Blowing away the prospects for offshore wind

Compared to other forms of energy, it's just not measuring up.

The other day I was alerted to a fine piece by David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute. David is seemingly a born skeptic regarding offshore wind, and he has good reason to be: not only is it much more expensive than onshore wind, he also concludes that the scheme Big Wind has in mind comes with a number of drawbacks, including the loss of fishing habitat, possible radar interference, and the impact on tourism - who really wants to see these behemoths offshore or see their red lights blinking on the horizon all night?

Stevenson also points out that the promised subsidies (expressed as “levelized revenue”) will most likely be too low for most of the projects on the boards. He concludes:

It is obvious that some of these projects will not be able to attract financing. Prospective turbine suppliers are having financial difficulties. BOEM's EIS process is seriously flawed, and the first two approved projects face lawsuits.

This reminds me of the Blue Water Wind project off the coast of Delaware. Similar troubling financial clues in 2011 led me to forecast that the project would not receive financing. Within six months the project was dead. Offshore wind is certainly not looking like a done deal.

It’s funny that Stevenson should mention Blue Water (sic) because that’s a blast from my past there. It’s been almost 15 years since that name began to darken my blogging doorstep, and after I eviscerated some fool who believed we really should pay $4 a gallon for gas (this was the era when gas prices first hit that lofty level, which was the inspiration for my post) I laid into the idea of Bluewater.

Perspective and theory

(Thanks to that embed I also get the chance to add a shout out to my buddy Elbert - one of my first subscribers here and a guy who had such a fine blog back in the day that he allowed me to crosspost. Elbert needs a Substack, if only to talk about his record collection.)

They have told us that offshore wind was coming to the waters off Maryland and Delaware for about 15 years, and if all had gone according to plan we would already have had them out there for close to a decade. But we don’t, and I don’t think it’s because Big Oil is impeding their progress - after all, Big Oil is also an investor in renewable projects and clean energy technology. The problem is the age-old issue of the juice not being worth the squeeze.

In truth, if it weren’t for the unneccessary boondoggle of states carving out market share for renewables by ill-advised legislation - and getting a hefty addition to their coffers when utilities can’t comply - there probably wouldn’t be a windmill or solar panel in sight. (They would be seen about as often as Trombe walls, if you remember those. That knowledge along with an eerie memory of sun angle charts is a product of my early-80s architectural education.) We probably don’t have enough folks around anymore who remember this, but windmills used to power farms on a regular basis until the government came along and loaned the money to rural co-ops to get them wired to the overall electric grid as part of the New Deal. (Of course, once that job was done the government entity didn’t go away. Mission creep: that’s the problem.)

The bottom line is that, in order to become more cost-effective in producing power, offshore wind turbines have to become more massive: the largest current production model has a 240-meter tower and blades 158 meters long. GE says it can power 5,000 homes by itself. (Of course, that’s at full capacity with the wind blowing just so, which only occurs about 30% of the time.) And even with that, my public school math tells me the tower runs about 787 feet high, with the blades adding perhaps another 452 feet. Assuming the hub is 20 meters below the top of the tower, that’s a 1,239-foot behemoth, taller than the tallest buildings in Delaware and Maryland - combined, with 350 feet to spare. So imagine the expense a company is going through just to power 5,000 homes on an intermittent basis, then multiply it by 90 just to cover little ole Delaware’s homes (but not their businesses or institutions.) No wonder the figures don’t add up.

We have so much need for energy, yet have been blessed with the abundance of resources that would fill our needs for decades, with plenty of coal, oil and natural gas within reasonably easy extraction. While I have nothing against the idea of renewable energy, the question to me comes from the expense we incur because the storage technology is nowhere near ready for prime time. Without a sound storage system for renewable energy, its lack of reliability means we have to have a redundancy of resources to create our electricity and make sure the grid remains in working order (i.e. a backup natural gas plant.) On the other hand, fossil fuels are their own storage system, so they’re exceptionally reliable as long as the supply is there - and as I noted above, we have plenty of supply if we choose to use it.

In a sane world, we wouldn’t be worried about wind turbine parts coming from Europe or solar panels coming from China - a place where they build over 100 polluting coal plants a year to keep up with their electricity demands. We wouldn’t be worrying about massive turbines lurking offshore because we would have responsible oil and gas exploration there if the supplies allowed an economically sound extraction.

The late Rush Limbaugh used to utter the truth: “Oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom.” Sunshine is nice in the summer at the beach and a wind is refreshing, but we shouldn’t be counting on those for the energy needs of a free nation.