Are Offshore Wind Farms The Endangered Species
The Wind Industry has to decide if it can survive four years of Donald Trump. I am here to tell you that the prognosis is not good, and that this makes me happy. The executive orders, dropping out of climate agreements, terminating taxpayer-backed prop-ups without which it can’t compete, and putting the green energy giant under a microscope next to the US Government’s regimented permitting process, bode ill.
Even in the fading moments of the Biden regime, Wind didn’t fare well. The Turbine failures off Nantucket generated a wealth of reporting as disgruntled residents discussed closed beaches, foam debris, and microplastics. [Related: The Poster Child For Why Wind Will Fail Bigly]
Orsted backed out of two New Jersey projects last year, while governors along the Eastern Seaboard, including those in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, realized the cost of the electricity from these offshore farms was not conducive to re-election.
And a lot of whales and dolphins died too, washing up on beaches for all to see. President auto-pens administration ignored it all and pushed hard, nonetheless, only to lose the nomination to Kamala, who lost the election to Trump, so they could watch it all brought to a screeching halt.
To borrow from Monty Python’s Holy Grail, after they ate Sir Robin’s Minstrels, “there was much rejoicing.”
Everything is on hold, and they meant it.
Interior Secretary Burgum just ordered all construction on a massive offshore wind project south of Long Island to cease. Empire Wind 1 was everything its Progolodye worshippers could ask for. Fifty-Four Turbines, fifteen miles off the coast of Long Beach. False idols to a false god, and a Norwegian Wind Company anxious to get them built.
Not so damn fast, he says.
Empire Wind was likely rammed through the federal goose like the Gulf of Maine Wind project. Lip service to concerns from fishermen, lobstermen, and actual environmentalists - the ones not on the take from the greenwashers in politics and the 'Green" energy companies that fund their campaigns.
Every OSW project is on hold pending a "comprehensive review of the federal government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects." Whether out of economic sense, spite, or because it's the right thing to do, every agency must make sure corners were not cut or regulations ignored—agencies headed by Trump’s people.
We can tell you from experience with the spastic, hyper-speed, adderal popping, energy-drink infused rate at which they fast-tracked the Gulf of Maine Wind project that corners were most definitely cut. [Related: Gulf of Maine Wind: Helping to Make Electricity a Luxury at the Expense of The Environment]
It’s very suspicious.
The Federal Government is built to slow walk everything through as many agencies as possible, all of whom get paid, or collect fees, to sustain the pay, benefits, office space, and voting habits of the bureaucrats embedded there. The machine exists to grow itself and to feed those who protect it. Progress, despite the prevailing parties’ claim to that idea, is glacial, so the speed at which some of these Offshore infrastructure projects suddenly advanced broke records, and any honest review will expose how.
Mr. Trump has come to tear it down, but not before verifying that they have followed all the laws and rules that have kept these parasites thriving.
No, violators will not be punished, even if they still have a job with the government (thank you, Trump and DOGE), but many in the pipeline OSW projects will likely die on the vine. It has the potential to be a near-extinction-level event for any new development.
The Gulf of Maine Wind project, which would sprout not far from the shores of my state, New Hampshire, got as far as the sale of leases, but nothing else. And it had problems before the threat of a Trump audit. There is no fixed location to onshore the power if it were built (Biden's Administration killed funding for the one planned in Maine), and Granite Staters were promised it wouldn't be Schiller Station, a decommissioned coal plant on the Piscataqua River, in Portsmouth being refitted (on paper) as a battery back up facility like Moss Landing in California, which is on its third major toxic-metal fueld, air and water polluting fire.
Without another step taken (or to take), Maine Offshore Wind’s future seems happily in jeopardy. Almost any review of the environmental impact process ought to be enough to kill it. Even BOEM cited risk to sea life. Ignored in the haste to get it approved and leases sold.
New Hampshire has also advanced legislation to neuter wind at the state level.
[The Bill] removes the office of offshore wind industry development from the office of energy innovation. It repeals the offshore wind industry workforce training center committee and the offshore and port development commission.
With any luck, we'll be saving dolphins, whales, our wallets, and the planet from the scam that is not-so-green offshore wind. Near me, near you, along any coastline in America. At least until we can ascertain, without political bias, what the short and long-term effects are on sea mammals and other ocean life that the political left went out of its way to protect.
Until a better deal with deeper pockets was found.
These are the worse! They take a lot of money to maintain and are ugly. As a boater I hate seeing them. When they break, they are hardly ever fixed and are just left standing. Waste!