The Offshore Wind Energy Scandal Is Even Worse Than You Think

From the Robert Bryce Substack

Robert Bryce

These 11 charts show how America’s biggest NGOs are colluding with foreign corporations that want to industrialize our oceans with thousands of turbines that will hurt whales and ratepayers

Two of Europe’s biggest energy companies are abandoning the SS Offshore Wind.

In May, Shell, the UK-based oil and gas giant (2023 revenue: $317 billion), announced that it was cutting staff from its offshore wind business because, according to Bloomberg, the company has decided to focus on markets that “deliver the most value for our investors and customers.” Bloomberg also reported that the staff cuts were made after the departures of top executives in the company’s offshore wind and renewable power businesses.

Last month, Murray Auchincloss, the CEO of oil and gas giant BP, imposed a “hiring freeze and paused new offshore wind projects.” According to Reuters, the new CEO is putting more “emphasis on oil and gas amid investor discontent over its energy transition strategy” and that BP (2023 revenue: $208 billion) was cutting investments in “big budget, low-carbon projects, particularly in offshore wind, that are not expected to generate cash for years.”

The moves by BP and Shell are only the latest examples of the troubles facing the offshore wind sector, which has been foundering on the shoals of higher interest rates, citizen opposition, and ballooning costs. Over the past year, numerous projects on the Eastern Seaboard, including Skipjack Wind in Maryland, Park City Wind in Connecticut, and South Coast Wind in Massachusetts, have been canceled due to bad economics. In all, according to data compiled by Ed O’Donnell, a nuclear engineer and a principal at New Jersey-based Whitestrand Consulting, about 14,700 megawatts of offshore wind capacity has been canceled. For comparison, about 15,500 megawatts of capacity is now in development, under construction, or operational.

Of course, those figures don’t jibe with the tsunami of hype about offshore wind energy that has appeared in major media outlets. But the hard reality is that America’s offshore wind sector is a subsidy-dependent industry that is dominated by foreign companies who are in bed with some of America’s biggest climate NGOs, including the NRDC (gross receipts: $555 million) and Sierra Club (Gross receipts: $184 million).

Those NGOs and others, including the National Wildlife Federation (gross receipts: $142 million) and Conservation Law Foundation (gross receipts: $17.5 million), are leading the most shameful environmental betrayal in modern American history. Rather than seek to protect marine mammals and stop the industrialization of our oceans, they are eagerly promoting the installation of hundreds of offshore wind platforms smack in the middle of the known habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

Last week, I gave public lectures in Nantucket and Newport on the energy transition and offshore wind energy. Those events allowed me to take a deep dive into the cesspool of offshore wind and the entities pushing it. Two small groups, ACK 4 Whales and Green Oceans, sponsored the lectures. (The groups are so new that they haven’t filed Form 990s.) The lectures allowed me to meet dozens of committed and interesting people from all walks of life, income levels, and political beliefs, who are fighting the insanity of offshore wind. Among them was Vallorie Oliver, a native of Nantucket who is the president of ACK 4 Whales. Oliver’s father worked as a carpenter and fisherman on the island. She has been fighting the offshore wind projects since 2019.

Oliver reminds me of the dozens of other Americans I’ve been privileged to meet over the last decade as I’ve reported on the backlash against the encroachment of Big Wind and Big Solar. When we talked at her modest home in Nantucket last Monday, I told Oliver that she’s special, but not unique. Oliver — and the many others I’ve met who are fighting the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with alt-energy — all share a common value. What is it? It’s the desire to protect their homes, neighborhoods, viewsheds, and property values from the climate change carpetbaggers who are only interested in the profits they can make by paving vast swaths of territory with solar panels and wind turbines.

In an email on Sunday afternoon, Oliver told me what keeps her motivated: “There are no do-overs when the last whale is killed off,” she explained. “There are fewer than 350 North Atlantic Right Whales left. What is Big Wind going to say when they kill the last whale? ‘Sorry’?”

These 11 charts show the offshore wind energy scandal is even worse than you think.

Chart 1: About two-thirds of the offshore projects that are operating, under construction, or proposed are owned either entirely, or in part, by foreign companies.

Chart 2: Those foreign companies are feasting on subsidies. As shown below, the foreign corporations pushing for offshore wind in U.S. waters have, according to data from Good Jobs First, collected more than $9 billion in local, state, and federal subsidies, loans, or loan guarantees, and they are eager for more. How lucrative are the offshore wind subsidies? Consider Vineyard Wind, the 800-megawatt offshore project owned by Avangrid, the Spanish company, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. Construction costs on the project will be about $4 billion. With an investment tax credit of about 40%, those two foreign outfits could collect as much as $1.6 billion in federal tax credits on Vineyard Wind alone.   

Chart 3: If there’s a better example of how climate NGOs have sold out to big business — and Big Oil — I can’t name it. Here’s a screenshot from the New York Offshore Wind Alliance website that shows the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex at work.

Chart 4: Yup.

Chart 5: Ibid.

Chart 6: I’m old enough to remember when environmental groups cared about whales. Alas, that was a long time ago. On Sunday, the Daily Mail published an article about Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who built a software system to analyze the dozens of whale deaths that have occurred on the Eastern Seaboard over the past few years. Gerasoulis set out to determine if the whale deaths were related to the loud blasts of sonar used by offshore wind survey vessels. His conclusion: “Offshore wind kills whales…The numbers never lie. There is a cause. We have shown that the cause for death of the whales is offshore wind. Period.” (H/t fellow Substack writer David Blackmon.)  

Chart 7: Can we trade the Sierra Club for an environmental group that cares about protecting marine mammals? The text below is from the club’s website.

Chart 8: This bit of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo is buried in the environmental impact statement the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did on Vineyard Wind. Here’s my plain English translation: “These projects won’t make any difference on climate change. But they are good because they allow state-level bureaucrats to say they met their policy goals.”

Chart 9: The big NGOs claim we must build gigawatts of offshore wind because of climate change. But given the enormous size of the U.S. power grid (1,300 gigawatts), whatever reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that might be achieved with offshore wind will be the equivalent of a fart in a hurricane.

Chart 10: Short of throwing currency into a boiler, offshore wind energy is the most expensive way to generate electricity. The recent announcement that the state of New York will pay $155 per megawatt-hour for the juice from the Empire Wind project proves that point.

Chart 11: The states on the East Coast that are building offshore wind have some of the highest electricity prices in the country. Those rates will go higher due to offshore wind. (California is also planning to spend billions on offshore wind, but that’s a topic for another Substack.)

I will close by repeating W. Edwards Deming’s famous line: “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” The data shows offshore wind energy is a lousy deal for whales and ratepayers.