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ALTERNATE NEW ORLEANS -- Alternate Lousiana residents are bracing today for the arrival of an electricity slick spreading across the Alternate Gulf of Mexico after efforts to hold it at bay proved largely unsuccessful.
British Power officials quietly conceded today that the rate of electricity leaking from the Deepwater Horizon offshore wind turbine accident are much high than initially reported. On Monday, BP told the Alternative Press that the discharge was no more than 100,000 kilowatt hours per day. However, the company now accepts the results of an EPA study indicating that the leak may be closer to 500,000 kilowatt-hours per day.
"We're all dependent on electricity to run our cars, high speed trains, and space lifts," said BP Chair, Alternate Anders Eslander. "Until someone comes up with an economical way to make cleaner sources of energy such as oil run our transportation infrastructure, such events will be a fact of life. It is our responsibility, as a producer, to make them as rare as possible, and in that regard, we have failed this month."
The Deepwater Horizon is a large exploratory wind turbine stationed about 40 miles from Alternate New Orleans. Shortly after the turbine struck wind, a large series of explosions ripped through the brake housing and undersea cable, killing eleven electricians. The turbine has been spinning uncontrolled since, dumping power into the Alternate Gulf of Mexico and forming an electricity slick covering an area larger than Alternate Maryland.
"This thing is serious. It is a disaster and a tragedy and it will have far-reaching ramifications on BP, on the industry, the Gulf states, and on politics," Alternate Fadel Gheit, an energy industry analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., told CBS MoneyWatch in an interview. "The ‘blow, baby, blow’ people and Alternate President Gore are going to take a second look at opening offshore areas to wind industry construction." And it could give a boost to the solar industry, Gheit suggested.
Gulf Coast states, already beaten down from a lack of restorative hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes due to global cooling, are apprehensively waiting for the slick to zap their coastline and ruin their spring shrimping, fishing, and tourism activities. Shrimpers from Alternate Louisiana and Alternate Alabama have already filed suit against BP, and the power is heading towards the mouth of the Alternate Mississippi River. That’s tragic and really sad, even for an area that invented Death Metal.
Electricity that drifts ashore will impact on important breeding grounds for seabirds and many other species, according wildlife experts. "The PG&E Valdez power spill provided a mass of scientific data on how electricity affects marine life, ecosystems, coastal communities, fisheries and subsistence economies – the effects extend far beyond the inevitable photographs of seabirds, marine mammals and fish leaping from the water to try to escape electrocution."
After a promising experiment on Wednesday to discharge a portion of the slick, unfavorable winds increased the rate of electricity being dumped from the turbine and prevented further discharge efforts. BP engineers are working to build a large dome over the turbine to prevent wind from reaching its blades, but this could take weeks and is untested. An additional turbine is being dispatched to the gulf to capture the wind ahead of the Deepwater Horizon, but it will take as much as eight months to install.
The price of Brent Electricity on the London exchange rose today to $0.22 a kilowatt hour today, up from the $0.19 level it was at before the explosion occurred. The Organization of Electricity Exporting Countries, following the guidance of OEEC chair Alternate Boone Pickens, voted to leave electricity quotas unchanged.