Offshore wind project will damage ocean ecosystem to no environmental avail
On Aug. 22, 2023, Revolution Wind was approved by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM. The Biden-Harris administration hailed the approval of the fourth major wind turbine project. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the project will be located about 15 nautical miles southeast of Point Judith, R.I., and have an estimated capacity of 704 megawatts of clean energy, which can power nearly 250,000 homes. A group of concerned citizens, pointing out that they will not release the biological opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is up in arms. See: https://green-oceans.org/
Revolution Wind is one of nine developments slated for the area off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts that will install more than 1,000 turbines, each 873-1,100 feet high, over 1,400 square miles of ocean. The four closest projects to Rhode Island, Revolution Wind 1 and 2, South Fork Wind and Sunrise Wind, will severely damage Coxes Ledge, one of the most fertile marine ecosystems in New England. Coxes Ledge is a terminal glacial moraine, a complex geological formation that supports a diversity of marine species equivalent to a coral reef. Teeming with life, it hosts the endangered North Atlantic right whale during the winter months and is the only remaining spawning ground for the Atlantic cod. The construction of hundreds of turbines with miles of cables will demolish this ecosystem. The developers chose Coxes Ledge for financial reasons; constructing turbines in shallow waters costs less.
If off shore wind projects could actually mitigate climate change, one might reluctantly accept the destruction of this unique ecosystem. However, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency tasked with permitting these projects, acknowledges in its environmental impact statement that they will have "no measurable influence on climate change." These projects will still require 100% capacity of backup electricity generation with natural gas power plants. Rarely discussed, the European experience demonstrates that off shore wind does not reduce reliance on fossil fuels, nor does it diminish carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, the intermittency of the wind causes traditional generators to operate inefficiently, producing less electricity with greater emissions.
According to the citizens group Green Oceans, the off shore wind developer of the projects on Coxes Ledge, Orsted, has misled people about the impact. The company maintains two sets of visual simulations. The viewer cannot discern turbines in the publicly available version; yet, in the confidential version, one can. Moreover, the developers will not release 25 out of 51 technical reports to the public, including the emergency response plans, the air emissions calculations and even the economic benefits to Rhode Island. Why hide the economic benefits in a confidential, Freedom of Information Act-exempt appendix?
It's a David-against-Goliath fight. Listen to the administration and they'll say we're helping Rhode Island meet its renewable energy mandate and that it's building a clean-energy future. Listen to the community leaders and you'll hear passionate opposition to the status quo, determination to fight the well-financed opposition and a desperate eff ort to save the ocean.
Who do you believe? How can you afford not to take a second look? Check out https://green-oceans.org/ white-paper-1.
If offshore wind projects could actually mitigate climate change, one might reluctantly accept the destruction of this unique ecosystem.
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America’s Wind-Farm Revolution Is Broken
Offshore wind farms should be one of the best solutions to the climate crisis but are turning out to be a lousy business. Getting the struggling industry back on its feet will require a new approach from companies and politicians alike.
The public face of the dilemma is Ørsted, a former oil and gas producer that became the world’s largest offshore wind-farm developer. The Danish company’s stock has lost more than $10 billion, or a third of its market value, since warning last week that it may take impairments of up to $2.3 billion on its U.S. projects. On Tuesday, ratings provider Moody’s downgraded the stock, a further challenge for a company that, like a property developer, needs debt to fund its plans.
Ørsted won contracts to develop wind farms off the coasts of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey in late 2018 and 2019. Since committing to sell the power from these projects at a fixed price, permitting delays, rising costs and higher interest rates have torched the returns it expected to make.
The Biden administration wants to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, from less than 50 megawatts today. Generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are meant to turbocharge investment. Ørsted hoped bonus tax credits in the climate bill for using locally produced components would paper over financial cracks, but now says its wind farms may not qualify.
The company says it will abandon projects if it doesn’t get more government support, and rivals are also rethinking their U.S. plans. Shell and Avangrid face multimillion-dollar fines for calling it quits on offshore wind-farm developments in Massachusetts that they can no longer justify. There is trouble further up the supply chain, too. Siemens Gamesa and Vestas, which together make roughly 80% of all turbine blades and nacelles for projects outside China, are losing money.
Of all renewable energy projects, offshore wind farms may be the most vulnerable to rising interest rates as they take longer to build and have higher upfront costs. According to George Bilicic, global head of power, energy and infrastructure at Lazard, building a U.S. offshore wind farm can cost $4,000 per kilowatt at the midpoint of estimates, compared with $1,360 for onshore farms and $1,050 for solar facilities. Average costs to build an offshore wind farm have shot up 36% since 2019, compared with 5% for land-based ones, in part because of pricier debt.
Offshore wind is a promising clean-power technology because it should be highly productive once the capital is invested. As the ocean is windy, the capacity factor of offshore farms—a measure of how efficiently they generate electricity—is higher than both onshore wind farms and solar power. Installing wind turbines out at sea is also less controversial than on land, so the politics should be easier, in theory.
In reality, the industry is hamstrung by politics at all levels. Transmission bottlenecks to get power from offshore wind farms to land are now a major obstacle to delivering projects on time. Governments that dole out green subsidies with one hand set unfavorable terms for seabed auctions with the other.
There are also self-inflicted problems. Turbine manufacturers raced to make bigger and bigger models, driving down costs and making offshore wind nominally competitive with fossil fuels in many regions. But the rapid churn also made important parts of the supply chain obsolete: Older-installation vessels can’t handle the new, supersize turbine blades and towers.
While the industry needs to get better at understanding the hidden costs of innovation, governments will have to pay more if they want offshore wind power to help reduce carbon emissions. “Policymakers got used to 20 years of continuously falling prices for renewables. All of a sudden, that has reversed and they have been slow to react,” says Chris Seiple, vice chairman of Wood Mackenzie’s power and renewables group.
Contracts should be linked to inflation. Right now, developers take on huge risks when they win a bid: Their future revenue is locked in but they are exposed to rising input costs throughout the years it takes to get a wind farm up and running. If governments have to shoulder these costs, they might overhaul permitting processes that are causing delays.
Even in Europe, where the offshore wind industry is more mature, the rollout has slowed to a crawl. In 2022, the European Union installed 2.5 gigawatts of new offshore capacity, less than the 3 gigawatts it managed back in 2015.
Offshore wind power is becoming a prime casualty of the shift in financial markets away from the old world of smooth supply chains, low inflation and free money. The industry and its political backers need to work together to find a model better suited to stormier times.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/americas-wind-farm-revolution-is-broken-fa82d64e
************************************************Once Again, Natural Gas Rescued Ontario From Blackouts
Well September 7th,2023 came and went and we Ontarians had another day without power blackouts thanks to our natural gas plants.
Our natural gas plants were humming throughout the day and generated 131,407 MWh which kept our businesses operating and the lights in our houses on. The day’s peak demand hour came at Hour 17 reaching 21,266 MW but wasn’t high enough to make the “Top 10” peak hour list in the current year. At that hour our gas plant generated 6,485 MWh or 30.4% of peak demand. Over the day IWT (industrial wind turbines) were operating well above their frequent low generation status during a summer day producing 19,957 MWh of power. They operated at 16.9% of their capacity and at the peak hour generated 1,181 MWh or 5.5% of the hour’s peak demand.
The major reason we needed all that power from our gas plants was partly related to the fact Bruce Nuclear had three of their 800 MW plants (G-3, G-6 and G-8) down and at hour 11 they shut down G-1 so 3,200 MW of nuclear capacity were down meaning only 7,800 MW of nuclear capacity were operating from that hour forward.
As a side note the G-6 unit was down for MCR (Major Component Replacements) but restarted at 1 AM today (September 8th, 2023) as the MCR was finished and by Hour 10 was generating 234 MW.
Fossil Fuels are Needed
It is amusing but potentially damaging the “climate change” organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation continue to push for an exit of fossil fuels to create electricity as they pontificate in an article posted yesterday containing the following:
“ Experts working with organizations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the International Energy Agency tell us we must curtail rampant consumerism, leave fossil fuels behind and shift quickly to renewable energy.“
Based on the foregoing they are obviously advocating for blackouts and energy poverty as; along with advocating for fossil fuel exits they are also against nuclear power as an earlier article on their website from May 2023 states:
“Along with its many known problems, as an inflexible, costly baseload power source, nuclear is becoming as outdated as fossil fuels. Small modular reactors will create even more waste and cost more — and slow the necessary transition to renewable energy.“
It seems obvious those many charitable “climate change” advocates such as the David Suzuki Foundation (annual revenue of $11,573,083 in last CRA filing) and others of their ilk have absolutely no concept on how reliable energy is necessary for our livelihood.
Conclusion
The time has come for the CRA to do what they had planned to do back in 2014 and investigate those charities involved in political advocacy. Those investigations were cancelled after the Trudeau led Liberals gained power and their damage to the Canadian economy has only gained traction since then!
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‘The green movement is a disinformation campaign’
The planet is on fire – and it’s all our fault. That has become the abiding mantra of the climate movement. This summer, wildfires from Greece to Hawaii have been portrayed as nature’s punishment for mankind’s polluting activities. Each disaster has been treated as a portent of the End Times. Reining in human development, we’re told, is the only way to avert an even more serious catastrophe. But is there any truth to these apocalyptic claims?
Journalist and best-selling author Michel Shellenberger recently joined Brendan O’Neill to discuss all this and more in a special live episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. Below is an edited extract from their conversation. Watch the full episode here.
Brendan O’Neill: The recent wildfires across Europe and America are held up by many as proof that Mother Earth is punishing mankind. Is this another example of disinformation from the climate-change lobby?
Michael Shellenberger: In this case, the word ‘disinformation’ is certainly accurate. It is a type of organised lying that needs to be disproved.
There has been a concerted effort since the 1990s to convince people that climate change is making natural disasters worse. Yes, there is some evidence that climate change is causing more heatwaves and changes to precipitation. But a disaster is defined by two things: deaths and costs. And we’re not seeing an increase in either. In fact, deaths from extreme weather events have actually drastically declined over the past century. Only a few hundred people now die each year from natural disasters in the US, for example. So the climate movement is undeniably a disinformation campaign.
Michael Mann, a world-famous climate scientist, has claimed that the only way to prevent these catastrophic fires is by reducing carbon emissions and stopping global warming. That’s just not true. We are not doomed to face out-of-control fires. And we’re absolutely able to prevent these catastrophic blazes from spreading. In the recent cases in California, Greece and Hawaii, for example, it was bad fire prevention, bad forest management or bad grasslands management that played a key role. In the American cases, authorities failed to clear the area around electrical wires, which are often the trigger for fires. They also failed to stabilise electrical poles, which likely collapsed and contributed to the fires. Hawaii in particular did not have the proper kind of disaster preparedness, such as working sirens and widespread training, that would equip people to escape unharmed.
In the case of the Greek fires, we were told by the media that the main cause was climate change, then it emerged that arson was more likely to blame. Warmer weather isn’t even a necessary factor. We’ve had catastrophic fires before, without high temperatures. Likewise, we can have higher temperatures and not have fires. This issue is fundamentally a question of land management and disaster preparedness.
Blaming climate change only serves the interests of powerful politicians. It allows them to cede responsibility for their own failures. Doing this also allows them to raise money and demand more subsidies for renewables.
At the same time, stirring up predictions of a secular apocalypse feeds people’s spiritual needs. It encourages them to embody an almost superhero self-image. They want to be the ones to sound the alarm and ultimately harmonise humankind with nature. This narrative is powerful on a visceral level due to the incessant, hellish imagery that accompanies coverage of the so-called climate crisis. Telling people that they must play a role in avoiding the ultimate apocalypse serves a perfect storm of political, financial and spiritual interests all at once.
O’Neill: Many of these environmental groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, are increasingly fanatical in how they declare the coming of the End Times. What do you think drives this religious impulse?
Shellenberger: Part of it is a healthy desire to feel a sense of transcendence. This is what Ernest Becker called an ‘immortality project’. We want to feel that our lives will make a difference, but that desire can quite easily become destructive or self-destructive. This is what we’ve seen with these new apocalyptic religions, particularly when it comes to climate change. I suspect that this largely stems from the decline of traditional religions and the collapse in meaning this has brought about.
After all, people may have stopped believing in God, the soul and the afterlife, but they still yearn for meaning, purpose and transcendence. That makes people vulnerable to the fantasy that they can save the world by importing solar panels made in China. This brings to life all kinds of purification rituals that have very little to do with serving humankind.
This speaks to a deep need to affirm a different set of positive values – a celebration of how humankind is special, creative, wonderful, constructive and loving. We need to affirm civilisation, too. Because if we love humanity, we must love civilisation and the way in which it enables us to protect all people – especially the vulnerable, the poor and the marginalised. If you’re pro-human, you have to be pro-civilisation. That means being in favour of all the basics, from cheap and abundant energy to the expansion of freedom and human flourishing.
We’ve found ourselves in a really dark, nihilistic place, characterised by repugnant new religions. A pro-human vision of humankind and civilisation needs to be urgently articulated. Otherwise, the future is going to look a whole lot darker than the nihilism and apocalypticism we are facing even now.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/04/the-green-movement-is-a-disinformation-campaign/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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