be able to see the structure because they'll be so far offshore just the way the curvature of the earth you won't be able to see the actual structure you'll just see water if you go up on the hills you'll probably be able to see the structure so it's not going to be terrible it's going to be far enough where you don't really see it but you're going to notice it but I have a bit of a problem with with what you know with what Susan Jordan is saying it's you know it's it's it's you can't have it all you know when it comes to aesthetics yes it'd be nice to just look out into the ocean but we really need these windries with these renewable energies to put in place we're running out of places to put it on land we want to kind of put it out into the ocean as long as it's not harming any animals or disturbing the ecosystem and this this project seems like they're doing everything they can not - they're gonna follow all the permitting they're gonna do their best to get everything going it seems like this is more of a better project than a lot of what's been going on in the past where you drive you know concrete into the ocean floor the other thing what I like about it from an ecological perspective is that each of these turbines when you put something in the ocean like some kind of structure in the ocean each of these turbines are actually going to attract fish it becomes almost fish habitat so you get a lot of great things from there and and you get a lot of animals that are there for fishermen it might be better you'll get local you'll get animals coming off the turbines coming into the ocean I'm switching it it's an attractive force for each of these turbines so it's a good thing to have in my opinion now fishermen on the other hand we were just talked about that they're a little worried about what's going on because they just got restricted from certain areas because of the big marine protected areas that marine protected parks that were put in the marine protected areas that network of marine protected areas that were put in in California so they've been restricted to certain areas of fishing now they have this big wind turbine going in they're a little worried that they're being restricted even more but they said they're willing to so it was Tom Hayford president of the more bait commercial fisheries associate fishermen association said we're willing to work with Weinstein on this who's the president of the company who's involved in this but we have some problems with it like I said we have a lot of areas that are taken away I don't know much of more I don't know how much more we can lose so they're a little bit worried but they're willing to work they're willing to negotiate with this company so it seems like some people really hate it some people really like it and some people are just kind of watching how this develops because from an environmental perspective because you know it's kind of new it's kind of what we need to go towards it's going to help California reach its half of 50% of energy from renewal renewable sources so it's kind of a good thing so there's lots of things that we have to watch here I always find this interesting these projects interesting because everybody comes out and they say oh we need renewable resources we need to focus more on these kind of energy resources and get away from oil but when it comes when push comes to shove when it comes in their backyard or that comes close to them they don't want to have anything to do with it because it's one it's an eyesore to yes it can have negative environmental impacts this is being pushed out offshore where most people won't be able to see it won't notice it they're going to do go through all the permeate to make sure that it's not going to affect the environment or have minimal effects on the environment it's going to bring their renewable energy resources closer to 50% so higher than the 20% that they're at right now and it's going to power 300 or 300 over 300,000 homes this is a big step towards going more towards renewable energies at 50 percent of getting energy from renewable energy is going to have a big drastic a very drastic effect on their climate change sort of influence or their output their carbon output so I think this is a bit of a good thing it's caught you have to be cautious about these processes and make sure that it doesn't you know harm the environment but I think people we need to realize that we need to come up with these types of changes and more and more of these types of changes and if it's in our backyard it's in our backyard as long as it doesn't affect our health and it doesn't affect the health of the ecosystem around us I think it's a it's a win-win situation in the fight against climate change so that those are my thoughts I want to hear what your thoughts are because I know a lot of people have varying thoughts on it so you can go to this the show notes which is www.speakupforblue.com/session49 in the comments right how you feel about these you know these these wind turbines being put offshore do you like it do you not like the idea why really love to hear not judging here I just want to hear what your opinion is it's always good to start a conversation in the speakup for blue community and you know that's what we're here to do you know and if you want to join the speakup for blue community and help the ocean even more I have a free PDF a 10 tips to live for a better ocean PDF that you can access by going to speakupforblue.com/session49 clicking on that link that on that picture that says access here's you can get access to the to the PDF here and signing up for that PDF the other way you can do is you can text the term conserve my ocean to the number three three four four four on your smartphone so just on your smartphone text the word or text the term conserve my ocean all one word to the number three three four four four and you will get access to this free PDF and you will get to find out how you can you know ten tips to live for a better ocean it's what we're here to what we're here to do here at speakup for blue and also support one of those tactics is to support ocean conservation organizations like sea turtles forever to do that you can go to speakupforblue.com/shop and you can shop your hard-away Christmas is coming get that t-shirt for your child for your significant other for your friends for yourself to really speak up for the blue and support a great organization in sea turtles forever so that's it for me today I hope you enjoy the show it's Thursday there's still football going on I'm very happy I'm gonna have a happy night I hope you guys have a great night as well we'll see you tomorrow for ocean talk my name is Andrew Lewis you've been listening to speakup for blue podcast happy conservation (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)