The Offshore Wind Swindle: You'll Pay 4X as Much for Electricity to Cool the Earth by .003 of 1º F 25 Years from Now!
Guest Post by Roger Caiazza of Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.
Last month I described a flurry of offshore wind related news and last week I provided an update describing additional news. In my opinion these latest revelations suggest a reassessment of the viability of offshore wind projects is in order. I did not address the costs, but a couple of articles that have appeared since then do suggest that costs should also be considered in the reassessment.
Overview
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030. Two targets address the electric sector: 70% of the electricity must come from renewable energy by 2030 and all electricity has to be generated be “zero-emissions” resources by 2040.
Offshore wind developments are a key Climate Act decarbonization strategy. There is a mandated target of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035. The Integration Analysis projects that offshore wind capacity will exceed 13 GW by 2040. However, there are overlooked risks to this strategy that are now becoming obvious. The fact is that the huge, proposed wind turbines have not been field tested.
Why Is Cheap Wind Power So Expensive?
Willis Eschenbach poses the cost question that is ignored by the green energy activists. First he describes the overarching Biden Administration goals released in March 2021:
Eschenbach is a numbers guy and was immediately suspicious:
Hmmm, sez I, seems a mite ambitious. Current US grid-connected offshore wind is a mere 0.17 gigawatts … so we’d need to do ~ 175 times as much as we’ve done to date and do it in a short six years.
So I divided it out. There are 65 months until 2030. Thirty gigawatts is thirty thousand megawatts, less the 174 megawatts in place, that’s 29,826 megawatts more total generating capacity needed.
29,826 megawatts divided by 65 months means we’d have to add offshore wind generation to the tune of 465 additional megawatts of generation capacity per month. Every month. Starting now.
Get real. That’s not remotely possible. The biggest US offshore windfarm just came on line, 132 MW capacity. To reach the White House goal, every month we’d need to build three new windfarms of that size. No way that can happen. It’s just numbers picked out of the air to gain popular support.
Then, he researched the expected time to get an offshore wind farm on line:
The time from the proposal of an offshore wind farm to its grid connection typically ranges from 7 to 10 years. This timeline can be broken down into several phases:
Pre-development and Planning (1-2 years): This phase involves site identification, feasibility studies, and initial environmental assessments.
Permitting and Approvals (3-5 years): Securing the necessary permits and approvals is often the most time-consuming part of the process. This includes detailed environmental impact assessments, consultations with stakeholders, and obtaining state and federal permits.
Construction (2-3 years): Once all approvals are secured, construction of the wind farm, including the installation of turbines and subsea cables, takes place. This phase also includes the grid connection process.
Commissioning and Testing (several months): After construction, the turbines are tested, and the wind farm is gradually brought online.
The bottom line is that if a project is not already well along it will not be available by 2030. He found cost information for South Fork Wind which in New York’s first offshore wind farm:
South Fork Wind just came online. This gives us a chance to look at some actual cost figures. It’s the biggest wind farm to date, a 132-megawatt addition to offshore wind. It cost $637 million.
However, Federal subsidies added $191 million to that, plus another couple of hundred million or so from Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
Stop and consider. Some private company is building a six-hundred-million-dollar white elephant in the middle of the ocean, and it’s getting paid four hundred million of taxpayer money to do so.
So … what does the New York consumer get for all of this more than generous support?
The consumer gets wind power costing four times as much as the current cost of power in New York.
Stop and consider. Even when the developer gets two-thirds of the cost paid by the taxpayer, offshore wind power is still four times as expensive.
Eschenbach sums it up:
What’s next?
Well, I’m sure that what’s next is the Harris/Walz campaign will declare that they are 100% behind expensive, intermittent, unreliable wind power, and will claim that if elected, they’ll do what they already said they’d do when Ms. Harris was last elected, which was to screw the consumer and the taxpayer with the huge subsidies, tax breaks, and electricity costs of offshore wind.
Oh, yeah. They claim that the 30 GW of offshore wind will “avoid 78 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions”. Tens of millions of tonnes, sounds impressive, right?
But , if the IPCC is correct, and that’s a big if, this will reduce the temperature in the year 2050 by …
… wait for it …
… 0.0016°C. Which is almost three-thousandths of one degree F.
Can we please pass a law saying people proposing any laws or regulations in the name of “climate change” be required to tell us (and show their math) how much actual temperature difference that will make by 2050?
All the points made in this article are direct analogies to what is happening in New York State.
Offshore Trojan Horses
Gordon Hughes from the National Center for Energy Analytics compares the subsidies for offshore wind projects to “the classic warning of the Trojan Horse legend, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”—in other words, the hidden dangers of accepting something that seems too good to be true.”
He argues that “New York State ignored that warning when it agreed to pay very high prices for the electricity to be supplied from its new offshore wind farms—Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind—located off the coast of Long Island.” He continues:
In announcing the final agreements, New York Governor Kathy Hochul triumphantly claimed that the new projects would create more than 800 jobs during the construction phase and deliver more than $6 billion in economic benefits for the state over 25 years.
Rather less emphasis was given to the fact that New York will pay an average price of over $150 per MWh (megawatt hour) for the electricity generated by Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind. That’s more than four times the average wholesale price of electricity in New York during 2023–24, $36 per MWh. The total annual premium over the wholesale market price for the power from these wind farms will be about $520 million per year at 2024 prices. Over 25 years, New York ratepayers will be paying about $13 billion for alleged benefits of $6 billion.
That is not all. Thanks to tax credits, U.S. taxpayers will cover at least 40% of the costs of constructing the wind farms. At a minimum cost of $5.5 million per MW (million watts) of capacity, the total federal subsidy for New York’s two wind farms will be at least $3.8 billion.
He also evaluates the jobs and economic claims made by the Hochul Administration. He concludes that “The economic benefits of the two offshore wind farms are much lower than claimed by the governor and the jobs are, in large part, temporary assignments for professional services staff”. I would add that the temporary assignments will probably be filled by experienced staff from out of state.
Conclusion
The offshore wind proposed contracts are unsustainable. Eschenbach suggests that folks in New York should be asked:
“Are you willing to pay four times the going rate for electricity for the rest of your life to maybe cool the globe by three-thousandths of one degree Fahrenheit a quarter century from now?”
I agree and think that these facts need to be publicized because most New Yorkers have no clue that Climate Act implementation inevitably will increase costs significantly.
Lastly, note that Climate Act proponents have always argued that one of the goals was to demonstrate leadership for the energy transition. This article presents two examples where New York’s transition leadership is cited. Unfortunately, both are bad examples showing what to avoid.
#ClimateAct #NewYork #Climate #NYC #OffshoreWind #NetZero #ElectricBill #Hochul #ClimateReality
Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This post represents his opinion alone and not the opinion of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated. Roger has followed the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and has written over 450 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.
With the wind power never being an economic move, there is too much distraction from the reality that wind is only intermittent and the machinery breaks down frequently. If there is no electricity generation the cost is a moot point. To distribute wind farms widely to attempt to minimize wind variations, there would be many times more wind farms than planned. So the ridiculousness of the effort is multiplied by the limitations of tree basic characteristics of wind. This is truly a fools folly being promoted by hucksters taking free government handouts,
We now know that wind droughts and the ABC of intermittent energy eliminate the possibility of running on wind and solar power.
Let's stop confusing and distracting people with lengthy pieces that may lead to the same conclusion.
We have a concise and conclusive message that school children should be able to understand. So put it out there and direct our efforts to the next big thing, the exit plan from net zero!