Offshore wind’s bogus benefits bragged on

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Resources for the Future (RFF) has produced a combined cost benefit analysis for 32 U.S. offshore wind projects now in development. They proudly point to the benefits outweighing the costs by a whopping 14 times. But these supposed benefits are not just exaggerated; they are fabricated. They simply do not exist.

Their lengthy title is “Offshore Wind Power Examined: Effects, Benefits, and Costs of Offshore Wind Farms along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts”. See https://www.rff.org/news/press-releases/new-modeling-shows-offshore-winds-benefits-to-climate-health-and-energy-bills/.

The analysis is fairly simple which makes it easy to see the fallacies. There are just four basic benefit claims. And of course it is all based on highly questionable modeling.

Before looking at each of these benefit claims it is worth noting a pervasive misconception. They assume that when a MWh of wind displaces a MWh of coal or gas fired power the emissions of the latter are reduced by the amount it takes to produce a MWh. As I have written at length this is not true.

Baseload fossil fueled power plants run on very high pressure steam produced by gigantic boilers. These plants have to be ready to produce power while wind and solar run intermittently. They are typically running while their output is temporarily displaced by offshore wind. The reduction in emissions is relatively quite small compared to the power displacement.

Each of the RFF benefit quantities is based on this mistaken displacement assumption. Thus each would be much smaller than they estimate if it were real. But as we shall now see they are not real.

The first and by far the biggest purported benefit is in changing climate change. This benefit is greater than the other three combined.

The claimed climate benefit is in reducing global climate change deaths for just under the next 300 years. I am not making this up. Here is their preposterous explanation:

“The GIVE Model, one of the three models on which the EPA (2023c) social cost of CO2 is based, projects that each million short tons of CO2 emitted in 2020 will cause 43 premature deaths globally between then and 2300 (after which the GIVE model does not project effects). Using this deaths-per-million-tons value, we estimate that the CO2 emissions reductions caused by the modeled offshore wind farms, in each year of their operation, will prevent 1,600 premature deaths. This mortality reduction is a major part of the overall estimated dollar value of the GHG emissions reductions caused by the offshore wind farms.”

Our emissions are not causing any climate change deaths, much less from now until 2300 so this benefit does not exist.

The next biggest benefit is in reducing the purported deaths caused by power plant pollution. Here is their summary:

“Our model estimates that the offshore wind farms will prevent approximately 436 premature deaths per year in the United States by reducing ground-level PM2.5. We estimate an additional 84 avoided premature deaths per year from reductions in ground-level ozone pollution; however, this is more uncertain than our PM2.5 related mortality estimate because ozone formation is more sensitive to background assumptions, and we base the estimate on a national average estimated ozone mortality rate of power plant emissions (EPA 2023a) rather than on modeling that accounts for the locations of the emissions changes.”

Power plant emissions are not causing these EPA dreamed up deaths so this benefit does not exist. In particular a great book on the PM2.5 hoax is Steve Milloy’s “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA”.

The third supposed benefit is “electric bill savings”. Again I am not making this up. That the cost of backup makes renewables expensive is well established and offshore wind is very expensive renewables so bills will go way up not down.

To get these supposed savings they basically rebuild the land based power generation system and given the offshore generation they build with cheaper stuff. Here is their opaque summary:

“In our results, building 35 GW of offshore wind farms reduces the average capacity factor of non-variable generation capacity and causes a change in the mix of such capacity. The change is a shift of several GW of capacity from types with higher fixed costs and lower operating costs to types with lower fixed costs and higher operating costs, which reduces costs and increases profits in light of the lower capacity factor.”

That lowering the capacity factor reduced people’s electric bill sounds like a model driven fantasy for sure. Moreover it sounds like the so-called savings are from what bills would otherwise be in some future scenario, not from what they are today. In that case the claim is a trick.

The last benefit is even more far fetched. It is “Natural gas user savings outside the electricity sector”. The simple idea is that so much gas is displaced by wind that the price of gas to everyone goes down. Not much mind you but a little bit.

They say “The offshore wind farms reduce the US and Canadian projected average natural gas price by 2.5 percent, from $4.12 to $4.02 per MMBtu, because of decreased demand for natural gas in the power sector.”

If only economics were that simple but it is not. Gas is a huge market besides electric power. Also most of the area in question is now served by fracked gas that runs around $2.00. So this tiny 2.5% change is not credible.

That is it for the bogus benefits. They are claimed to be 14 times the cost but they do not exist. The costs however are very real. At least RFF did not include jobs as benefits, as they are costs. They just used fairy tales.

Perhaps this report is written for politicians and other people who will cite it but never read it. Or maybe for people who believe the fairy tale of America’s tons of emissions killing people around the world for the next 300 years. I like to think my readers are smarter than that.

Offshore wind has no benefits; it is a destructive and wildly expensive policy mistake.