By Steve Goreham
On November 6, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) regulatory agency approved a project to construct wind turbines near Virginia Beach. The plan calls for construction of turbines 27 miles off the coast, to begin operation by the end of 2020. Virginia electricity rate-payers will pay the exorbitant costs of this project.
The project, named Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW), will be the first offshore wind project in the mid-Atlantic. Dominion Energy and Orsted A/S of Denmark will erect two 6-megawatt wind turbines supplied by Siemens Gamesa of Spain. The estimated project cost is a staggering $300 million, to be paid for in the electricity bills of Virginia businesses and households.
According to the Wind Technologies Market Report, US wind turbine market prices in 2016 were just under $1,000 per kilowatt, or about $6 million for a 6-megawatt turbine. Virginia will pay 25 times the US market price for the CVOW turbines.
The wholesale price for electricity in Virginia is about 3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). This is the price received by coal, natural gas, or nuclear generating facilities. The electricity produced from the two offshore turbines will receive 78 cents per kWh, or a staggering 26 times the wholesale price.
The SCC acknowledged that the project was not the result of competitive bidding, and that the project was not needed to improve power system reliability or capacity reserve margin. They also concluded “…it appears unlikely that the cost of offshore wind facilities will become competitive with solar or onshore wind options in the foreseeable future.” Virginia electricity rate payers will also pay for any project cost overruns.
Why would the State Corporation Commission approve such an expensive project? The SCC pointed out that on six separate occasions, the Virginia General Assembly declared that offshore wind was “in the public interest.” Governor Ralph Northam said the project would harness Virginia’s “offshore wind energy resource and the many important economic benefits that this industry will bring to our Commonwealth.”
What is it about green energy that induces government officials to pay far above market prices? It is doubtful that governor Northam or Virginia Assembly members would pay 25 times the market price for food, clothing, or housing. But they are quick to approve a project that will soak Virginia electricity rate payers.
Beyond the project cost, Virginians should be concerned that these wind turbines will likely not survive to the end of their projected 25-year life. The CVOW project is the southernmost proposed wind project along the Atlantic Coast and the site of periodic hurricane activity.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 34 hurricanes have been recorded within 100 miles of the project site within the last 150 years. Five of these storms were Category 3 hurricanes, including Hurricane Bob in 1991 and Hurricane Emily in 1993. A hurricane passes through the area about every five years.
Project specifications call for the CVOW wind turbines to survive sustained winds of 112 miles per hour (50 meters per second). The turbines are also designed to survive waves of 51 feet (15.6 meters) in height.
But it’s doubtful that these turbines will survive either the wind or waves of a major storm. According to the National Hurricane Center, Category 3 hurricanes exhibit sustained winds of 111 to 129 mph, stronger than the design limits. Category 1 hurricanes typically drive waves much higher than 50 feet. Hurricane Florence measured Category 1 wind speeds when it crossed the coast at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina on September 14. But just two days before, wave heights of 83 feet were recorded on the northeast side of Florence.
Who speaks for the electricity rate payers of Virginia? It’s certainly not Governor Northam, the General Assembly, or Dominion Energy. Long after government officials leave office, Virginia citizens will be on the hook for an expensive offshore wind system that is unlikely to survive the turbulent weather of the Atlantic Ocean.
Originally published in The Western Journal., republished here at the request of the author. Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.
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Well, all I know is my Oklahoma legislators decided to stop paying subsidies to windmills because it would eventually bankrupt the State economy.
How long do you think it will take Virginia’s legislators to discover this fact?
I saw a new study the other day claiming windmills cause unhealthy effects in humans. I wonder what kind of health effects these offshore windmills have on the creatures in the sea. The noise they make travels a lot farther in the ocean than in the air.
I must say this Virginia deal is about the worst one I have seen so far. It makes you wonder who is running the show in Virginia. Whoever it is must be really clueless. They probably think they are really clever.
Look what that Hockey Stick and all those other lies have caused. They have driven a certain segment of society over the edge of sanity and turned them into gibbering idiots.
Somebody ought to go to jail.
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I don’t think economic reality played the least part in their calculations. They are catering to the ignorance and wishful thinking of a particularly vocal segment of the electorate, while dishing out “pork” (a euphemism for graft) to well-heeled donors.
Wow, just WOW! And I thought we had some dumb politicians in Australia.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project reportedly is for 2 towers with a total of 12 MW nameplate capacity (so about 4 MW average delivered power) for $300 million?
In Australia we had a 75 tower onshore wind farm built at Ararat in Victoria in 2017 with a nameplate capacity of 240 MW (average delivery about 70 MW) for a cost of about US$300 million.
I calculated that would require a price of about $70/MWhr to give a 6% return on investment assuming a 20 year life.
A twenty year life is extremely unlikely unless it accepted that all the parts of the windmill will have been replaced by then. At sea it may be a third of that.
Ian W
Very much on the button.
Salt winds, high-ish humidity and warm temperatures [in summer, at least] can do wonderful (if not necessarily wanted) things to machinery that is not properly protected.
And, of course, any small failure of protection will allow more wind and salt to attack the innards.
And so the weakening begins . . .
Auto
They’ve just done the same in Shale oil rich Estonia (just watched recently as a nice northern anticyclone laid them up to sleep for the best part of 5 days).
You couldn’t make it up, then watch my electricity bill double!
The EU dictated, using your own resources = 2 legs bad, shuttered the only Baltic states NPP, Ignalina, despite having no alternative (and it being operated faultlessly for decades) = doubled Lithuanian electricity prices in the middle of a deep recession = 4 legs good!
They were then forced to admit, the only answer to the resulting energy famine is to import electricity from a (soon to be built) NPP literally 30 miles further over the border in Belarus.
There is only ONE worse scenario to having your own idiotic behaviour in a US state like Virginia…
Having a bunch of unelected drunken fools (Hi Mr Juncker!), some 1000 miles further away in Brussels doing the same, then claim all the people who previously lived on the cheapest electricity in the EU as backward!
Come to think of it, why not build a windfarm in central Brussels or a NPP in the old polluted oil refinery zone of Strasbourg, as they also try to shutter a fully working NPP in southern Alsace?
That nutter François Hollande and his greeny greeny ex wife Royale of “solar panel” road fame, has literally covered France with intermittent power sources, for a country getting up to 80% of it’s power from nuclear!- so much so, you can’t travel more than 30 miles at night without being surrounder by winking red lights.
There has got to be a place in a lunatic asylum for both of them, followed quickly by the Brussels partying/best restaurant brigades into rehab.
Just let them get on with the scheme, the results might knock a bit of sense into their heads.
27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach is a very busy location for maritime traffic, as shipping lanes converge entering the Chesapeake Bay. Also, the weather is often foggy offshore. I’m not sure the hazard to navigation is worth it for just a few MW of electricity generation.
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Press and politicians reaction: “That’s never happened before! (GASP!) It must be global warming.”
The median family income is about $55k/year. Every $1 million of spending consumes the entire annual income of about 18 families. A project with the capital cost of $300 million sucks the income of 5,400 families out of the general economy.
Such a project’s net effect on the economy comes from the extent to which it creates more wealth on an ongoing basis than it consumed to construct over its life time. Given the size and probabilities of disabling storm damage, an additional reserve must be accounted for as well. I am sure that the risk of total loss (and salvage expense) was included in the cost calculations. Dont you
think? Just asking.
I wonder if this project will affect all Virginians’ rates, or just those in Dominion Energy’s domain (this wind farm is a Dominion Energy project). There’s at least one other power company in Virginia.
300mill?
That’s nothing
My elektrik supplier has just told me I’ll be paying £200 more in the next 12 months than I did, for the same amount of electric, as I paid in the previous 12 months.
It is actually a ‘nice round’ 33%
And just me in there. Single person cottage
Take that across *just* ordinary people’s homes in the UK and you get £6 billion.
wtf will ‘industry’ be paying extra?
Sorry. Silly question.
UK industry has left – gone to The Land Of The Rising Tat Pile
Is it any wonder that women are simply saying no. They have been for 25+ years, just ask the French.
Not just ‘unreasonable behaviour’, it is suicidal insanity.
They are NOT saying ‘no’ because The Boys are soooo rich, clever and intelligent as they like to think.
This story, amongst dozens of others, demonstrates the Exact Contrary to be true
Thanks Ancell, we owe you one.
That increase is to pay for Drax to be converted into a wood burning stove (all 4 gw of it).
So Drax is now burning every forest in America, while emitting millions of tonnes of CO2 in cutting, processing and shipping the wood-pellets, and also increasing its combustion CO2 by 50%. (Prieviously, its coaI came from a mine under the power station.)
But you know this all makes (Green) sense…!!
R
Governor Northam is a democrat but the Virginia House and Senate are 51/49 – 21/19 republican majorities, at least in name, RINO comes to mind. If I lived there I would me for publishing the names of everyone that voted for HB 1558 which on the first line contains:
§ 56-234. Duty to furnish adequate service at reasonable and uniform rates.
A. It shall be the duty of every public utility to furnish reasonably adequate service and facilities at reasonable and just rates to any person, firm or corporation along its lines desiring same. Notwithstanding any other provision of law https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?181+ful+HB1558EH1
In what universe is 25 times the going rate reasonable?
The turbines are also designed to survive waves of 51 feet (15.6 meters) in height.
And the Titanic was designed to survive a collision with at iceberg.
And if the waves get to 52 feet?
Then the wind will only be blowing at 90mph ’cause that is all it takes to whip waves that high
Yes, and each US Space Shuttle (orbiter) was designed to fly at least 100 missions. The orbiter Challenger was destroyed on its 10th flight due to an unforseen/overlooked launch booster failure mode. The orbiter Columbia was destroyed on its 28th flight due to an unforseen/overlooked failure modes of the launch system external tank and orbiter’s leading edge thermal protection tiles.
“TWO 6-megawatt wind turbines” … PLUS 27 mile long underwater cables, PLUS connection and control infrastructure. A breathtaking amount of money and effort for next to nothing in the way of electricity.
Boiled frog syndrome applies here, the cost increment to bill payers will be tiny, but not after umpteen such increments.
That 6MW is the nameplate rating (i.e. – the marketing not-to-exceed performance)?
Real output closer to 1/3 of the nameplate rating, if they’re lucky.
“Governor Ralph Northam said the project would harness Virginia’s “offshore wind energy resource and the many important economic benefits that this industry will bring to our Commonwealth.” Even more stupid than “to save the world from climate.” This is the nation’s energy policy being practiced in most places. The article is a vivid reminder worthy of repetition everywhere – including state capitols.
The post states:
“Virginia citizens will be on the hook for an expensive offshore wind system that is unlikely to survive the turbulent weather of the Atlantic Ocean.”
What about the US tax payer contribution to this project? US tax dollars landing in the DC money trough slop over to most of the top 10 wealthiest suburbs/counties in the US. Much of the Virginia wealth comes from it’s proximity to DC – thus the US tax payers are indirectly co-funding this project.
Virginia has always been in the top 10 in per capita income. Long before the population explosion of Northern Virginia over the last 15 years.
Virginia has always been a fairly wealthy state.
Remember, we are not West Virginia.
Since no state has regulatory authority over offshore waters, this project would have to be subject to Federal permitting under NEPA as a “major federal project’ since it is situated in Federal waters (the exclusive economic zone granted to all nations from the 12 mile national waters to 200 miles offshore). Consequently, those who would be impacted by the hazards to navigation presented by these offshore towers would have a right to comment and intervene.
Duane,
Absolutely correct, but already taken care of. This has been in the works (EIS, lease auctions, etc.) for years. Hopefully, it fails and doesn’t go any farther after the next few years. Remember, SE Virginia is a BIG navy (and military in general) area. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t already have DoD buy-in.
The plan calls for construction of turbines 27 miles off the coast
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been long time since I looked into maritime law/borders but…..this seems to well cross the boundaries and is eye catching to me.
I wondered about that, too.
Here’s a link:
https://www.quora.com/What-parts-of-the-oceans-are-considered-international-waters
“An exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is a sea zone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea over which a state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.”
end excerpt
It looks like they have a legal right to put the windmills out there.
Yeah, but there should laws against being that stupid.
“We” is the United States of America Federal government … not the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I noted that after Earl passed across the Dominican Republic, all of the windelecs (wind turbines) had lost all their blades. (Despite their ability to feather the blades.). That is an expesive job, to check for structural damage and replace all the blades.
Should be named for what happens when the next big coastal storm hits after installing — Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind or CRASH.
Wonder if Bezos gets a discount or waiver entirely of the electricity price for the new Amazon HQ2 (HQ2a? HQ2b?)
MORONS
This is state establishment of religion. The $300 is to perform a strictly symbolic religious sacrament, virtue-signaling the state’s eco-religious bona-fides.
There’s no need to worry about hurricanes. The wind turbines will dissipate them. I’m, of course, being sarcastic, but, Mark Jacobson and his tiny toon fans are serious and they have a lot of influence:
https://www.vagazette.com/79463921-157.html
The location they selected is in about 60-70 feet of water, give or take, and the towers won’t be seeing waves higher than about 1/2 that. Plenty of old ordinance and other obstacles to navigation litter that area, and they are out of shipping lanes. As far as winds from storms, I’m thinking the blades will by design break off at the rotor hub once the wind gusts get high enough, and hopefully float to somewhere where they can be towed back to Norfolk and then refit on the windmill.
On the cost, we should just settle for 6 of them at a discounted 1 Trillion US Dollars. Didn’t California spend about 66 times that amount for a high-speed-rail system that isn’t going to be operational for about 5-7 more years ? At least they had a ton of economic trade studies and the people voted on the bond measures.
The 300 million being wasted on the 1st two windmill units shows up here ( Virginia Port Authority):
publicreports.dpb.virginia.gov/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=dwBudgetWizCapital&QLinks=Sec&selFieldList=SecretarialAreaCode,AgencyCode&selTitleList=SecretarialAreaTitle,AgencyTitle&selChapterID=51&selValueColumns=Total+Dollars&iptSubmitted=True&chkInitial=True&chkAmended=True&chkCaboose=True&iptFirstPageCall=False&iptShowInput=DontShow&iptShowToggle=Show&rdShowModes=Show
Virginia’s capital projects budget would be 1.2 Trillion in 2019, with these two paltry units gulping down 1/4th of it.
A single AC6000 GE locomotive alternator output is around 4 MW, and they cost about 3 million each, so would need 3 of them for under 10 Million US Dollars. Wind energy is very expensive initially (means pollution just to build them), and then there are the summer doldrums on the Chesapeake (we live there too), where home AC use is the highest.
No top down trade study of pros and cons seems to be available on the internet. Just some slides about how they are going to protect the existing leap frog population and not blow themselves up on old ordinance out there.
How do ships avoid these?
James Fosser,
Umm…as of right now, there’s only two.
Has anyone looked at the numbers of birds that travel this route every year as part of their migration?
I think it is right on the main flight path for shorebirds.
So much for the Atlantic Flyway.
Birds seldom fly over ocean waters on their migratory path southward. Especially as far out as where these turbines will operate.