By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 2, 2022
“… global commodity price increases … sharp and sudden increases in interest rates, prolonged supply chain constraints, and persistent inflation have significantly increased the expected cost of constructing the project.”
Electricity rates are going up because of wind, solar, and batteries being forced upon, and duplicating, the grid. Reliability is going down because of wind and solar intermittency. And higher interest rates are (further) ruining the economics of the infrastructure-heavy, up-front capital necessary to turn “free” wind and solar into electricity.
It’s a perfect storm that might just overcome the taxpayer largesse of the federal subsidies (DOE and IRS) and rate averaging for captive ratepayers. With offshore wind experimental and extra-uneconomic, the worst can be assumed.
An October 30, 2022, article by Colin Young, “Major Massachusetts offshore wind project no longer viable,” explains the fluid situation.
A major offshore wind project in the Massachusetts pipeline “is no longer viable and would not be able to move forward” under the terms of contracts filed in May. Both developers behind the state’s next two offshore wind projects are asking state regulators to pause review of the contracts for one month amid price increases, supply shortages and interest rate hikes….
A one-month freeze, the developer said, “would give the parties an opportunity to evaluate the current situation facing the project and potentially agree upon changes to the PPAs, along with other measures, that could allow the project to return to viability.”
“As has been publicly reported in recent weeks, global commodity price increases, in part due to ongoing war in Ukraine, sharp and sudden increases in interest rates, prolonged supply chain constraints, and persistent inflation have significantly increased the expected cost of constructing the project. As a result, the project is no longer viable and would not be able to move forward absent amendments to the PPAs,” attorneys for Commonwealth Wind wrote in their motion.
The developer’s brief highlights “cost saving measures, tax incentives under the newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act, an increase in the PPA prices, and improvements to Project efficiencies” as the possible approaches to restoring their project to viability. The developer also said that it “remains fully committed to the project and to delivering cost-effective renewable energy from the project to the residents and businesses of Massachusetts in a manner that advances the purposes of [the state’s clean energy law] and the Commonwealth’s energy and climate policies.”
The Boston Globe reported last month that a top Avangrid executive told investors that the company expected Commonwealth Wind and Park City Wind (a project intended to provide power to Connecticut) to each be delayed by a year as they sought contract revisions. CEO Pedro Azagra said Commonwealth Wind is now expected to go live in 2028, the Globe reported….
Commonwealth Wind said that “the IRA benefits to the project are not fully known at this time and not anticipated to make the project economic absent other changes to the PPAs,” but told DPU that it “believes there may be potential opportunities to share benefits associated with the IRA with ratepayers and would be willing to explore those opportunities with stakeholders.”
It is unclear when a DPU decision will come, but the agency had previously set a Tuesday deadline for briefs related to the latest offshore wind contract….
Final Comment
The above article comes from the New Bedford Light, not the New York Times. But if the impasse continues without additional subsidies from Massachusetts authorities or captive ratepayers, it will deserve national attention.
One can only hope that local ratepayers reject associated rate hikes and preserve their shorelines at the same time. And may Commonwealth Wind’s problems serve as a warning that not only nuclear (Plant Vogtle) but also offshore wind is subject to significant risk to its developers.
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Great little bit of information on the eve of the mid-term elections. It might just tip the result – so as to swing the senate vote for the GOP!
From your print to cod’s ears!
The Biden administration is doubling down by announcing his plans to shutter all coal plants in the US, and replacing them with wind and solar. He made these statements November 4 in California. Maybe that will help tip the vote, too.
It SHOULD! What an asinine plan.
These wind systems aren’t “viable” on land, why would anyone think they would be better offshore? The 10 or 15% wind performance improvement offshore vs. land would be chewed up instantly by increased costs of construction and maintenance. Do these pinheads have any idea what a competent offshore construction firm charges for providing workers, ships, barges, and related infrastructure to marine projects? I’m certain it would more than double the cost of a land based equivalent. And don’t forget, the real reason wind turbines are uneconomical is the requirement for 100% backup.
Germany, UK, Denmark, etc., are all in deep do-do, because of excessive reliance on wind, solar, and batteries
Because of increased materials, labor, transportation, and construction costs, and greatly interest rates, and greatly increased inflation rates, and costly/delaying, supply chain disruptions, the wind/solar/battery, 20-year spreadsheets of a few years ago, do no longer make sense
1) Much greater subsidies per kWh to developers would be required, plus expensive grid expansion and augmentation, plus expensive counteracting by the other generators, of the up/down variations and intermittencies of increased wind and solar
2) Much higher charges to ratepayers and taxpayers, c/kWh, would be required
All that would make the US even less competitive in world markets, and more vulnerable to increased imports and foreign economic control
All five of Europe’s wind turbine manufacturers are currently operating at a loss and have been for some time. In a press release on 26th September 2022 Siemens Gamesa, for example, said
“As a result wind turbine manufacturers are operating at massive losses and cannot invest to satisfy growing demand for wind energy”
Siemens Gamesa ‘Europe’s energy independence impossible unless wind power is considered a strategic industry’
The European wind industry is also fearful of cheaper Chinese competition which has seen Chinese turbine manufacturers win contracts in France, Italy, Croatia, Ukraine and Serbia.
As regards offshore wind, Wind Europe noted earlier this year that there was a worldwide shortage of the specialised vessels needed to build such wind farms and the problem was exacerbated by the fact the turbines were getting bigger at a faster rate than these ships and the number of offshore sites was also growing much faster than the fleet available to build them.
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/news/europes-offshore-wind-expansion-will-depend-on-vessel-availability/
As those fields get older, many of those ships used to construct the turbines will have to be diverted in order to maintain the same turbines.
Hard to compete with cheap energy AND slave labour.
Building more renewables will never solve the problem that they only work when the sun shines brightly and the wind blows, but not too strongly
I wonder if that also goes for the proposed wind farm of south eastern Victoria.
I would say that the cost of materials is going to make Net Zero impossible and will apply not only to windmills, but to electric cars and grid-scale battery backup.
Net Zero is Nuts!
“As a result, the project is no longer viable and would not be able to move forward absent amendments to the PPAs,”
Tom, the decision that its no longer viable is based on the costs of materials, not all the other things that have made all the world’s renewables not viable. So these “Paris-sites are hoping subsidies and power rates to solve “Climate Policy-Caused Disaster^тм” can be what? Quadrupled? Quintupled?
We know also, that the EU faces far worse economics than Massachusetts! Since they didn’t have the guts to report all of theirs are not viable either, I’m doing that here. Peak global renewables power generation was in 2017. I don’t see this changing.
As any good socialist knows, if government pays for it, it’s free. So cost is no object.
Net Zero is suicidal!
So the contractor has concluded, unless the DPU the Department of Public Utilities agrees to pay more under the PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) or gets additional grants from the state via IRA the Inflation Reduction Act The project is not viable.
That tells us the project was miss sold to the people of Maryland/Connecticut using false cost/income projections.
The idea a change in the present day world price of energy or the current inflation numbers is in some way able to impact a long term contract running out 25 years into the future tells us the people who stuck the deal with the contractors have been suckered into a false promise.
Wind is free remember?……
NB As Great has already revealed, if your desire is to destroy capitalism as stated by the Green Alarmists the most effective route is to advocate the capitalists build more solar arrays and more wind farms.
The path to economic destruction is illuminated and paved with unreliable/intermittent energy systems
Quote:”That tells us the project was miss sold to the people of Maryland/Connecticut using false cost/income projections.
Nicely sums up and describes every public infrastructure project, in the UK, for the last 30+ years.
Come in with a low quote, supposedly via an ‘open competitive’ bidding process’ amongst potential suppliers.
Then, when one has been chosen and work gets past some point of no return, start ramping up the ‘unexpected costs’
Just like has happened here except that nothing much has been done.
Or has it – how much compensation is now due for ‘wasted time and effort’?
Sometimes the real cynic wonders what actually is going on.
Because there was, UK again, an infrastructure firm name of Carillion. And they seemed to pootle along quite nicely thank you, building roads and bridges etc
Maybe things over-ran a little bit but not any huuuuuge amount.
Until Government comes along to inform Carillion that they’re not paying enough into the pensions of their workers – and bankrupts the firm almost overnight.
The Cynic wonders because pension funds are pretty well the only places where there is any actual money these days and Government needs tha money (borrowed via Bonds and Gilts) to stay afloat….
It’s very similar to how the renewable energy suppliers were/are allowed to sell their power into the spot market – and make epic profits are they’re doing now.
Just so that Government can invent a new ‘Windfall Tax’
The Whole Thing Stinks – even less fragrant than Elon is now finding Titter to be.
(Bless him, just switch the whole thing off Elon. Just do it, you know you want to.)
What really is going on – just how deep a pile of schist are we actually in?
Quite, it does all stink. I think we should call the latest effort to rob those with money under the heading ‘windfall tax’ the ‘wind-fail tax’!!
Exactly right – wind and solar the cheapest forms of energy??? And yet can’t compete when natural gas and oil prices are through the roof??? I really hate liars – especially con-men pretending to care about the environment.
How often, dear readers here, have you been told by ‘official’ sources that wind power is cheaper than competitors? Or renewables in general are cheapest for electricity for you?
It is not possible to discern from the lawyerly words quoted above, whether these specific renewables are the cheapest means of producing large-scale electricity in Massachussetts.
Maybe costs for competitors like hydrocarbons have also increased.
This story highlights the need for some definitive, comprehensive, direct comparisons of costs of the major ways to produce electricity. Every comparison I have seen so far has its own ‘special circumstances’ that cloud the comparison away from like with like. This would be a typical dodge to conceal a poor rank for a chosen, popular proposal, typical of the smarmy advertizing industry, not of proper engineering.
These major projects need their viability determined on actual measured performance, not on variations of acts and regulations and special pleadings by lawyers or politicians or the like.
Global economies are in a sad state, with threats to the lives of people, because there is no single reference that shows what is better than what.
When some sanity returns and the wishful thinking factors are taken out of the fundamental equations, we really ought have fun doing name and shame of the incompetents who mouthed off that this or that was cheapest, while showing no evidence.
Under today’s, and probably tomorrow’s, technology there is surely only one possible finding from definitive, comprehensive, direct comparisons of costs of the major ways to produce electricity:- Wind and solar can only produce electricity for a third of the time. They can never power a grid, because grid electricity is needed all the time.
To my mind, the way to manage a grid is to recognise the need for the grid to be operating all the time by inviting bids for baseload supply to cover the bulk of demand each day (or longer) while also inviting bids for minutes-ahead short term supply to handle fluctuations in demand. In the Texas debacle, for example, it appears that the system only included the latter, ie that the whole system was run on a short-term minutes-ahead market. After the debacle, there were suggestions that the operators should also take bids for backup supply (stand-by), and that indeed might not be too bad an idea, but surely it is much more important to run the market in a way which recognises the benefit of base-load supply.
That was (something like) my reaction to the Texas incident. What I thought at the time is that for a given future period bids could be taken for, say, the first, second, third, etc. gigawatt demanded, with bids being lower for each successive gigawatt (but presumably greater per actual megawatt-hour delivered) because the first GW is always demanded but, say, the twentieth often isn’t.
My thought was that suppliers of wind and solar would have to make their own back-up arrangements so that they could meet their commitments regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. So their bids would have to reflect that reliability cost.
Since I really don’t know the power business, this approach is probably naïve, but the point is to get reliability priced into the market.
I think we’re on the same page on this. I see the need being to run the market in a way that matches need. Just as in many other markets, there is a need to manage at least a bit of foreseeable future not just the next few minutes. Imagine if the property rentals market only took bids for the next few minutes.
There is no other commodity which is produced and consumed simultaneously. This feature severely complicates the matter of reliability when the supply is randomly intermittent.
Such back-up arrangements would be the windmill owner paying for his own back-up and feed in tariffs. No wonder the left doesnt like free enterprise and competition.
Maybe the gas power companies owning all the wind and solar farms could figure out how to make an extra dollar.
No, it’s not naive.. Wind and solar are not stand alone electrical energy sources.. The true cost should also include battery storage, and any standby generating capacity, and to include replacement cost adjusted for inflation, every 20 or so years.. True life cycle cost analysis. Include transmission, distribution, and maintenance cost.. With conventional power plants the cost of construction, fuel, and maintenance are included in the cost per kwh. These are established known cost…
What is really going to happen is somewhere on a continuum between completely abandoning intermittent sources at one extreme and at the other extreme forcing society to organize around a hunter-gatherer approach of feast and famine. “Make hay when the sun shines”.
Another way of saying this is that the grid has always been managed on a concept of load following, with the imperative to add or reduce supply so as to match the instantaneous demand within a tight tolerance.
That is not the only possible answer. What reality demands is that voltage and frequency are held essentially constant in order for the grid to remain stable.
The other way to achieve that is by reversing the script. You could do supply following. With supply following, the imperative would be to add and reduce DEMAND so as to match the instantaneous supply within a tight tolerance.
Let me illustrate how this could be done in a very crude way, just to explain the idea. The disadvantages are obvious and any practical implementation would need to be much more complex. Please bear with me.
Imagine that we run entirely on wind, solar, and a base load dispatchable source. The dispatchable source would be hydroelectric and/or nuclear if fossil fuel is ruled out. Reality rules out battery storage, of course.
The dispatchable source is necessary to keep the grid stable at near zero intermittent supply.
The difference between supply-following and demand-following is that in supply-following, the dispatchable sources are purely for base load. No attempt is made to ramp up or ramp down based on demand. Instead, when supply drops, demand is shed—a neighborhood gets disconnected from the grid. When supply increases, a neighborhood gets reconnected to the grid.
A more sophisticated system would not disconnect whole neighborhoods. It would instead allow each consumer to choose whether and how much to reduce their demand based on a price signal.
Smart meters and appliances would be programmed to make these decisions. Adjusting the price would be the control knob that adjusts demand to follow supply.
If you’re poor maybe you run your heating only when the price signal is at or near zero. Maybe you control on price rather than temperature, letting the temperature get uncomfortably warm when power is free and hoping thermal inertia will carry you through periods of low supply when you can’t afford to heat. You’ll do something similar with your refrigerator, running it very cold when power is free and perhaps freezing water in the walls of the refrigerator so that it acts like an ice box while the power is off.
Practically speaking, some degree of short-term ramping up and down on dispatchable sources would be needed to fine-tune this, and load shedding would continue to be a fail-safe measure. Industrial demands will potentially require priority access to baseload power (things like aluminum where uninterruptible power is an absolute necessity).
Reality will prevent most people from having cars if cars must be electric. There just isn’t enough lithium. This doesn’t necessarily mean that common sense will prevail and ICE cars will still be used. The rich will have their Teslas, the middle class will ride their electric bikes, and the poor will be their own power source riding a bike.
Whether these things happen will depend on the degree to which society continues to believe in the delusion that CO2 is harmful.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not an approach that I would advocate. But it is compatible with reality and probably the only way forward with Nut Zero. We will be forced to make do with less and we will have much less freedom.
Those who hope for a big winter grid crash that wakes up the public are probably hoping in vain. The grifters chowing down at the public trough are pushing impossible goals just to maximize current profits. As long as their gravy train is maintained, they don’t care if it’s Nut Zero 2050 or Nut Zero 3050. The goal posts will move as necessary to keep the scam going.
I too hope that it is not an approach that you would advocate. The rich and powerful get all the power they want, and the peasants can ‘choose’ to die. It’s not a choice, of course.
As I said, it’s a dystopian future that I don’t want to see, but from an engineering point of view, I’m afraid that it’s feasible and can be anticipated if the insanity continues.
I come at this not from a perspective of wanting to solve the “problem” but from the perspective of anticipating the enemy’s next move. What their engineers will think.
I want to warn those in the skeptic community (of which I am an ardent member), that the scam isn’t going to go away quickly or easily. There isn’t likely to be a grid failure that wakes folks up. The scam artists aren’t going to be that clumsy. They will burn brown coal before they hand us a talking point of brown-outs. There are going to be approaches that will get them through the emergency and the goalposts will continue to move as necessary to keep the gravy train going.
So I’m roasting my Thanksgiving turkey, and my smart meter decides to load shed 5 kW in order to maintain grid stability. So not only do I stop cooking my turkey, but my freezer also is taken off line. All my food in the freezer is spoiled, and my turkey is ruined.. I don’t have a backup generator because they’ve been outlawed.. To bad,so sad, says the state..
Jon,
This is not something I am promoting. It is more of a warning about something I anticipate to be feasible with current technology and likely to be tried as a solution to the intermittency problem. It will lower our standard of living to be sure.
In your example, you have not grasped the main point which is the price signal. Your smart meter would not be the main way demand is “shaped”. It would be smart appliances that avoid running when costs are high. Except in unusual cases, you wouldn’t be cut off involuntarily, only by your pre-set preferences that you could override.
Your refrigerator would not be the same as we have today. It would be designed as a hybrid icebox-refrigerator that makes ice in its walls when power is at surplus and is free or even paying you to use it. It would then power down when power is expensive. During that period, the ice will slowly melt to keep your food safe.
Your oven might likewise stop heating for periods when power is more expensive than you’re willing to pay. In the case where you have a turkey in there, you might choose to raise the setting on how much you want to pay, or you might accept letting it take longer to roast. That will depend on how much you have in the bank. Others will choose a different acceptable price. The law of supply and demand tell us that at some price, demand will drop to match supply.
Your electric bike might not charge while the wind isn’t blowing, but probably will charge enough before you need it. After all, it’s just a bike. You’re no trillionaire, so you won’t be needing to charge a car battery.
Dishwashers and washing machines will turn on and off to use surplus power and avoid costly power. There are many similar cases where the power we use can be shifted to when it is available. You might only be running LED lighting when grid pricing is super expensive. The more you’re willing to be inconvenienced, the less you pay. The wealthy will never need to be inconvenienced. The poor will live on surplus power when it happens to be there.
We can anticipate having power forecasts like weather forecasts, so you could probably anticipate whether you’re going to be able to afford to roast the turkey or should start it early or even postpone the meal to another day.
The point is that of course bird choppers and slaver panels can’t run the grid the way it runs today. But that is not to say that there can’t be a different system that will “work” in a way that people can accept.
If you really want to worry, consider the idea of having smart meters that set your price based on your social score. 55% of the population can get almost continuous free power while 45% can barely get a watt unless there’s too much supply. And the party that arranges that system can stay in power forever while holding “free and fair” elections that don’t depend on the dead vote.
So I guess I’ll get up at 2am in morning to cook my turkey, when demand is low.. and save a bunch of money… Why not just build a few more safe and reliable nuke plants on the existing coal fired power plant sites that sleepy Joe wants to get rid of .. Tie into to the existing grid and call it good.. Then I can cook my turkey Thanksgiving morning like I’ve been doing for the past fifty years.. This great green energy fiasco we are going through is not going to end well…
You can still buy wood-burning stoves and true ice-boxes.
Of course you’ll need a source of wood and ice. Pete forbid you live in an urban area!
I get that my posts are too long for you to be bothered to read but this isn’t what I suggest, it’s what I expect whack jobs will suggest.
Rich Davis,
Why do you go to such bother to give a theoretical analysis of a problem that has an easy, known answer?
The answer is that all of the energy needs of society can be met by a simple reversion to the old ways of making electricity, expanded as needed for larger populations. Like, we here in Australia had the cheapest, most reliable national scale grid electricity in the world, so we can easily and quickly return to that successful design. Engineers already know how to do it.
Engineers for decades produced electricity on demand. Nobody I know felt limited by supply. The opposite wa s the case. International investments in projects like alumina refining and aluminium smelting grew because supply of energy was cheap and reliable. Finance was readily available to build new hydrocarbon energy plants because the design and economics were so well known and as a result, energy-intensive industry swarmed here because it was so attractive.
Remember the excitement of the times, say the 1970-2000 era, when many Aussies opened the mining/finance pages of their daily newspapers before the sporting pages? There was excitement in the air, a future with better incomes, nicer jobs, better education for our children, all those great and good factors.
What did we achieve in the last 20 years? Much of the good stuff has been badmouthed by killjoys, torn down, personal preferences thrown on the scrap heap to satisfy the climate change gods, whose properties and predictions are so poorly known that future generations will write about the madness of crowds again. I am thoroughly ashamed of our present ‘leaders’ who are followers, followers of some cult that niether thay nor I understand..
We are now operating under a system of politicial decisions by supply, not politicial decisions by demand. That is the big problem.
Geoff S
Geoff,
It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I am speculating on how all the excellent arguments for what you and I know to be the right answer will be countered by the irrational true-believers. Why? Because the obvious technical solution is no longer the obvious political answer. Why? Because I’d like to believe that the whole untenable enterprise must fall under its own weight, but I fear that we are too hopeful in that assessment. It is our Maginot Line. The enemy will find new tactics.
You live in Australia so that should have been painfully obvious to you, but apparently it is not. Your once-great nation waits to become a Chinese colony and is only consoled by the fact that things are not as bad as the pathetic display of wokeness over in New Zealand.
Geoff,
Surely $1,000 per month power bill is not too large a sacrifice to save the planet?
I am sure every pensioner around the world would be more than happy to pay $1,000/month to save the planet.
That link above to Australia leads to an anonymous mob called Climate Action Tracker who spend their careers inventing “ambitions” for countries then throwing hissy fits when by CAT calculations, ambitions are not being met. They put reduction of CO2 on a higher plane than ensuring people have adequate energy to survive.
With friends like these, who needs enemies when they write extracts like this:
“In 2021 Australia released a long-term emissions reduction plan for achieving net zero emissions by 2050, also submitted as a Long-Term Strategy. The LTS sets a net zero emissions target for 2050. Yet the strategy presents scenarios which only reduces emissions by 66% – 85% below 2005, rather than 100%. The strategy does not come up with new any new policies, and relies on global technology trends, carbon offsets and further unknown technology “breakthroughs”. There are also no plans to phase out coal, curb fossil fuel exports, nor to hold heavy polluters accountable. The Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) and Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) system has also been heavily criticised by one of its own former regulators as “fraudulent” because of its ineffectiveness in regulating polluting companies.”
We love cats, but not CAT. Geoff S
Whoops, jumped a page. this was meant for posting under Washington Post: “Countries vowed to ramp up climate pledges in 2022. Very few have”
Geoff S
It’s OK here too, isn’t it. Post it everywhere you can. Try the BBC, they will love it.
Oz is already at net zero BECAUS very little CO2 emissions and plenty of trees, shrubs and grasses to suck it up.
Oz politicians and Oz MSM and Oz scientists are not smart enough to realize that FACT.
We used to be The Lucky Country.
We are now The Dumb Country.
Any agreed to alterations to PPAs should also include a guarantee of daily power delivery at a pre agreed to level. Even if the wind farm has to invest in on site alternate generation or additional capacity and battery storage
If these sort of agreements come to pass I think batteries are a non-starter for backup
Yes of course. The global economy is slowing. That affects ever-ree-thing — including the build out of the green dream (read nightmare). Remove all subsidies, and the “transition” will immediately grind to a halt. — You can forget the idiotic 2030 date for “transition”.
Interesting isn’t it,the “climate catastrophe” and the urgency to move “green clean electrical energy”, the war on carbon, coal mining, gas, fossil fuel production, and more broadly capitalism, and economic growth — depends on a vibrant growing economy and healthy competition — but don’t tell the green left that.
After all, without capitalism, there would be nothing to tear down…
The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill from an offshore rig turned Californians against offshore drilling and the unsightly rigs. There used to be dozens of them. Now they’re almost gone. Looks like Massachusetts residents are feeling the same about ugly offshore windmills. Hopefully our grandchildrens’ experience of them will only be through tales of their brief crazy existence.
Like The Towers of San Gimignano and other towns in the area, Volterra for example. A fashion statement to show off wealth as oppossed to a fashion statement to show off green credentials
Big difference is those towers were built with private money. The proponents of wind want to use your money and mine to prove their credentials.
How come no one ever mentions the oil slicks which regularly appear on the beaches at Santa Barbara due to the natural seafloor seepage ADJACENT TO Santa Catalina?
Shhhhhhhh. The Indians used that to waterproof boats. So they were polluting way before Europeans arrived.
I remember when Fat Head Ted Kennedy managed to get a similar project killed years ago. What is good for thee is not for me!
He didn’t want it visible to the Kennedy mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.
Snicker… I could have told them it was a loser from the start for free if they would have asked.
See that’s your trouble. First you need to charge them millions of dollars. Then you need to tell them what they want to hear. Never offer truth for free. Offer fantasy for whatever the market will bear.
con$ultancy 101.
What infuriates me is that politicians here refuse to even look at the evidence of the failure of wind projects elsewhere, not even on their doorstep in Europe, and they keep pushing on relentlessly for more wind power.
Politicians care about what feels good, not what is actually good.
Emotions get them elected more than facts.
Especially, they like the feeling of the cash in their pockets, stuffed there by investors in solar, wind, electric/hybrid vehicles, and like crooked schemes.
Most of the time politicians bear no cost for being wrong.
I forget what the concept is called in economics, but it involves distributed costs and concentrated benefits.
Since public programs are paid for by taxpayers, even millions of dollars in cost works out to only a dollar or two per taxpayer. Not enough to get worked up over, and not enough to get active and campaign against a politician.
On the other hand, the benefit of those millions of dollars goes to just a few people. They on the other hand are very grateful and will donate thousands of dollars to the campaign funds of the politicians who caused it to happen.
Multiply this effect by thousands upon thousands of government programs and the end result is a government that is completely out of control.
Frankly, I would be ok with this project moving forward provided that the additional revenue needed to cover the additional cost came solely from the PPA where those costs would ultimately be passed onto the residents of MA. Why? Because MA is a deep blue state where a large majority are true believers who support this lunacy. Let them bear the additional costs and suffer the consequences of an increasingly unreliable grid
I don’t want to waste the resources building these monstrosities. Besides they would probably be most useless when people needed power, the winter storms or Nor’easters that hit two or three times a year.
And who knows what it would do to the fishing and whale watching industry in the state, probably destroy it.
I don’t either. Wind, solar and batteries are a complete waste of time and money. There may be niche applications for stand alone solar – like powering a remote lamp post on a rural road – but neither wind or solar can replace fossil fuels. My point was that if money is going to be wasted on such a foolish project, let those who think it is a good idea pay for it and subsequently suffer thru the inevitable loss of power due to a far less reliable grid. Some people only learn from a very harsh lesson and the true believers in MA will likely learn no other way. I know too many of them and no amount of data will convince them that their religious fervor to save the planet by switching to renewables is absurd and impossible.
Remember the old Canery in the coal mine.
Well we now have the modern equivalent.
The Tasmanian Hydro electric commission wanted to test the viability of wind power.
They selected a Island between Tasmania d & the Australian State of Victoria. That being a small island Kangeeroo Island.
It’s in the perfect spot to test the viability of renewables as its situated in the “Roaring Forties” of the days of sailing ships, with a mostly steady wind blowing from the West to the East.
Also Australia has a lot of sunny days.
The Tasmania Hydro spent a lot of money setting up a fully automatic setup. With Diesal as back up. It has battery backup too & even a bank of heat resisters to take any overload.
It’s available by typing in ”
King Island,Tasmania,Hydro.
.
You will see in rea time it working.
.now I watched it every day & apart from the odd storm, the wind only provided on average 40 % of the electricity.
.Solar was very poor, at about 5 %.
Clearly if in such a ideal position wind was unable to supply even half the required power for a rural location, then no way can wind manage a industrialised country.
I still say that long term the Green movement is just the road to their dream of Communism Mark Two.
Michael VK5EELL
You just have to store the peaks to fill in the troughs don’t you?
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2022/october
Tesla take care of that in between making EVs.
I read an article on the long term storage of cell phones with Li-Ion batteries.
They recommended that you keep the batteries stored at 50% charge.
Those wind projects were used to justify not building gas pipelines into New England. I’m sure the people of New England won’t mind paying world market LNG prices rather than much cheaper piped in NG prices while the wind developer figures out how to maximize financial returns with the IRA funding.
I wonder if the stated IRA issues have anything to do with the ones I wrote about:
https://www.cfact.org/2022/08/23/renewables-subsidy-chaos-coming/
IRA slashes wind tax credits by 80% unless all contractors and subcontractors get local union wages. This creates a huge labor and certification challenge that could take years to sort out.
At this point the impact will be regulatory confusion, which is my field:
http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html
Who is a contractor or subcontractor is itself an open question. Then the Labor Dept may not have even published local prevailing wages for some of these, especially the maratime categories. It may take IRS guidance, etc.
The impact on the tax credit market is also unknown. Buyers are liable for seller’s noncompliance.
A fine mess! The Dems decided to throw in social engineering.
Just think if the federal government didn’t subsidize Ford to develop the Model T and pay Standard Oil to supply fuel nationwide we still be on horseback. And if the government didn’t pay Edison to generate electricity we would be be using candle to read. The government can solve every problem if you just help them grow.
G’Day Southern Yankee,
“And if the government didn’t pay Edison to generate electricity …”
I’ve often wondered why a major electrical supplier would adopt the name “Edison”. After all, it was George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla who came up with alternating current generation and transmission for electrical power. Thomas Edison was going with direct current – didn’t catch on at all.
None, if this green energy is viable, including battery powered cars & trucks.
Democrat Massachusettes just like they claim to be open borders and a sanctuary state as soon as the reality hits, and immigrants(illegal) come to settle, they back out and say not in my backyard. Of course the people now don’t want to see the unsightly windmills from their beaches while pushing clean energy in the name of climate change hoax.
There is a lot of energy in the ocean that can be intelligently harvested without undue damage to a fragile environment: waves and tides come to mind. Wind? I don’t know. But just seeing those towers rising up out of the ocean makes this sailor’s blood run cold.
Ed,
There may indeed be a lot of energy in waves and tides [which produce no energy at slack water twice a day], but nobody, yet, has clearly demonstrated that that energy can be collected and transported to where it is needed – when it is needed – cost effectively.
One obvious challenge, that I and many other on WUWT have mentioned, is the interaction between salty, damp atmosphere and electrical, mechanical – and electronic, I guess – components.
There is work ongoing off Scotland – near the Pentland Firth, where tidal streams reach ~ 15 knots at spring tides – which might find some solutions, but none appear to have been publicised [not even by the BBC!] to date.
And the Pentland Firth is many miles – over 100 miles by road – from the nearest City, Inverness [population about 50,000 or so].
Auto
I don’t disagree. The research needs to be done and it won’t be easy. My larger point which I didn’t make very well is that there are a lot of problems with windmills which don’t translate easily from land to the sea.
The research is in reality largely complete. It has been established that tidal streams are brutal environments for turbines, with large differences in water speed at different depths and significant interaction with surface waves. This results in enormous stresses on the turbine bearings and lots of vibration. Design defences are to limit turbine diameter to reduce the stresses and to avoid resonant frequencies. In turn, that severely limits turbine output. That is why the O2 Orbital turbines are a paltry 1MW apiece.
Even thus restricted, the turbine output is subject to enormous flicker, and is unusable as a direct feed to the grid or the electrolysers that are part of the project. Instead, it is fed into an array of costly vanadium flow batteries which can tolerate the flickering input and deliver a more stable output. The batteries are also billed as smoothing the output between tides, but they impose a round trip loss of around 20% in the process. They are far too small to bridge the output variation between spring and neap tides, which is probably of the order of a factor of 8 every fortnight. Feeding the output to an electrolyser to make hydrogen in theory allows that variation to be smoothed. But the electrolysis struggles to be 60% efficient, and utilisation varies between spring and neap tides, not helping the economics. The hydrogen then gets used inefficiently to generate power. All these inefficient steps in the chain produce extremely high cost energy.
It’s a Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg contraption.
The ocean tears apart any wave /tide machines.
How much money has already been spent and who did it go to?
Virtue signalling. No surprise.
i guess that means the lawsuits asking to block construction in the endangered right whale protection zone can be tabled ?
Wind and solar projects only happen when government subsidies are available; they’re an example of our government legislating inefficiency and unreliability into the power grid. And it’s all to satisfy the globalist’s demand for net zero carbon–driven by the false religion known as climate change.
If you can con the public into increased subsidies anything is viable! Fools