Europe continues to leave the United States behind

The UK’s projected wind energy output was boosted this week by the approval of the London Array project in the Thames Estuary. It will generate more electricity than any offshore plant in the world and Britain is now well on its way to having well over half of the world’s offshore wind power plants currently in construction. 

Offshore projects, more appealing to those who believe land-based turbines are a blot on the landscape, are avoiding some of the local resistance from planners which have long bedevilled onshore schemes. With developers eyeing three main strategic sites in England – the Greater Wash, the Thames Estuary and north-west England – several projects are expected to come online in the next few years. The offshore projects currently planned, together with those already in operation, could supply a total of 20 gigawatts of clean electricity, amounting to 17 per cent of the UK’s total electricity supply. 

As well as the five offshore wind farms currently in operation, another 10 have won approval and eight are at the planning stage. One of the biggest in the offing is the Lynne/Inner Dowsing project in Lincolnshire. It comprises two adjacent wind farms acquired by Centrica in December 2003, which are being built 5km (3 miles) off the Skegness coast. The two 90-megawatt farms are together expected to provide enough power for more than 130,000 homes and to reduce CO2 emissions significantly.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/green_living/article3047623.ece

The moon has impact wrinkles

Wrinkles on the moon could reveal secrets regarding devastating impacts that also ravaged Earth and other planets in their early days. These impacts could have scoured life from the young Earth-but they might have also planted the ingredients for life as well, scientists said today at a European conference. The researchers focused on giant basins on the moon believed to be wounds from the "lunar cataclysm," a time 3.8 billion to 4.2 billion years ago when the moon suffered heavy bombardment from asteroids or comets. There are roughly 50 recognizable lunar basins more than 186 miles (300 kilometers) wide, most of which are thought to date from then. To learn more about these basins, the researchers peered at pictures taken by a microcamera on SMART-1, a European Space Agency satellite that orbited the moon from 2004 to 2006. They combined data from these images with records from the U.S. Clementine space probe, which looked at visible, ultraviolet and infrared light from the moon during 1994 and measured its gravitational field to determine the makeup and concentration of minerals in the lunar surface. 

Read the entire article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070822_wrinkles_moon.html