The Fly in the Floating Wind Ointment Is the “Floater” and It's Time to Squash the Illegal Grant Made by Biden to Do This

Guest Post from David Wojick via CFact.

I have the honor and pleasure of co-signing a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, asking him to terminate a half billion dollar grant made by the Biden administration to the West Coast wind industry. The short story is the grant was illegal.

The longer story is interesting because it takes us into the strange world of floating wind power, a technology still looking to prove itself. The idea is to put a huge offshore wind tower on a float that is so big that the tower does not blow over in a hurricane. Whether this can actually be done remains to be seen.

The Biden folks decided to charge ahead on this stuff, way ahead, to say the least. France just commissioned a 24 MW test facility, while Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management sold leases for an incredible 5,000 MW of floating wind off California.

Jplourde umaine, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>

The fly in the floating wind ointment is the “floater.” This is the huge contraption that holds the tower. There are over 100 floater designs that have been announced, some patented but none proven, which just measures the immaturity of the technology. Some are steel, weighing up to 5,000 tons. Some are concrete, tipping the theoretical scale at 20,000 tons.

The problem is that before you can build a floating wind power generation facility, you first have to build the factory that makes the floaters, which has to be nearby on shore. With fixed wind, there is just a single standard monopile holding the tower and these are made by several companies for use everywhere. It is the custom made floater and factory that make floating wind cost an estimated three times what fixed offshore wind costs.

In order to kick-start floating wind, the Biden Transportation Department decided to inject just under half a billion dollars to build a floater factory at Humboldt Bay in Northern California. But Congress never appropriated the money to do this, so DOT raided their INFRA program. which is supposed to fund improvements in the U.S. freight system.

Hence our letter begins as follows:

“Call for rescission of INFRA Grant for The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Grant Dated January 23, 2024, and a return of unspent disbursed funds (see article 13.5 of attached INFRA grant terms and conditions) connected with misappropriation of said INFRA Grant Funds.

The undersigned organizations call for the return to the U.S. Department of Transportation any unspent disbursed INFRA funds awarded to the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District in the amount of $426,719,810 on January 23, 2024 and to terminate the awarded grant as a misappropriation of federal funds.

Our requests are legally justified based on DOT internal mandates associated with the INFRA grant structuring. According to the INFRA Grant eligibility guidelines grant projects must be “projects of national or regional significance to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of the movement of freight and people in and across rural and urban areas.” Additionally, “To be eligible under INFRA, a project within the boundaries of a freight rail, water (including ports), or intermodal facility must be a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate direct intermodal interchange, transfer, or access into or out of the facility and must significantly improve freight movement on the (National Highway Freight Network) NHFN.”

Further, Humboldt Bay is not a designated national multimodal freight network facility and is as such ineligible for any INFRA Grant funds. The Humboldt Grant is clearly designed to accommodate a non-existent floating offshore wind industry, and is defined as a heavy lift terminal capable of assembling and handling wind turbine components. Obviously the project meets none of the INFRA guidelines for grant approval.”

The signing organizations are CFACT and the REACT Alliance. I and several other individuals also signed. This all fits in with the President’s executive order calling for agencies to assess deficiencies in prior actions related to offshore wind. This grant is a huge deficiency.

Dr. David Wojick is an independent policy analyst and senior advisor to CFACT. As a civil engineer with a Ph.D. in logic and analytic philosophy of science, he brings a unique perspective to complex policy issues. His specializes in science and technology intensive issues, especially in energy and environment.

#Wind #Offshore #FloatingWindTurbines #CFact #Wojick #WindTurbines #Maine

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