Excellent post Big Gav. I think the Gund Institute is one of the few areas for the study of ecological economics. We are hoping to bring Dr. Costanza to Michigan for this year's Conference on Michigan's Future: Energy, Economy and Environment www.futuremichigan.com

I always find your posts on many various topics to be very informative. In the future I will be looking for information on offshore wind power so anything you could send along on this would be helpful.

Our governor has recently formed a Great Lakes Offshore Wind council and we are going to be looking into this for Michigan. However, much of Lake Michigan is >30 Meters in depth so we will need some creative ideas on offshore platforms. We are also fortunate to have the 1875 MW Ludington pumped storage plant nearby to help store some of this wind energy.

Thanks for all of your efforts and keep blogging.

Dear Jim,

This might be up your alley: http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/4849

Wind power for the "Windy City" eh? - Now that's *thinking*!

That is a great post Cretaceous. thanks a bunch. Looks like Big Gav is all over offshore wind too. Not surprising.

Good to see someone remembers my posts - thanks Cretaceous !

That particular post was looking at floating offshore wind, which is still a pretty immature field.

Jerome has done a few posts on regular offshore wind power, which has huge potential and is being harnessed today in large scale projects (Jerome's area of expertise).

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/30/231713/57
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4670
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5003

Here's one on wind power in Lake Ontario too:

http://local.theoildrum.com/node/2513