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NEW YORK — Some time in the past year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg morphed into Captain Green, a crusading environmentalist determined to quench New York's insatiable thirst for energy. But yesterday, after unveiling the most radical proposal yet in his expanding green revolution, some observers were quick to suggest an alternate nickname: Mayor Quixote.
At a summit in Las Vegas Tuesday night, Mr. Bloomberg outlined plans that could result in placing large wind turbines atop skyscrapers and bridges, augmented by a wind farm in the middle of the ocean, several miles off the Manhattan coast.
Such a move would dramatically alter the city's iconic skyline, prompting several media outlets to lampoon the idea, grafting images of windmills onto the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.
"What happens in the next King Kong movie?" asked political scientist Doug Muzzio "He gets shredded by a windmill?"
Mr. Muzzio , a professor at Baruch College, credited the mayor for taking a novel tack in his pursuit of renewable energy sources, but he ultimately dismissed the proposal as fanciful, saying it would raise a public outcry and encounter a thicket of political opposition.
"The Don Quixote line just pops into one's head," he said. "There's got to be nine million government bodies that would have to approve this. The way politics work in this state and city, the odds of this happening are close to zero."
But Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire entrepreneur who founded an eponymous news organization, has never been easily dissuaded. While he acknowledged there are aesthetic considerations to take into account with any wind-power scheme, he was earnest in his determination to make New York the top producer of clean power in the country.
"More than 100 years ago, a new statue standing tall in New York Harbor gave our nation its greatest symbol of freedom," he told the audience in Las Vegas. "In this century, that freedom is being undermined by dependence on foreign oil. So I think it would be a thing of beauty if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon, she not only welcomes new immigrants, but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean wind farm."
Mr. Bloomberg, thought by some to be a potential presidential candidate, is pinning much of his political legacy on green initiatives. He tried, but failed, this spring to introduce a congestion fee on Manhattan drivers in a bid to reduce traffic and encourage more reliance on public transportation.
Undeterred by that setback, he recently introduced a $2.3-billion (U.S.) plan to cut emissions from city agencies by 30 per cent within the next 10 years - an effort he hopes will "embarrass" the federal government, and force it to make energy conservation a priority.
He has also offered tax rebates to spur the use of solar panels and the creation of rooftop gardens, and has launched a pilot project to generate power from the Hudson and East Rivers that flank Manhattan.
Now he has solicited responses from companies on how the city can derive more power from wind turbines, tidal currents, solar panels and geothermal energy.
Josh Magee, research director at Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge, Mass., said some of these proposals, like the offshore farms, are more viable than others, because of the city's coastal positioning and the prevailing wind currents. Although this power can be expensive, it would provide the city with a natural hedge against volatile price swings in the natural-gas market, on which New York relies heavily for its power needs.
The notion of affixing windmills on the top of skyscrapers, however, appears to be far-fetched, given the turbulence and wind shear they would face at this altitude.
"Quite simply put," said, Mr. Magee "the current wind turbine technology is not designed for installation at those heights."
Time may be as much of an issue as technology, given that most of these alternative energy projects will take several years to produce their first kilowatt of electricity.
Mr. Bloomberg, meanwhile, has just under 500 days remaining in his final term, and he wants everyone to know that time is running short.
The mayor has installed digital clocks in more than a dozen offices, each of which provides an up-to-the-second countdown of how much time remains on his watch. The clocks are meant to imbue his office with a sense of urgency, and goad employees to work more aggressively on seeing these projects through to completion.
"The clock acts as an incentive - the impact is real on staff," Mr. Muzzio said. "If some of this stuff comes to fruition, it might give him an even bigger legacy."
But Mr. Bloomberg, true to his business roots, is still a realist, and when pressed by reporters after his speech, he conceded the city is far more likely to place windmills at sea than atop tall buildings.
"If there is a large ape that starts climbing the Empire State Building," he said, "it might get in his way."
