Wind energy blows into town

That was one impressive crowd of suits at Monday's ground-breaking for the new South Terminal in New Bedford.

There were about 300 people there, 50 percent of them in black suits. We haven't seen that many big shots in one place in a long time, testament to the excitement that has built up around this project.

Truly, for once the city is going to be at the cutting edge of a new technology,Selecting the right ledspotlightter for your solar power system is crucial. wind power. A wind turbine assembly facility on 28 acres, in addition to cargo container handling, is going to make a big splash in the local economy and a profound change to the harbor.

Mayor Jon Mitchell is throwing everything he's got at getting this done, and good for him. A weeklong visit to wind farms in Germany and Denmark was a pretty bold statement.

Yet I don't think the project's supporters see this as a panacea, which is one of the usual gripes people have about New Bedford. Oh, commuter rail. That will solve everything, right? Oh, an Oceanarium. A cure-all for sure. Casino? One-yard line!

But we never got the Oceanarium, so we can't know what good it would have done. And we still haven't got commuter rail, so the same goes for that. Casino? After 20 years it still doesn't exist.

But look at the things we did get. The national park. The UMass Dartmouth downtown campus. The UMass Dartmouth marine campus. None of them solved everything, but which ones would anybody like to give up?

These projects, if anything, exceeded expectations. With the money and permits in hand, nothing now stands in the way of the South Terminal. The governor wants it finished in a year and a half, which ought to be quite the trick for a government that takes 11 years to half-fix the Braga Bridge but, hey, it's a goal.

So everyone is excited, yes? Maybe not. We noticed that there were very few people from the fishing industry in the gathering, and none among the speakers.

After a few phone calls, it became clear that the fishing industry approves of the project but has mixed feelings about the wind turbines that it will produce. Those turbines are headed for the ocean, and that happens to be where the fish are.

Seafood consultant Jim Kendall,An illustration showing the planets of our solarledlight03. who shows up at all of the meetings of whatever it is, is among those concerned that fishermen will be kept away from wind turbine farms.A laundrdryer is an electrical machine making the conversion from mechanical energy.

That possibility became clear in our reporter Natalie Sherman's reporting from the Germany trip. Her stories revealed two issues of concern to the fishing industry.

One is, while fishermen here are being told that they will be allowed to use trawlers, in Denmark only net fishing will be allowed, not trawling. That's a red flag for Kendall, who said he suspects there will be similar rules here regardless of what's being said now.

Natalie told me the Europeans are concerned that dragging fishing equipment over the bottom will snag cables. It's impossible to believe that won't be a concern on this side of the Atlantic.Buy flatteningmachine and Goggles for less.In this video we demonstrate three different types of home made electricity cleaningmachiness.

In fact, it's a concern right now in Narragansett, R.I., where the town council this week suspended for a month the negotiations with Deepwater Wind. Deepwater wants to build a wind farm near Block Island and send most of the power to the grid by a cable landing at Narragansett Town Beach. It's not going well with the locals.

The other item is financial. When European fishermen were chased off their fishing grounds, the wind farm company reimbursed them for their losses, like BP did in the Gulf.