By David Wojick
I have the honor and pleasure of co-signing a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, asking him to terminate a half billion dollar grant made by the Biden administration to the West Coast wind industry. The short story is the grant was illegal.
The longer story is interesting because it takes us into the strange world of floating wind power, a technology still looking to prove itself. The idea is to put a huge offshore wind tower on a float that is so big that the tower does not blow over in a hurricane. Whether this can actually be done remains to be seen.
The Biden folks decided to charge ahead on this stuff, way ahead, to say the least. France just commissioned a 24 MW test facility, while Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management sold leases for an incredible 5,000 MW of floating wind off California.
The fly in the floating wind ointment is the “floater.” This is the huge contraption that holds the tower. There are over 100 floater designs that have been announced, some patented but none proven, which just measures the immaturity of the technology. Some are steel, weighing up to 5,000 tons. Some are concrete, tipping the theoretical scale at 20,000 tons.
The problem is that before you can build a floating wind power generation facility, you first have to build the factory that makes the floaters, which has to be nearby on shore. With fixed wind, there is just a single standard monopile holding the tower and these are made by several companies for use everywhere. It is the custom made floater and factory that make floating wind cost an estimated three times what fixed offshore wind costs.
In order to kick-start floating wind, the Biden Transportation Department decided to inject just under half a billion dollars to build a floater factory at Humboldt Bay in Northern California. But Congress never appropriated the money to do this, so DOT raided their INFRA program. which is supposed to fund improvements in the U.S. freight system.
Hence our letter begins as follows:
“Call for rescission of INFRA Grant for The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Grant Dated January 23, 2024, and a return of unspent disbursed funds (see article 13.5 of attached INFRA grant terms and conditions) connected with misappropriation of said INFRA Grant Funds.
The undersigned organizations call for the return to the U.S. Department of Transportation any unspent disbursed INFRA funds awarded to the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District in the amount of $426,719,810 on January 23, 2024 and to terminate the awarded grant as a misappropriation of federal funds.
Our requests are legally justified based on DOT internal mandates associated with the INFRA grant structuring. According to the INFRA Grant eligibility guidelines grant projects must be “projects of national or regional significance to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of the movement of freight and people in and across rural and urban areas.” Additionally, “To be eligible under INFRA, a project within the boundaries of a freight rail, water (including ports), or intermodal facility must be a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate direct intermodal interchange, transfer, or access into or out of the facility and must significantly improve freight movement on the (National Highway Freight Network) NHFN.”
Further, Humboldt Bay is not a designated national multimodal freight network facility and is as such ineligible for any INFRA Grant funds. The Humboldt Grant is clearly designed to accommodate a non-existent floating offshore wind industry, and is defined as a heavy lift terminal capable of assembling and handling wind turbine components. Obviously the project meets none of the INFRA guidelines for grant approval.”
The signing organizations are CFACT and the REACT Alliance. I and several other individuals also signed. This all fits in with the President’s executive order calling for agencies to assess deficiencies in prior actions related to offshore wind. This grant is a huge deficiency.
It remains to be seen what Secretary Duffy does. Stay tuned to CFACT to find out.
That project makes Solyndra seem a wise investment.
Well done sir.
Yes. Based on this information, seems like an open and shut coffin… er… case.
Transparency, as in a glass coffin. “Remains to be seen.” 🙂
Again clearly illegal transactions by government officials. Everyone who signed off on this should be notified they have 60 days to get the money back or charges will be filed against all involved. I’m tired of getting screwed over by my own government. They suck.
” Everyone who signed off on this should be” in a federal prison!
Including Otto Penn.
Surely no one believes there was actually a wind energy project here. This seems to be merely a convenient disguise for offloading lots of federal funding to Democrat party supporters in return for Party campaign contributions.
Having a fake “energy system” research project as a fig-leaf is a standard practice in lots of countries beyond the United States. One of the most ridiculous of these things was a proposed 1,000 km submarine transmission cable to transport solar power electricity in Western Australia to Singapore.
I wonder how the electrons were going to make the remaining 2800km distance from Oz to Singapore? Maybe they were intending leaving USAID to cover the gap….
The notion of having a submarine transmission line going through Indonesian territorial waters was utterly ridiculous.The idea that this could ever be cost-effective was absurd, and the notion that it could have required maintenance was simply silly. This was a project developed by some grifters in Australia to attempt to milk research money from the Australian federal government.
It was proposed by a couple of Australian billionaires in a project called Suncable. The press was told it would cost $30 billion US and deliver the output of a 20,000 MW solar farm. It fell apart in 2023 because of a quarrel between the two.
More like 4370 kms!
“The idea is to put a huge offshore wind tower on a float that is so big that the tower does not blow over in a hurricane. Whether this can actually be done remains to be seen.”
Anybody with experience in a moderately strong ocean wave the wind produces, or even consulted oceanic engineers building “hurricane proof ” petroleum platforms know that there ain’t no such thing. Same thing with “hurricane proof glass” on land as they know better offshore.Flexing blades should make interesting music.
My wife used to sell Tupperware.
Their water bottles with the snap on lid said they were “virtually leak proof”.
(Probably a legal thing.)
Copilot AI
The largest floating offshore wind turbine currently in service is the Qihang 20 MW, developed by China Railway Construction Corporation (CRRC). This massive turbine features a rotor diameter of 853 feet (260 meters)—equivalent to seven soccer fields—and a hub height of 495 feet (151 meters).
The Qihang turbine was completed in October 2024 and began testing in January 2025.
Similar large-scale offshore wind turbines typically weigh several thousand tons, including the floating platform, tower, nacelle, and blades. The floating foundation is engineered to provide stability in deep waters, using a combination of ballast systems and mooring lines to keep it anchored while allowing flexibility in ocean currents.
re: “China Railway Construction Corporation (CRRC)“
Makers/builders of the govt building that completely collapsed in the Myanmar Earthquake?
Oh wait – the collapsed building was constructed by China Railway No. 10 Bureau.
“At the time of the incident, it was already in the glass curtain wall installation stage. Online videos have surfaced of a China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC) promotional clip from last year, showing a red banner with the words “Successful Completion of Structural Work” hanging on the building. Several Chinese workers were seen holding a banner celebrating the structural completion milestone.”
So is “China Railway No. 10 Bureau” within the China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC)?
What’s half a billion here or there? Just borrow more. Got to grow the economy, you know.
From a UK floating wind power proposal –
Who knows? It might work – for a while, at great expense. Like Ivanpah?
Yes, I’m cynical. I’ll apologise profusely in twenty years if I’m wrong. After all, these ideas come from the best and brightest. America leading the world as usual.
Good luck to you, David. Maybe commonsense will prevail.
“floater”. What an appropriate name. I usually find that a couple of flushes will get rid of a floater.
Makes me think of eyeball floaters- very annoying indeed.
I don’t understand how a floating wind turbine can work well, ignoring entirely the economics. In a strong wind, it’s not going to be stable. Won’t it wobble back and forth and won’t that reduce it’s effectiveness? I know zero about engineering – just curious.
If you wish hard enough anything is possible. Just ask Miliband.
It’s big enough that I doubt it will rock more than a couple of degrees.
The big problem is what happens when that big spinning gyroscope is constantly being rocked. Even a few degrees of rocking are going to be enough to put some very interesting strains on the bearings.
Just imagine the quantity of CO2 generated burning the coal to make the steel for these monstrosities. How many years of operation to break even?
Where is Don Quixote when you need him?
Concrete. Do not forget the concrete. 20,000 pounds of it.
re: “the Biden Transportation Department decided to inject just under half a billion dollars”
Solyndra-scale lunacy … Solyndra was
630535 million IIRC.Another Biden fiscal malfeasance.
To bad he is beyond the reach of impeachment.
Hywind is a ‘windfarm’, consisting of 5 floating windwands, installed off the Scottish coast near Peterhead about 7 years ago. After only 6 years at sea, all 5 were taken out of service and towed to Norway for major rebuilding, apparently centered on the main bearings. Equinor, formerly Statoil says that there have been ‘learnings’ during reconstruction. The 5 failed windwands were towed back across the North sea and reinstalled after a break approaching a year. We now await the next big fail. Bearings don’t like a constantly varying side load, caused by rocking the base. Who could have predicted that? I expect that this project will prove to have been a costly disaster when it is consigned to landfill.
Follow the money
https://x.com/RickyDoggin/status/1932840938843640231
They used a fake Climate Change group to get an $50,000,000 EPA grant under IRA to buy a front end loader used for the Oct-7 attack in Israel