Fresh Kills

Most of you are probably aware of the enormous Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island (which used to take all of NYC's waste back in the middle of the century). In recent years, there have been grand plans to transform the area into a park while creating roads, recreation areas, landfill mitigation (and energy harvesting) and the possibility for renewable energy (AKA wind turbines). That part everybody knows (a dumb Philadelphian like myself just discovered this after I moved to NYC, shortly after I found out Staten Island was actually part of NYC and not Jersey)

Now I know there was a large push from both the public and local reps for providing wind energy on the site (from various articles), and but when the DGEIS (draft generic environmental impact statement) came out in May and then the Public Hearing occured in September, wind power was basically ruled out. Other than a few vague articles I found saying that people were upset, the issue pretty much died. They did mention landfill gas reclamation for energy, but no wind.

Now here we are looking at a real life example of a huge capital project that could become a symbol for minimizing dependance on coal (small but something) and give the public what they are asking for (unlike the Puerto Rico lecture where many were opposed) . I wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't for the fact that the reasoning given in the EIS was so breif. I saw no potential site maps with wind load studies. You can see for yourself in the "renewable energy supply" of the energy section (pages 15-6 and 15-7)

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/fresh_kills_park/pdf/VOLUME%20I/15_Energy.pdf

Many of the narrative talks of 'potential' but ended up not really being included in the master plan.

Now I am asking if anybody has heard anything in the past month or so regarding recent developments, if anything noteworthy came of the public hearing (can't find anything on the NYS Assembly website http://assembly.state.ny.us/Press/). I'm guessing it got pushed on the backburner after the financial mess.

The main reason why I am bringing this up, other than the fact that it is a great land use and environmental case study is that so many of us feel very strongly that pushing renewable energy is a priority. If we really want to make bold statements like "we should reduce our demand for oil" or "reduce greehouse gas emmission" then cases like these are the steps we need to take to get there. We need thousands of these steps to even come close to making a dent.

Now for all I know, this has already been adressed and for all I know it's already been thoroughly proven not feasible to put wind turbines on the island. My point is that I haven't seen the arguments. Have you?