YOUR TAX MONEY THROWN TO THE WIND BY CUYAHOGA COUNTY COMMISSIONERS?

Submitted by Jeff Buster on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 15:13.

Cuyahoga County has issued  RFQ 8382 for a so called “Feasability Study concerning Lake Eire Wind Energy Center”. See County site here.  Responses are due April 23. 2007  The  "Center" is not a center as in a building, but  an offshore installation of  turbines.

Has anyone seen any advertising for this RFQ?  There was a meeting held on March 28 which, unfortunately, I could not attend.  Was this RFQ in the Dodge Reports?  If it wasn't, this  RFQ is  definitely  bogus.  I searched Dodge  quickly and found nothing.

Although Mr. Rosenberg was not on the list of :”task force” members voted on and approved by the Commissioners, Mr. Rosenberg (GE Marketing) is back on this list presented at the March 28th, 2007 meeting.

You can see further information about the meeting here

I don’t believe that this RFQ has been adequately advertised because there were no international turbine manufactures/ developers represented on the list of attendees – correct me if there was one.  I don’t like taxpayer money going out on a bogus inadequately advertised RFQ.  It is worth noting that in the :”task forces” original report released a month ago – the “task force” identified only one company who expressed any interest in offshore wind – French EnXco.  The following material is from page 22 of the County publication Building a New Energy Future available as a PDF on the County Development web site here  The list of firms was originally in a table so it is a little scrambled here.  The point is that only one company was identified as having any interest in offshore wind, yet the County is determined to proceed with water wind rather than land wind.  Something seems amiss.

 

Table 2: Major Wind Farm Developers

Major Wind Farm Developers Offshore Experience & Interest

John Deere Credit/Suzlon/FPL

(considering Long Island project, USA) Not interested

Babcock and Brown Recommend contact

BP

Have a pilot offshore project, but not

interested in third party offshore

EnXco

Offshore development is an emphasis

area for the company and it has

expressed interest in our project

European developers, various Not contacted

FPL

Offshore development in process in Long

Island

Goldman Sachs (Horizon) May be interested

Outland Renewable Energy

No offshore experience; not interested in

offshore at this time

Second Wind Not contacted

Shell

Have a pilot offshore project, but not

interested in third party offshore

I do compliment the County for getting the above material up on their web site – now if we can get the Cleveland Foundation to do the same that would also help drive open networking.

 

 

 

 

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Imagine if this was an open and inclusive process

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 17:55.

In the year this group has been working on this in closed rooms, as a small elite task force, a large open community of various experts in related fields, and developers and investors and public officials at all levels, could have collaborated on all aspects of wind and other energy options - we have the ability to enable collaboration but that requires collaborators. So now we have one set of RFQs out for one option for large scale wind - that is not impressive. I'm sure the task force is rushing to churn out other recommendations - but why should they. We should all be bringing the right solutions to the table - we're doing that here - grow the dialog.

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