I don't know where this one is, but there is a new one at Great Lakes Science Center on Cleveland's lakeshore.  Here's the link: http://www.glsc.org/visit/upcoming.php?id=298 (turn the sound down before you click unless you want to hear the wack tape loop while you read) There's a picture of it here and some interesting dialogue, too. http://www.gcbl.org/

I have asked Green City Blue Lake to provide us with the Anemometer reads (from the crib) on their site like a current temp and weather link. Anyone think Beach and Lefkowitz can make that happen? Anyone at RealNEO want to try it? Who's gonna throw down the gauntlet on wind data in Northeast Ohio?

I can see it now... The scene in Talkies; the woman flips open her laptop and says hello to the person with whom she is meeting, but instead of saying, hang on a minute, I have to check my email, she says, "Hold on a minute, I want to check the wind speed and know just how many KW hours it might be producing right now..."

Andrew Watterson (Cleveland’s Sustainability Boy Wonder) said, in response to an architect at the Sustainability Forum with Cleveland Green Building Coalition, Case and the AIA a couple of weeks ago, that if the researchers can find a work around to offshore wind in fresh water (ice is an issue), Lake Erie would be the spot for wind in the Great Lakes. The towers, however, would not be adorning the backyards of Lake Avenue mansions; rather they would be placed beyond the intake crib -- a good 14 miles off shore. Unless your eyesight is REALLY good, they would appear as specks on the horizon. This, of course, would not diminish the good they would do.

I agree about their artful quality. They are so much prettier than Perry or Davis Bessie. Martha Eakin tells me that the prevailing wind in Cleveland is from the SSW. This may be why Gene Krebs of Greater Ohio is talking to Ohio farmers about rezoning portions of their farmland for wind towers -- tall wind. Jeff Buster, as noted in his posts on this site, is working on small wind -- something practical for the environmentalist who lives in town -- maybe not cell phone small, but smaller than what we're looking at here. But, best of all is Jeff and Martha's idea to power the RTA with wind -- Ride the wind -- take the RTA. Now that's innovative! That's green thinking.

I was doing some searching on ofshore wind power and come accross the Cape Wind Project.

http://www.capewind.org I recommend visiting the site.
One thing to note about wind power is that Lake Erie has relatively light winds and would not produce full power output of a standard power windmill. There is an interesting entry on Wind power with a simple wind map at wikipedia.

    I was closed out of the most recent Rain Barrel workshops sponsored by Shaker Lakes Nature Center and Cleveland Botanical Garden (or whatever it's called now that you have to pay to visit nature in the city). That's right, I said CLOSED OUT!!!!

This is fabulous news. Not that I didn't get my 4 rain barrels made, but that there were so many people that they had to make a wait list and plan to do it again in June. I am thrilled that so many Clevelanders are beginning to know that their gardens and lawns much prefer rain/roof water to hose/treated city water, even if they don't know that we are paying a premium for all the water we treat and don't treat to put in the lake and river. One obvious premium is bacteria levels so high that you can't swim in what might be beautiful recreation spots along the lake and riverfronts never mind what it does to the fish.

    Visit the North East Ohio Regional Sewer District website and check out the CSO map. http://www.neorsd.org/cmweb/library/NEORSD-CSO-Locations.pdf

What would my first task for a new regional sustainability czar be? Visit all the municipalities and ask them to launch a downspout disconnect program in concert with their municipal water program and NEORSD. We could avoid treating many gallons of water simply by redirecting it to the lawn and not into the storm sewer. And don't give me this flood my neighbor's basement crap. If you do, the city should give to a permit to have your downspout connected -- the rest of us should get off the sewer line.

    When I see the drawings by Forum Architects for the Flats East Bank, and they are on a river colored blue, I have to wonder who is wielding that crayon and have they seen our Cuyahoga River lately? Blue it is not, and will not be, but it could be considerably cleaner. It can't be done by hiring one or two people, it will take a change in behavior by all of us living in the region.

A regional sustainability office is a solid idea -- a good use of the Cleveland Foundations millions. I have to wonder though how this can coordinate with all that is already happening here, i.e. what is NOACCA doing if not just that -- working at regional sustainability. Do we need another layer of beauracracy or just more education and cooperation among the players?

... and I'm glad that we are doing the tests to help us determine whether a large-scale project will make sense.

I also really like the idea of disconnecting our gutters from our sewer system -- I hadn't heard that as a proposal before. We just had new gutters installed, with a little trap in the bottom of each one so we can clean out any small bits of debris on a regular basis. I can't imagine that it would be so difficult to use a similar principle to put in diverters, so that in a huge storm that might threaten my basement or my neighbor's, I could divert stormwater back into the city drains temporarily (but most of the time, be collecting it in rainbarrels for our lawn and plants).

I'm delighted to hear that the Nature Center will have another rain barrel workshop in June, when my husband or I could attend!

Now, if I could just convince him that grass is not the best use of our backyard (I've given up on getting rid of the grass in the front yard, it's just too important to him, but the backyard would definitely be better off with multispecies permaculture rather than the struggling monoculture we have)...

great map Susan.   Now all people need is a relationship with a helpful lab, some lat/long coords, and some sampling jars,  safety awareness, personl protective equipment  and folks can generate their own data. 

i wonder it if would match up to whats on file, if there is anything on file that is.  whos to say if those are national pollution discharge elimination system (npdes) permitted outfallss.  if they are, there should be a mountain of electronic data at the state level that could potentially be plugged into a nice open source gis database... could learn alot.

Last May we started discussing off-shore wind and other environmental issues - seems a good time to revisit and update our thoughts - what's on your mind about all this now?

Disrupt IT

I want windmills -- lots of them -- where ever they will be most cost effecitve and have the least impact on the natural environment (especially birds). I don't think windmills will make our lake front less attractive though. Our lake front is already pretty ugly. There is hardly anything I would call attractive along Cleveland's lake front -- a sewage treatment plant, piles of gravel, a sad rotting, neglected historic building, a waste of space private airport, and a clutter of hundreds of private boats. Once in a while I see a nice sunset or a Great Blue Heron, but I have traveled the world and I have to say Lake Erie circa 2007 is not picturesque. I am sure I would feel differently if I could go back in time 200 years or so, but I live near the lake and I know how it looks and smells. Will windmills blow the stench from the sewage treatment plant near my house farther inland?

From the Union Of Concerned Scientists

"Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors discovered many of the problems at Arizona's Palo Verde Unit 3 while several others revealed themselves during near-misses. As a direct result of these discoveries, the NRC in August 2007 rated Palo Verde Unit 3 as having the worst safety record among the nation's 104 operating nuclear reactors.

UCS is extremely troubled by the situation at Palo Verde. As bad as the long list of safety problems is, even worse was the company's unacceptable response. When confronted with safety problems, rather than use resources to fix the problems, the company spent millions of dollars trying to persuade the NRC that its mistakes—for example, deliberately draining water from the emergency core cooling system pump piping between 1992 and 2004—weren't so bad."

....Click on the "Show Inherently Safe Reactors" button at the bottom of the map...

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html