Tag Archives: wind farms

Buyers’ Remorse

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On Friday, Hot Air posted an article about the city fathers of Nantucket’s regret at allowing the developers of the Vineyard Wind project to construct a large-scale offshore wind farm 15 miles from the island town.

The article reports:

The Nantucket City Council and Nantucket residents are suffering from buyer’s remorse, like everybody who decided to buy a Yugo based on the marketing that it was a great car at an amazing price. 

We told you so. It’s as if liberals see common sense and choose to do the opposite of what it tells them. No amount of sage advice will dissuade them because some “expert” with dollar signs in their eyes can talk them into anything as long as they whisper magic words like “renewable energy.”

The article includes a quote from The Washington Free Beacon:

If they could go back in time, officials in Nantucket, Massachusetts, wouldn’t sign the legal agreement that helped bring the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm 15 miles from the island town’s picturesque shoreline.

That was the common sentiment expressed during a Nantucket select board meeting this week about the August 2020 community benefit agreement the town entered into with developers of the Vineyard Wind project, which is currently under construction. “These wind turbines are bigger, brighter, and much more impactful than we ever thought—and not to mention the environmental hazards from failures,” said Dawn Hill, the chairwoman of the select board, which serves as the town’s executive body.

The agreement represented Nantucket’s formal endorsement of the project and satisfied Vineyard Wind’s legal responsibility to consult with the town. Because Nantucket is a federally designated national historic district, regulators and developers must consult with the town on new projects that may threaten its protected status.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” added Greg Werkheiser, an attorney who represents Nantucket. “Every lawyer in the world wishes 5 or 10 years into a negotiated contract that they could take the knowledge they have, fly back in time, and renegotiate—but communities make the choices they have with the information they have at the time.”

North Carolina take note! There is a group pushing for wind farms off the North Carolina coast.

Remember this event:

Tensions between Nantucket and Vineyard Wind reached a boiling point in July 2024 after a football field-sized blade on one of its wind towers fell apart during construction, sending 50 tons of fiberglass and industrial-grade foam into the ocean, forcing the island’s beaches to close. Project developers waited until debris washed ashore three days following the failure before they informed Nantucket about the incident, sparking fury from officials, businesses, and residents.

In the 12 months since the blade failure, the developers haven’t provided the town with information about changes to the construction timeline or the progress of environmental reviews related to the blade failure. As of this week, Vineyard Wind’s leadership remains in “hiding,” according to Mohr. Alas, Vineyard Wind issued its most recent press release in October, and its only public update this year appears to have come during an earnings call held last week by one of its developers, the Spain-based energy firm Iberdrola.

“They were not uninformed. Local groups were informing them five years ago that they should not do this deal and gave them all the reasons why they now regret it,” said Dave Stevenson, the director of the Center for Energy Competitiveness at the right-leaning Caesar Rodney Institute. “The folks in the town didn’t fight, they didn’t look at all the negatives, they just didn’t listen.”

Don’t let that happen here!

Before We Continue With Offshore Wind Farms…

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On Friday, The Maine Wire posted an article about an environmental disaster currently happening off of the New England coast. It’s summertime when New Englanders head for the beaches of Maine, the Cape (Cod), or the islands of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard to cool off and enjoy the water. This year, that isn’t going to work well.

The article reports:

An offshore wind turbine project operated by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners broke apart this week, scattering debris throughout Massachusetts’ coastal waters, with much of the flotsam washing up on Nantucket beaches.

Since the turbine experienced a catastrophic malfunction — for reasons that are not yet clear — social media has been inundated with pictures and videos of beachgoers and government employees picking up trash bags and dumpsters full of debris.

The turbine in question is owned by Vineyard Wind US, a joint project of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners of Denmark and Avangrid, the parent company of Central Maine Power (CMP). The turbine itself was manufactured by GE Vernova, which has experienced similar failures in the past with their offshore wind projects.

The article includes the following Tweet:

The article concludes:

The recent incident has led Leeman to renew NEFSA’s calls for New England governments to slow down the push for industrial-scale offshore wind development due to their possibly disastrous consequences and potential to harm commercial fisheries.

Offshore wind turbines have long concerned fishermen and lobstermen, and not only for their effect on the environment and commercially important fish populations.

The turbines are potentially dangerous for fishermen sailing in low-visibility conditions, and the chemicals they release into the ocean can contaminate their catches, significantly devaluing their products.

Most recently, Vineyard Wind has claimed that the blade of the damaged turbine is sitting on the ocean floor, and company has promised to recover it “in due course,” without indicating a timeline for that recovery. It’s unclear whether environmental remediation plans were put in place at the time the Commonwealth of Massachusetts created legal and financial incentives for the company to install the turbine.

We have seen the dead whales washing up on the shore. The article also notes a recent U.K. study that discovered that oysters and mussels were contaminated by hazardous fiberglass particles that can cause harm to humans. It truly is time to re-evaluate offshore wind farms and the rest of so-called ‘green’ energy.

 

 

 

This Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone Who Has Been Paying Attention

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On March 25th, American Experiment posted an article about renewable energy.

The article reports:

Bloomberg recently ran a very interesting interview with Brett Christophers about his new book The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.

In the interview, Christophers argues there’s a widespread misconception about what’s needed to expand the deployment of renewables and transition away from fossil fuel generation. 

Christophers makes the following argument:

The basic argument is simple, and it’s something that the world doesn’t want to admit: The business of developing and owning and operating solar and wind farms and selling electricity is kind of a lousy business. 

Whether new solar or wind farms get built is ultimately about the expected profitability of those assets. Even though the generating cost aspect has become increasingly beneficial over time that doesn’t necessarily mean that the expected profits are going to be there. 

Generating costs are only part of the costs that a company that owns and controls a solar or wind farm, and sells the electricity, incur. There are also costs associated with delivering that power to where it gets consumed. 

For renewables the delivery costs tend to be higher than they are for conventional power plants because conventional power plants on average tend to be located closer to centers of demand. 

That’s because unlike conventional power plants, renewables like solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power. 

Unless governments are willing to either assume the burden of renewables development through public ownership…they will have to keep subsidies and tax credits in place indefinitely or else renewables investment will collapse because of the unfavorable economics. 

The article concludes:

The author obviously favors wind and solar and later advocates for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. However, it is interesting that he acknowledges there is no economy-wide business case for wind and solar without government support.  

It’s time for our politicians to be honest with Americans about the cost of ‘green energy’ both in dollars and in damage to the environment. The people who advocate for electric cars fail to mention the children mining lithium in Africa or the environmental devastation lithium mining causes. Those who favor offshore wind farms fail to mention the number of whales that have died in the implementation of those wind farms or the number of birds that are killed by either wind farms or solar farms. Let’s do the complete research before we back something that is more damaging than what we originally had.

This Green Energy Thing Just Isn’t Working

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On Friday, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog about the current state of green energy.

The article reports:

Wind and solar are both terrible methods of generating electricity, both expensive and unreliable. The one thing that can make the situation worse is the drive to electrify everything, including motor vehicles. The impracticality of this “green” vision has become blindingly obvious, and the “green” movement has begun to fall apart.

The article cites a few recent articles on the subject.

From the Telegraph: “Electricity prices ‘must rise by 70pc to pay for more wind farms.’”

No new wind farms will be built off Britain’s shores unless the Government lets operators earn more money from the electricity they produce, the chief of the nation’s biggest generator has said.

Tom Glover, country chair of RWE’s UK arm, said the price offered by the Government to wind farm operators must rise by as much as 70pc to entice companies to build.
***
His warning follows the disastrous result of the last offshore wind allocation round in September, which ended in a humiliation for ministers with not one company offering to build new offshore wind farms.

From Robert Bryce: “Ford Lost $62,016 For Every EV It Sold In 3Q.”

The bloodbath in Ford Motor Company’s EV division continues. On Thursday, Ford reported an operating loss of $1.3 billion in its EV division during the third quarter. That translates into a loss of $62,016 for each of the 20,962 EVs it sold during the period.

That’s a smaller loss than the company recorded in the second quarter, when it lost $72,762 for each EV and the $66,446 it lost per EV during the first quarter.
***
In its October 26 press release, Ford provided an additional comment on the EV losses, saying, “According to the company, many North America customers interested in buying EVs are unwilling to pay premiums for them over gas or hybrid vehicles, sharply compressing EV prices and profitability.” …

That’s a truth bomb of the first order, one to which veteran observers of the EV hype should rightly reply, “ya think?” Consumers, that is, consumers who aren’t part of the Benz and Beemer crowd, have been unwilling to pay premiums for EVs throughout the century-long history of the EV business. The question that Ford shareholders should be asking the company’s management, and CEO Jim Farley in particular, is obvious: “What the hell took you so long to recognize that customers aren’t willing to pay high prices for EVs?”

I don’t know if I can ever forgive Ford for what it did to the Mustang!

This is what happens when the government interferes in the free market.

When Reality Shows Up

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Green energy is a wonderful theory. So is the perpetual motion machine. However, both are limited by the laws of physics, and the first is limited by practicalities regarding cost.

On Saturday, Legal Insurrection posted an article about some of the current problems being encountered by wind farms.

The article reports:

A couple of weeks ago, Sweden’s government ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Shortly afterward, fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil!

Now it looks like specific wind farm projects are beginning to topple due to strong economic headwinds. Recent, Rhode Island’s leading utility decided to nix a project called Revolution Wind 2 because the cost of the electricity was deemed too high.

…In Europe, Swedish energy firm Vattenfall will stop the development of a major wind project in the United Kingdom after a surge in costs (Hat-tip Hot Air’s Beege Welborne). Once again, the issue was related to surges in energy costs.

The economic headwinds associated with wind farms are beginning to be noticed.

…. Even as the White House is welcoming it with open arms and the Democrats’ climate law is channeling money in its direction, strong economic headwinds are blowing in the opposite direction – inflation and rising interest rates have hit the industry hard.

And then there’s the whales: Some citizen groups and conservative media have blamed a rise in whale strandings and deaths this year on the nascent wind farm projects – a connection scientists have so far found no evidence for.

The combination has made it a precarious time for offshore wind, said Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, the trade group representing US clean energy.

“This is the vulnerable moment where the benefits are on the horizon,” Grumet told reporters this spring. “Because we don’t have the benefits of it on the table. We don’t have massive facilities producing energy, lowering prices in those states.”

Currently, green energy is not the answer to anything. The climate-change fear mongering is simply a way to eliminate the middle class and gain more control over the world’s population.

In February 2019, I posted an article that included the following:

In March 2016, I posted an article with the following:

…Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

I can’t post this quote often enough. It needs to engraved in the minds of every American.

The Price Animals Pay For Green Energy

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On Monday, PJ Media posted an article about the increase in whale deaths offshore near wind farms. The article reminds us that when the Cape Wind Farm was proposed off the coast of Massachusetts, the elites who lived on the coast proposed it. Wind farms were for the little people.

The article reports:

…But there is concern that the surveying for the construction of offshore wind farms may be causing a problem for the whale population. Dead whales are washing up along the shores of New York and New Jersey. Meghan Lapp of Seafreeze fisheries told Tucker Carlson:

I can’t authoritatively say that all of the whales that are washing up are because of offshore wind farms. But what I can tell you is that the seven whales that washed up off New Jersey in the past month have all washed up during intense geotechnical surveying of wind farm leases off of New Jersey. On the East Coast, there has been an unusual mortality event for humpback whales from 2016 until now. The only thing that has changed in the ocean in that time is the fact there have been offshore wind surveys occurring from 2015 until now. Now, magically there are a bunch of humpback whales dying.

The article concludes:

So, coal is bad and deadly. Oil is bad and deadly. Natural gas is bad and deadly. But wind power is awesome! Unless you happen to be a whale. In which case, the process of putting in a wind farm could be bad and deadly.

It is tempting to think that the administration is in bed with the WEF and companies that create wind farms, and that the lobbyists have done their jobs well. And that is a perfectly reasonable speculation since everything must be electric now, lest the planet becomes a smoking cinder before our very eyes. It is equally plausible that the people who are pushing the electric agenda didn’t think things through far enough to consider the possibility that they could kill animals that have been struggling for years in terms of numbers. Or they just didn’t care. But then, being a Leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. Or admit a mistake.

Wind farms are also deadly to birds attempting to fly through them. In January 2121, The American Bird Conservancy reported the following:

The Erickson study reported that 62.5 percent of the birds in their data set were small birds. Taking 62.5 percent of the 681,000 annual mortality estimate calculated above and adjusting this with the 1.6- and 2.7-fold multipliers from the dog search study (and adding the other 37.5 percent of birds back in), this would translate into a total of 936,000 and 1.4 million birds based on the numbers from the two sites. Averaging the two, this would suggest that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the United States each year.

The Perils Of Green Energy

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On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy.

The article reports:

A renewable energy firm that conspired with former president Barack Obama to maim and murder hundreds of majestic bald eagles has finally been brought to justice.

ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, was sentenced in federal court on Tuesday after pleading guilty to three criminal counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The company will serve five years probation and was ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution for its role in the deaths of at least 150 eagles that were slashed to pieces by its wind turbines.

The article notes:

NextEra, which operates more than 100 wind farms in the United States and Canada, received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits as part of Obama’s efforts to promote renewable energy. The Obama administration typically granted permits to operators of wind and solar farms that exempted them from federal laws prohibiting the killing of bald eagles and other protected species. NextEra didn’t even bother to apply for these permits, which prosecutors said gave the company an advantage over its competitors that did seek Obama’s permission to commit bird genocide.

Wind farms during the Obama administration were responsible for the murder of more than 573,000 birds each year, including 83,000 hawks, falcons, and eagles, according to the Associated Press. Weaponized solar farms, which also benefited from taxpayer subsidies, were another key component of Obama’s genocide campaign. Sunlight reflected from the massive arrays of solar panels creates a “kill zone” where temperatures can reach up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Bloomberg, some birds are “incinerated in flight,” while others fall to their deaths after having their feathers singed. Birds that survive the fall are often “too injured to fly and are killed on the ground by predators.”

When discussing green energy, shouldn’t the impact on bird life in America be considered?