Robert Bryce torpedoes Nantucket offshore gigantism
On Saturday, the Nantucket Select Board announced it was considering legal action against Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the foreign corporations that own the $4 billion Vineyard Wind project now under construction in Massachusetts waters.
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The news of the possible litigation, which the Nantucket Current published on Saturday, comes less than a week after tons of debris from the broken wind turbine blade that was part of the massive offshore project began washing ashore on the island. The pollution forced the town to temporarily close many of its beaches during the peak summer tourist season while the debris was removed. The beaches have since reopened.
As I noted here a week ago, the development of offshore wind energy on the Eastern Seaboard has been promoted by some of America’s biggest climate NGOs, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and Conservation Law Foundation, as well as numerous Democratic politicians at state and federal levels. But the disaster at Vineyard Wind — and it is a monumental disaster for the offshore wind industry — is spotlighting the environmental risks posed by installing dozens or even hundreds of massive wind turbines and offshore platforms in our oceans. This disaster happened in calm weather. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine what will happen when a hurricane hits the East Coast.
The NGOs have been shameless in their collusion with foreign corporations, including oil companies like Equinor and Total, that are eagerly queueing up to collect billions in federal tax credits. But the turbine blade failure at Vineyard Wind is only part of a broader crisis facing Big Wind, both onshore and offshore. Before I talk about that crisis, and hurricanes, a bit of background is needed.
The Vineyard Wind project aims to have 800 megawatts of capacity. It will require installing 62 offshore platforms on the Eastern Seaboard in the midst of known North Atlantic Right Whale Habitat. Each turbine will have a capacity of about 13 megawatts. A handful of turbines have been installed and the project began producing power in January.
On Saturday, I talked to Amy DiSibio, a board member of ACK 4 Whales, the Nantucket group fighting offshore wind. “People are pissed,” she said. “They are really upset for a lot of reasons.” (ACK 4 Whales has sued to stop the project, arguing that the federal government ignored the Endangered Species Act when it issued the permit. A federal judge rejected their case in April, but the group is appealing their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.)
One of the reasons for the anger is obvious: the turbine blade began disintegrating on Saturday evening and sent some 17 cubic yards of debris into the ocean. But the owners of Vineyard Wind didn’t notify officials in Nantucket until Monday at about 5 pm. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which is part of the Interior Department, issued a stop work order at Vineyard Wind, “until further notice.”
On Thursday, as the beach cleanup was ongoing, the remaining portion of the massive turbine blade, a chunk about 300 feet long, fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The Coast Guard warned mariners in the area of the wind project, which is located 15 miles south of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, to “use extreme caution” when passing through the region.
On Sunday afternoon, I talked to Bob DeCosta, a fisherman on Nantucket who started fishing with his father when he was nine. “I’ve been on the water for 56 years,” he told me from his boat. “I don’t have a Ph.D. But like the other fishermen here, I know the tides, and the waters better than anybody. They never talked to us. These wind turbines are getting steamrolled over us. Big Wind is not green. The only thing green about it is the money going to the offshore wind companies.”
DeCosta, who served on the Nantucket Select Board for six years, operates a 35-foot charter boat, The Albacore, with his son, Ray. DeCosta said he steered his vessel through the area near Vineyard Wind early last Sunday morning through thick fog but didn’t know that debris from the shattered turbine blade was in the water. DeCosta said he could have unwittingly hit the debris which would have done significant damage to his boat. “For 48 hours, that stuff was floating around, and we knew nothing about it. It’s unacceptable.”
In addition to the public relations disaster at Vineyard Wind, Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big. Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight. The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.
But here’s the critical part: its blades are 107 meters (351 feet) long and weigh 70 tons. In addition, the rotor of the massive machine spans 220 meters. For comparison, the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is 34 meters. In other words, the turbines at Vineyard Wind are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and each of their blades weighs more than a fully loaded 737.
https://stophumansacrifice.substack.com/p/slam-the-scam-robert-bryce-torpedoes
********************************************Generator Sales Are Rising… And There’s Good Reason
I bought a house earlier this year, and to my absolute delight, it came with a built in 16 kilowatt (kW)kW generator, plenty of power for a medium sized house.
Given increasing electrical grid unreliability, many Americans are on the market for a new generator. Whether they’re upgrading from a portable generator to a built-in standby generator, or buying a portable one for the first time, many are rethinking their longstanding trust in the reliability of the grid.
When I first bought my house, right as I was moving in, I was there alone late one night scrubbing the walls in the kitchen, getting them ready for a new coat of paint the next day. It was a dark and stormy night (really), and at one point as I was scrubbing away and listening to what was probably an Agatha Christie audiobook, the thunder crashed, lightening flashed and the lights flickered once, twice, and then went out.
At that point I would usually be turning on my phone flashlight and beginning the search for errant candles or the stray flashlight. Instead, I waited with anticipation to see if my generator would work as advertised. Thirty seconds later I heard it thrum on outside, and inside of two minutes my lights were back on as if nothing ever happened.
Now this was just a small thunderstorm, and the outage it caused only lasted a little while. Twenty minutes later I heard the generator shut itself off as power returned. But there will almost certainly be longer storm outages in the future and given the state of most of the country’s power grid, chances are good that there could be blackouts caused by an inability to meet demand rather than from a downed line in a storm.
I’m happy to have found a way to insulate myself slightly from the state of the power grid (I live in Pennsylvania and my power comes from the PJM interconnection). Many other Americans with some combination of the means and foresight to do so are taking the same precaution.
Fortune Business Insights found that the generator sales market in the U.S. was valued at $6.1 billion in 2023, and projected that it will grow to 6.43 billion by the end of this year, and to $10.26 billion by 2032.
I appreciate a clever short-term solution to a problem, and I’m a fan of being prepared to meet any eventuality. I think it’s largely a very good thing that more people are taking the initiative to ensure that they have an alternative power source in a blackout.
What concerns me is both the reasons behind this growing impulse, and those that will be left behind in a crisis.
The grid should be reliable enough that a standby generator feels like a needless extravagance rather than a reasonable precaution. Lawmakers should be working to ensure that power supply problems don’t lead to blackouts.
In my new paper at the Competitive Enterprise Institute “How to Keep the Lights On”, I outline 9 principles that lawmakers should focus on to ensure that power remains reliable, and generators like mine remain a superfluous display of preparedness rather than a constantly relied upon crutch for poor policymaking.
If the principles had already been followed, Americans would be less interested in buying generators because they could rightfully expect that their lights will stay on. Unfortunately, since the importance of reliability has been minimized by some policymakers, many Americans are realizing they could soon find themselves in the dark.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/07/17/generator-sales-reason/
************************************************Britain will never be an energy superpower
Keir Starmer’s victory became assured in the autumn of 2022. This was the moment when the tension between the Bank of England’s attempts to reduce energy-driven inflation and the inability of financial markets to absorb higher interest rates humiliated Kwasi Kwarteng, a rookie chancellor determined to go on a borrowing splurge.
A political party that offered three prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – in 50 days could not be taken seriously as a governing force. But it was the nature of the economic crisis that trapped the Conservatives in the sumps of unpopularity. The very financial conditions that put Sunak in office in October that year forced his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to withdraw most of the energy-support package that Truss had introduced and eschew pre-election tax cuts.
The Labour leadership has internalised the financial markets’ disciplining power. Writing in the Financial Times in September 2023, the then shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, declared that Labour’s commitment to the electorate “starts today with a very simple promise: never again”. Whatever else happens, “with a Labour government, never will a prime minister or chancellor be allowed to repeat the mistakes of the ‘mini’ Budget”. The result is that despite the party’s landslide win, Labour’s approach to public expenditure is unlikely to differ that much from that of the previous government.
But there is little evidence that the Labour cabinet has grasped the acute interaction between this macroeconomic environment and Britain’s energy troubles. If Labour were to achieve its aim of decarbonising electricity by 2030 and reduce bills by doing so, this would still leave around 80 per cent of British energy consumption exposed to another inflationary shock. This would only change if the government also made rapid progress in electrifying the country’s heating and transportation systems. That would be dependent on spending large sums of borrowed money to subsidise consumers buying electric vehicles and heat pumps. Even then, the more electricity that is substituted for fossil fuels in these sectors, the harder it will be to achieve 100 per cent low-carbon electricity.
Prices for fossil-fuel consumption are determined by international markets over which the UK government has scarcely any influence. The gas-price shock of 2021-22 began with a spike in China’s demand for imports and was intensified by Germany’s entry into liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even Joe Biden’s administration – aided by a large domestic oil base and a much larger Strategic Petroleum Reserve – has been unable to drive US oil prices down much below the level it found politically intolerable before the 2022 midterm elections.
Geopolitical tensions, as well as the sense of political uncertainty in Washington, only intensify Britain’s impotence. British naval vessels have been in action since last December in a US-led military operation to reopen the Red Sea to Western shipping, but there were more Houthi attacks in June than in any month so far this year. If he is elected president again, Donald Trump could prove unwilling to continue with Operation Prosperity Guardian, since the US has a limited economic interest in the Suez Canal compared to the Persian Gulf. But since Britain now imports more than a quarter of its gas from the US rather than Qatar, another Democratic administration that insisted on the primacy of its domestic consumers, and which hardened Biden’s move against new LNG export approvals, could be just as much of an energy security risk over the course of this parliament.
Whatever the follies of Kwarteng and Truss, their fall exposed a structural vulnerability in the British economy to crisis dating from 2004, when Britain became a net importer of energy. Britain does not export enough goods to service its rising energy imports, required because of declining North Sea production.
At times of financial market turbulence, the ensuing trade deficit risks a fall in sterling, making dollar-priced energy imports more expensive. In the last year of Britain being a net energy exporter, the current-account deficit was 1.8 per cent of GDP and sterling started 2004 at around $1.80. When the Truss shock hit, the current-account deficit had widened to 4 per cent and sterling had fallen to $1.07. While sterling has recovered from that nadir, it still has only briefly touched $1.30 again.
The Labour leadership will argue that the answer is growth and using the energy transition to boost exports. During the election campaign, Ed Miliband, now the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, proclaimed, “The offshore wind industry is the beating heart of our mission to make Britain a clean-energy superpower.” But there will be no electricity-exporting superpowers in the way that Saudi Arabia, Russia and the US are fossil-fuel superpowers, because electricity cannot be distributed across oceans.
Far from being behind the curve on wind, Britain is already a pace-setter. It has the largest offshore-wind capacity in the world, and opened the first ever floating wind farm, off the Aberdeenshire coast in 2017. At the end of 2023 and the start of 2024, renewable electricity, mostly from wind, hit record levels – more than half of the total UK electricity generation.
Yet this success has not translated into any kind of industrial or macroeconomic reward: there is not one UK company in the top-20 wind turbine manufacturers in the world, and in the first quarter of 2024 net electricity imports were higher than ever. Rather than being the basis of an exporting renaissance, a large wind sector locks Britain into a set of hourly trade interdependencies with other European countries to provide electricity when the wind does not blow. Allowing for onshore wind, as Labour now has, cannot change that fact.
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Supporters of arrested Sea Shepherd founder say parallels with Julian Assange are ‘disturbing’
The arrest of the anti-whaling activist Paul Watson in Greenland – where he could face extradition to Japan – has been condemned as “politically motivated” by supporters, who compared the case to the detention of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
“The parallels are disturbing,” said Omar Todd, chief executive and co-founder of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF).
“We have our own extradition drama going on,” Todd said. “Governments don’t like people to tell the truth or do the right thing.
“Assange’s case was political and Paul’s case is the same. If Julian had been extradited to the US, he knew he was going there to die. If it comes to it and Paul gets extradited to Japan, he could get 15 years in prison … it’s like a life sentence.”
Brigitte Bardot, the former actor and French animal rights activist, has criticised Japan for its “manhunt” of Watson and demanded his release. More than 300,000 people have signed a petition in support of Watson.
Watson, a 73-year-old Canadian-American who lives in France, was an early member of Greenpeace and later founded Sea Shepherd, the marine conservation group known for its direct action tactics.
Watson, who appeared in the Whale Wars TV programme, was arrested and detained in handcuffs on Sunday after arriving in Nuuk, the autonomous Danish territory’s capital, on the Captain Paul Watson Foundation ship, apparently on an international warrant issued by Japan. Greenland’s justice ministry is responsible for deciding if there are grounds for extradition, according to police there.
“He doesn’t have time to play that game,” said Todd. “He has a wife and three kids, including a seven-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-old, living in Marseille. His wife is very upset.”
Watson’s arrest took place during a stop-off on a mission tracking Japan’s new whaling ship, the Kangei Maru, in the northern Pacific Ocean.
CPWF said it believed his arrest was related to an Interpol “red notice” issued over “Watson’s previous anti-whaling operations in the Antarctic region”, and that the international arrest alert had been issued in March. Interpol could not confirm the date of the notice.
“This development comes as a surprise since the foundation’s lawyers had reported that the red notice had been withdrawn,” the CPWF said in a statement.
Greenland police said Watson had been arrested on Sunday in response to an international arrest warrant. On Monday, a judge ruled that he must be detained until 15 August while the case was being investigated. An appeal against his detention on Tuesday was denied.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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