Tag Archives: Craig Rucker

Coalition Files Notice of Intent to Sue Federal Agencies to Stop Whale-killing Virginia Wind Project

From Watts Up With That?

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Marine Fisheries Service have violated federal law by finding that the Virginia Offshore Wind project will not result in the destruction of the North Atlantic right whale as a species 

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (November 14, 2023) — The Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) announced today that they are filing with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) a 60 Day Notice of Intent to Sue letter for a violation of the Endangered Species Act. The violation is contained in a defective “biological opinion,” which authorizes the construction of the Virginia Offshore Wind Project (VOW). 

The 60 Day Notice is required by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for parties who wish to commence litigation against BOEM for failure to provide adequate protection of the North Atlantic right whale and other endangered species. The North Atlantic right whale is listed as “critically endangered” by governments of both the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States. Numerous studies by federal and environmental organizations have found that only about 350 North Atlantic right whales remain in existence.

CFACT and The Heartland Institute assert that the Biological Opinion issued by the NMFS fails to consider the cumulative impact of the entire East Coast offshore wind program ordered by the Biden administration, and ignores the “best scientific information available” about the endangered population of the North Atlantic right whale. The biological opinion found that the VOW would not cause a single death of that species of whale over its 30-year projected lifetime — although it did acknowledge the wind project could result in Level B harassment. That level could, according to NMFS, result in indirect death, requiring the need for a “take” permit, which authorizes the “harassment” and potential killing of the North Atlantic right whale.

“We need to send a message to BOEM and NMFS that there will be legal consequences if they violate legal requirements for protection of the North Atlantic Right Whale,” said H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. “The Biden administration’s plan to industrialize the ocean along the East Coast must follow the law, and we will intervene, if necessary, to make sure that the North Atlantic right whale continues to exist as a species.”

“This letter officially puts BOEM on notice that CFACT is prepared to file suit in order to expose the agency’s clear violation of federal law in failing to protect the North Atlantic right whale,” said Craig Rucker, president of CFACT. “By refusing to consider the cumulative impact of the dozens of industrial offshore wind facilities, consisting of several thousand individual turbines planned for the East Coast, it adopted a piecemeal approach, which only considered each individual offshore wind project in isolation. This is clearly a ploy to artificially reduce the total impact of these projects on the North Atlantic Right Whale. This obvious violation of federal law was ignored by the oversight agencies but will not be tolerated by the courts.”

“BOEM has admitted that it produced noise control regulations for the North Atlantic right whale that were based on guesswork — not on the ‘best available science’ — as required by law,” said Collister Johnson, senior policy adviser for CFACT. “They have funded ongoing studies that will finally produce information necessary to determine the noise impacts of offshore wind factories on baleen whales, such as the North Atlantic right whale. The results will not be available until 2025, at the earliest. This is a further violation of federal law, in addition to ignoring the cumulative impacts.

“There is a reason why Dominion Energy’s stock price has declined by 50 percent over the past year,” Johnson added. “Investors know that Dominion’s wind project is a costly, risky gamble that has already driven most other East Coast wind developers to either renegotiate their utility contracts or abandon their projects altogether. If Dominion decided tomorrow to abandon this project, as it should, its stock price would improve dramatically, and a huge financial cloud hanging over its future would be removed.”

The 60-day notice letter instructs the federal government agencies to take corrective action to remedy the alleged violations. If no corrective action is taken, the signatories of the letter are allowed to seek relief through the courts. The most likely venue for this litigation would be the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

The firm of Gatzke, Dillon and Ballance has filed the letter as counsel for the CFACT and The Heartland Institute. The firm is currently representing plaintiffs in ongoing litigation against BOEM and NMFS, who are opposing construction offshore wind projects in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

Earlier this year, more than two dozen large dead whales washed up on the shores of New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, directly following 11 offshore sonar mapping activities conducted by wind developers. These “site characterization” studies use high-powered sonar pulses to determine the proper areas for placing the wind turbines. Sonar mapping has been found to interfere with the hearing capabilities of marine mammals. Environmental groups have successfully sued the Navy to restrict sonar mapping being conducted in the Pacific Ocean.

The 60-day notice adds to the risks faced by Dominion Energy as it attempts to build an offshore wind generation facility that would be the largest such project of its kind in the world. Siemens Energy, which has been designated by Dominion as the supplier of the huge 14MW turbines for the project, recently announced a write down of €2.4 billion for the 3rd quarter, leading to an annual loss of €4.5 Billion, due to costly mechanical failures in its new wind turbines. The company has said its turbine failures are a “quality issue” which “will take years to fix.”

Measured in megawatts, some 80 percent of the proposed East Coast wind projects have either been abandoned or are in the process of trying to renegotiate their power purchase agreements.

The Heartland Institute is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1984 and headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

CFACT is a national non-profit organization founded in 1985 and based in Washington DC which believes that the power of markets and safe, proven technologies can offer humanity practical solutions to the world’s most pressing concerns.

CFACT issues “intent to sue” over offshore wind, releases new study

CFACT is not just talking about the tragic mistake of offshore wind, we are taking action.

This week CFACT, partnering with The Heartland Institute, filed their joint intent to bring a lawsuit against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for abrogating their responsibility to protect the endangered Right Whale from the rush to construct wind turbines.

As we state in our press release, “The North Atlantic right whale is listed as ‘critically endangered’ by the governments of both the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States. Numerous studies by federal and environmental organizations have found that only about 350 North Atlantic right whales remain in existence.”

Unprecedented numbers of whales have been found dead along our coasts as wind turbine construction proceeds.  BOEM released its “biological opinion,” giving Dominion Energy a green light to proceed with building its 2,600 MW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project 27 miles off Virginia Beach. This biological opinion has numerous pitfalls, including a failure to rely upon the “best available science” and employing a piecemeal approach to assessing risk to marine mammals that minimizes their actual lethality.

If bureaucrats refuse to do their jobs, we aim to force them!

To make matters worse, the Biden Administration’s energy strategy is terribly misguided in claiming offshore wind will meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  CFACT released a study this week which concludes, among other things, that “the net ‘carbon’ (carbon dioxide) reduction effects of offshore wind development are hugely negative and cannot justify further investments in this industry.”

You can read the entire study by David Wojick, Ph.D., and CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen at CFACT.org.

The verdict is in regarding offshore wind. When one considers the incredible costs, its threat to the power grid, and the potentially severe threat to marine life, the way forward is simple…

Stop building offshore wind.

Read CFACT’s wind turbine study here

Wojick-Driessen-How-Offshore-Wind-Drives-Up-Global-Carbon-Emissions-FINALHerunterladen

Craig Rucker

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president. Widely heralded as a leader in the free market environmental, think tank community in Washington, D.C., Rucker is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, written extensively in numerous publications, and has appeared in such media outlets as Fox News, OANN, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, among many others. Rucker is also the co-producer of the award-winning film “Climate Hustle,” which was the #1 box-office film in America during its one night showing in 2016, as well as the acclaimed “Climate Hustle 2” staring Hollywood actor Kevin Sorbo released in 2020. As an accredited observer to the United Nations, Rucker has also led CFACT delegations to some 30 major UN conferences, including those in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Kyoto, Bonn, Marrakesh, Rio de Janeiro, and Warsaw, to name a few.

The post CFACT issues “intent to sue” over offshore wind, releases new study appeared first on CFACT.

CFACT blasts Fed’s “floating wind” fantasy

From  CFACT

CFACT President Craig Rucker has blown the whistle on Federal plans to put hundreds of floating wind generators off the Oregon coast. Floating wind is the latest green energy fantasy, taking its place along with hydrogen, EVs, battery storage, and net zero.

The idea is that where the water is too deep for conventional offshore wind generators, we will simply put these huge towers and turbines on floats. Pretty much all of the West Coast fits this bill, as does most of Maine.

Responding to a Federal request for comments on a big floating wind proposal for Oregon, Rucker explains clearly that the technology needed to do this does not exist and may never exist in an economically feasible form. The federal agency is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The plan is to designate hundreds of thousands of ocean acres as Wind Energy Areas and then start auctioning them off to floating wind developers.

His succinct comments are here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Comments-concerning-BOEMs-Draft-Wind-Energy-Areas.pdf

I want to dive into the technology a bit to show what a boondoggle floating wind really is.

First, let me say that, sure, we can put huge turbine towers on floats. Our fighter jets take off from and land on floats, right, floats called aircraft carriers. But they are really big, hence expensive. The same is true for floating wind, albeit at a somewhat smaller scale.

Look at it this way. Suppose you took a sailboat and put a 600′ tall mast on it. At the top, you put an 800-ton turbine with three 500′ long wind-catching blades. How big would that boat have to be not to blow over when hit by severe wind and waves?

The answer is very big indeed, in fact, huge. Now compare this huge float with the simple monopile that conventional offshore generators sit on. The monopile is a simple steel tube, maybe 30′ in diameter and a few hundred feet long, driven solidly into the ocean floor.

Compared to the huge float, the monopile is small and cheap. But simple monopile base offshore wind facilities are already tremendously expensive. Floating wind is projected to cost much more, from 2.5 to 3 times more, in fact.

In addition to the huge float holding up the turbine tower, there have to be a bunch of monster mooring chains anchored firmly to the ocean floor in all directions to keep the float from rocking too much in heavy seas or from capsizing. Then, too, the power lines taking off the electricity have to somehow get from these bobbing floats to the distant shore.

The highly specialized fabrication facilities and work boats required to make and install all this stuff in deep water do not exist. Given that over 50 vastly different floating wind designs have been proposed, we do not even know what to build.

I say projected because no utility-scale floating wind facility exists in the world today. BOEM is talking about quickly building thousands of Mega Watt (MW) of floating wind. Five leases pegged at 3,600 MW have already been sold off California. But as Rucker points out, the biggest facility in the world today is an experimental 88 MW and that just fired up a few months ago.

Those five California leases are, in effect, experimental. The developers are each going to try to produce an economically viable floating wind facility. As things stand, the odds are very long against them. I can hardly wait to see the Construction and Operations Plans, which are the first required step in the long road toward project approval.

But the ultimate crunch point is selling the juice via a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). If costs run three times regular offshore wind, which is already extremely expensive, then the required PPAs might simply be unobtainable.

However, California just passed a law allowing the State to directly buy offshore wind energy. Perhaps the plan is for the State to buy horrendously expensive electricity, sell it to the utilities at the much lower going wholesale rate, then let the taxpayers eat the losses. It is, after all, Crazy California.

Mind you, this silly game is being played around the world. Several countries have launched similarly speculative large-scale floating wind projects, and many more are talking about it. Of course, they are also talking about mass-scale hydrogen, EVs, and net zero. It is all part of the same green nonsense.

As for the American floating wind fantasy, stay tuned to CFACT as this engineering comedy unfolds.

CFACT helps lead Cape May protest to Save the Whales

CFACT helps organize Cape May rally to Save the Whales from offshore wind.

From  CFACT

Over 120 people gathered to protest offshore wind energy in Cape May, New Jersey and call attention to mounting numbers of whales being washed up along the East Coast this year. Numerous speakers addressed the crowd and led them in chants, including CFACT’s president Craig Rucker, and the event concluded with protestors holding glow sticks and forming a “whale tail” to showcase their solidarity with other activists around the world that were also conducting protests.

“We know that the pile driving and sonar blasting going on out there is being done at decibel levels that interfere with the whale, dolphin and other marine mammal navigation system…that’s outlandish,” Rucker noted. CFACT’s president then went on to say that the offshore wind projects should be opposed because they are not truly “green”, they drive up costs on ratepayers, and they destabilize the grid.

Also addressing the crowd was Congressman Jeff Van Drew, state Senator Michael Testa, Lund Fisheries president Wayne Reichle, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fisherman Association, conservation biologist Trisha DeVoe, animal rights activist Constance Gee, NJ fisherman Ed Baxter, and radio 98.7 FM host Melanie Collette.

The Biden administration currently plans to put in 30,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030 but has suffered numerous setbacks in recent months that has put his goal in jeopardy. Southcoast Wind in Massachusetts recently doled out $60 million to pull out of its contract to provide 2,400 MW in that state, and Avangrid’s Park City wind project was also recently terminated. In all, nearly 10,000 MW or the 30,000 MW of the President’s planned goal is now in a state of collapse as stock prices for several offshore wind and utility companies have plummeted by 40% in recent months.