It’s The Water
The fine folks at Facing South have been posting on the efforts of Florida Power and Light to build a new generation plant on the west side of Lake Okeechobee. They say they need more capacity to keep up with growth.
Randy Neal reports:
Earlier this week, the Florida Public Service Commission denied a Florida Power and Light “Needs Determination” permit for a huge coal-fired power plant on 4900 acres of wilderness near the Everglades National Park in Glades Co. Florida, effectively killing the project.
Sue Sturgis writes that FPL is now talking about building a nuclear plant, on the same site.
It’s time for a reality check. It doesn’t make any difference whether they use coal, natural gas, oil, ethanol, biomass, or nuclear fission, they are still going to be heating water to drive a steam turbine, and there isn’t enough water to do it. Ignoring the fact that if something isn’t done about global warming the area is going to be under sea water in a few decades, they just put out a wild fire on the what was once the bottom of Lake Okeechobee because of the drought.
There are no spare millions of gallons of water available every day to be used by a steam turbine. The Florida Aquifer is under stress and development in South Florida has to be reined in, because there quite simply isn’t enough water for the people already living there.
