Floating Wind Madness in Maine
Good God!
The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision.
Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland.
The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while a floating tower sits on a huge complex structure called a floater. We are talking about massive 500-foot towers with 500-ton turbines on top and 300-foot blades catching the wind.
The floater has to be large enough to keep this monster tower from blowing over. Then, it has to be even bigger to contain enough air to be buoyant. It also has to be anchored to the ocean floor in ways that require a lot of different mooring lines.
The small existing floating generator systems cost around three times what fixed wind costs per MW, but the big and hurricane-proof generators might cost even more. Over a hundred designs have been proposed, which shows just how immature Floating wind technology is.
Which brings us to Maine’s floating green dream, a costly nightmare for its people. When it comes to electricity use, Maine is a small state with average generation of just around 1,500 MW. But in an act of madness, they passed a law saying they will buy 3,000 MW of floating wind. Fixed wind is not an option because the Gulf of Maine is too deep.
How do they justify buying so much floating wind? Simple, it is a net zero fantasy. They have a 115-page “Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap” that explains it.
For a start, they shut down all their existing combustion generators, mostly burning either gas or wood. Maine is 90% forest, so there is a lot of wood. Then, they electrify all the other forms of combustion. For example, 60% of homes are heated with fuel oil, so they switch to heat pumps or something that works in really cold weather. Of course, all the cars and trucks are electric.
The projected cost of the 3,000 MW of floating wind is huge. Using the reported three times fixed wind figure, I get a rough estimate of $50 billion for construction and an equal amount for financing and profit, giving a total cost of around $100 billion. It could be a lot more once large-scale and hurricane-proof technology is developed if it ever is.
Apparently, the astronomical cost is no object because it is never mentioned. Not in the law, roadmap, or various technical support documents. Jobs are frequently mentioned, but they are part of the cost. But then, too, there is the much larger cost of the energy transition, without which the floating wind is simply not usable.
Clearly, the floating wind development may never occur, which brings us back to the present day, where things get really crazy. The State of Maine has started the process to build a huge new port specifically to handle this floating wind fantasy. I am not making this up.
With fixed wind, the shore facility is merely a marshaling yard where the pieces are held until barged out to the offshore site for assembly. There are just four big pieces: the monopile, tower, turbine, and blade set.
Floating wind is completely different because the huge floater is built at the port. The tower, turbines, and blade set are mounted on the floater there as well. Then, the whole assembly is towed to the site and anchored to the sea floor using eight or more mooring lines.
So this is really a highly specialized shipyard, a floater factory, not a port. There will have to be one or more dry docks to build the huge floaters in, plus a great deal of specialized equipment, especially cranes. Reportedly, steel floaters for a 15 MW turbine could typically weigh 3500 to 4500 tons, while concrete floaters would be in the range of 17,000 to 22,000 tons.
The final configuration is completely unknown until the floater design is finalized. Note, too, that this shipyard might only be in operation for the few years it takes to build 3,000 MW of floating wind generators.
The presently estimated cost of this shipyard/port is a bit under a billion dollars but it could easily be more depending on the complexity of the design. The cost of a unique new system tends to go way up when the engineering is actually done.
Starting this billion-dollar port project now is just foolish. It is highly likely that the required energy transition will not occur. The electricity will be very expensive, perhaps four to five times the present cost. Plus, we have no idea what the technology will look like, assuming it can be made to work in the tempestuous waters off Maine.
The people of Maine are unlikely to accept these onerous conditions, nor should they. This whole nutty project needs to be reconsidered.
https://heartland.org/opinion/floating-wind-madness-in-maine/
********************************************BBC Hails Green Election Letter From “408 Climate Scientists” Signed By Psychologists, Accountants And Landscape Designers
An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists.
The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“.
Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.
The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events.
This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.
There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers.
One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist. A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future.
Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.
Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN).
One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”.
She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.
Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process?
A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.
The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events.
Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.
As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia.
Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:
You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.
Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line.
It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work.
It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.
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Home insulation is the latest net zero farce
Zoe Godrich of Swansea might best be described as collateral damage in Britain’s glorious march towards net zero. Three years ago, she had her three-bedroom home fitted with cavity-wall insulation – which the government is out to encourage through its Great British Insulation Scheme. Sadly for her, it has not worked out quite as intended.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong?
Within weeks of having it fitted, Godrich says her walls started to run with water, and black mould started to form on her walls. She can no longer use two of her bedrooms, and she and her children now have to slum it on mattresses in the one remaining habitable room. The company which installed the insulation also went bust and the guarantee for the work turned out to be useless. Her only option seemed to be having the insulation sucked out of the wall – for which she had to borrow £7,000 to have done. That work turned out to be botched, too.
Godrich’s experience, it turns out, seems to be becoming commonplace. Twenty miles away in Rhondda Cynon Taff, 280 homes had to have cavity-wall insulation removed after it made their walls damp. The BBC is reporting that Ofgem has told it that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of homes which have been fitted with cavity-wall insulation have been left with problems due to it being badly fitted. There are an estimated 15 million homes in Britain which have such insulation fitted – many of them courtesy of subsidy schemes launched by the present government and the last Labour government.
But if there is a lesson here, it is one that our leaders seem determined not to learn. While the present government has launched its Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 households in a three-year period from last March at a cost of £1 billion, Labour is promising to go much further. Under its Warm Homes Plan, every home in Britain would be brought up to the standard of a ‘C’ on an Energy Performance Certificate over the next decade – using loft insulation, cavity-wall insulation and solid-wall insulation. A Treasury analysis suggests that it would cost taxpayers between £12 billion and £15 billion a year for the next 10 years. According to Labour, it will save households £500 a year on bills – unless, presumably, they have the same experience as Zoe Godrich and many others, in which case they may find themselves having to take out emergency loans to put right botched work.
It is possible to retrofit old houses properly to bring them closer to the energy performance standards of new homes, but it is also possible to damage them through such work. This is as true of solid-wall insulation as it is of cavity-wall insulation. Linda Griffiths of Carmarthenshire found that out the hard way, when she spend £30,000 fitting it to her home, partly with the aid of a £10,000 grant from another government scheme, the Energy Company Obligation. She, too, ended up with damp – and was left complaining that her home had been devalued by £100,000.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong? As with so much to do with net zero, reason seems to go out of the window as governments seek to meet their rashly-set targets.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/home-insulation-is-the-latest-net-zero-farce/
*******************************************************Origin Energy warns costs and public support are inhibitors to nuclear power in Australia
Needless controversy from Dutton
The Coalition’s nuclear strategy will have to overcome high costs and community acceptance if it is to play a part of the country’s future National Electricity Market, Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria has warned.
The comments underscore the significant challenges that the Coalition will need to overcome if it to implement its signature energy policy, which is says will reduce the toll of the transition net zero by 2050 on households and businesses.
Mr Calabria said the industry is agnostic to technologies underpinning the country’s electricity market, but said nuclear has some sizeable hurdles, and it does not offer an immediate solution.
“There’s obviously also the public debate that’s going to go on about the acceptance of nuclear, and we would have to watch that as well. We’re not in control of that,” said Mr Calabria.
“The experience today around the world if you’re building a new one, it’s very expensive, but there are now new modular technology around the technologies that are being certainly development and research and that’s going to be something that continues, and we all look at that with interest.”
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has flagged seven potential sites, including AGL Energy’s Liddell Power Station in NSW and Loy Yang in Victoria and EnergyAustralia’s Mount Piper Power Station in NSW. The Coalition has also earmarked Western Australia’s Collie Power Station and South Australia’s Northern facility and Callide and Tarong in Queensland.
Australia’s energy industry has been careful to comment on the proposal amid concern of alienating a potential future government, but AGL Energy has rebuked the suggestion.
The most directly impacted companies did not immediately respond to the proposal, but AGL’s chief executive Damien Nicks In March said nuclear was not viable.
“There is no viable schedule for the regulation or development of nuclear energy in Australia, and the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive,” Mr Nicks said.
“AGL’s ambition to add 12GW of new renewable and firming generation by 2035 does not include nuclear energy. Policy certainty is important for companies like AGL and ongoing debate on the matter runs the risk of unnecessarily complicating the long-term investment decisions necessary for the energy transition.”
While AGL has vowed to push ahead with its renewable energy strategy, Australia faces a looming shortfall.
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the country’s coal power station fleet is likely to have been retired within 15 years, a fact acknowledged by Mr Calabria.
“We’ve got coal plants that are coming to very long into their lives, so we can talk about years, but they’re not going to be there,” Mr Calabria said.
“For decades, we are going to have a coal transition, but that’s all around timing. And so therefore, what we’re doing is, therefore having to make the investments and navigate that as a country to achieve what’s the best blend of technologies that does that?”
While Australia’s energy industry has been considered, Treasurer Jim Chalmers slammed the Opposition’s energy policy as the “dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party” and accused the Coalition of “ideological stupidity”.
He said the Albanese government’s policy “couldn’t be more different to the economic madness, which is being peddled by our opponents today”.
“We are expecting to hear a bit more about the Coalition’s nuclear road to nowhere.
“With Australia’s advantages and opportunities, nothing could be more economically irrational, or fiscally irresponsible. Nuclear takes longer. It costs more, and it would waste Australia’s unique combination of geological, geographical, geopolitical and media illogical advantages.
“It might be the dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party. It is the worst combination of economic and ideological stupidity.”
Energy now shapes as a defining theme of the election due by May 2025, with a diametrically opposed strategies threatening to create more policy uncertainty.
Mr Calabria said there was “certainly more” certainty today than five years ago as to the government’s position on renewable energy but said clarity was needed on the federal Labor’s centrepiece Capacity Investment Scheme.
“There’s certainly more in terms of where they want those renewable zones to be constructed and where they will be built,” he said. “And there’s more certainty in our role now … as you approach timing, and we’ve just committed for a gigawatt of batteries to be installed on our existing sites, and we see those have matured as being part of a solution.
“I think there are still some things that need to happen in terms of timing on transmission, timing on when those builds will occur. And probably the capacity investment scheme is the key one where they’ve announced that scheme, but we’re just waiting. More details need to be developed.”
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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