London, 5 July – Net Zero Watch has urged the Government to stand up for consumers and businesses by rejecting the wind industry’s latest demands for more subsidies.
In a move that gives the lie to years of propaganda claiming falling costs, the wind industry’s leading lobbyists have written to the Government, threatening to abandon the UK unless there are hugely increased subsidies for their companies (see RenewableUK press release).
The industry is claiming that unforeseen rising costs now necessitate and justify three actions:
1) A vast increase in the budget for the fifth auction (AR5) of Contracts for Difference subsidies, with an increase of two and half times the current levels for non-floating offshore wind alone;
2) Special new targets and thus market shares for floating offshore wind, one of the most expensive of all forms of generation, and, most importantly of all,
3) a revision to the auction rules so that the winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their “value” in contributing towards the Net Zero targets.
This would in effect not only increase total subsidy to an industry that was until recently claiming to be so cheap that it no longer needed public support, but also provide it with protected market shares, all but entirely de-risking investors at the expense of consumers. It would also be an open invitation to graft and corruption.
The Government should reject these self-serving demands on three grounds:
1. The UK economy cannot be expected to continue to subsidise a sector that is still uneconomic after nearly twenty years of above-market prices and guaranteed market share. The wind experiment has failed and must be wound down.
2. UK consumers of all kinds, from households to businesses, are already experiencing extreme pressures on budgets, and a further burden on the energy bill simply cannot be tolerated. Government must recognise that households and businesses are unable to afford yet more subsidies to the wind industry.
3. The industry’s current cost difficulties are neither unforeseen nor unpredicted but have been obvious to careful observers for over a decade.
Dr John Constable, NZW’s energy director, said:
It would be both absurd and counterproductive for government to bail out the wind industry in spite of the evident failure to reduce costs. A refusal to learn from mistakes will be disastrous.”
Notes for Editors:
Articles and studies on unrealistic offshore wind bids for Contracts for Difference
As dead whales continue to wash up on New Jersey’s beaches, Garden State officials are hoping to issue the final permits in the coming months enabling construction to begin later this year on the state’s first offshore wind facility.
Ocean Wind 1 is a project of a U.S. subsidiary of Danish wind developer Orsted. Upon completion, it would feature 98 giant turbines located 15 miles off the coast of Ocean City and Atlantic City. It is the first of three such projects planned for the Jersey Shore in the near future, with even more on the drawing board in the years to come.
While acknowledging certain environmental challenges associated with the project, New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in April issued a key approval for Ocean Wind 1. That decision is now being challenged in court by three groups opposed to the project. Save Long Beach Island, Defend Brigantine Beach, and Protect Our Coast NJ filed an appeal on June 23 in the Supreme Court of New Jersey, saying the DEP’s decision is inconsistent with state coastal management rules.
Threat to Marine Habitat
Bruce Afran, an attorney for the groups, told the Associated Press that the DEP “has acknowledged the wind turbines will destroy marine habitat, compress the sea floor, severely damage maritime communities, cause commercial fishing stocks to decline, and injure the beach economy.”
“Yet the state persists in the bizarre belief that this massive engineering project will not injure our state’s coastal zone, one of the most important marine communities on the East Coast and the core of New Jersey’s $47 billion tourist industry.”
To buttress his plaintiffs’ case, Afran cited numerous sections of the DEP’s April decision on Ocean Wind 1, “acknowledging potential negative impacts on the surf clam industry; changes to the ocean floor from wind turbine foundations and equipment; and the regular use of the area as a migrating channel for five species of whales, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale,” the AP reported.
The appeal follows a decision by the investigative arm of Congress, the Congressional Accountability Office, to study the impact of offshore wind on the environment and other areas – something opponents have long sought, the AP notes.
Orsted, in addition to Ocean Wind 1, has another offshore wind project making its way through New Jersey’s approval process. The Danish renewable energy developer now finds itself potentially benefitting handsomely from a bill under consideration by Garden State lawmakers. Legislation pushed by Sen. Bob Smith, Middlesex County Democrat, would allow Orsted to keep federal tax credits it otherwise would have to return to ratepayers in order to counter what the bill’s proponents say are lingering economic effects from the COVID-19 pandemic and still-high inflation.
Brian Lipman, director of the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel, warned that what was good for the developer was not necessarily good for the ratepayer.
“There should be no doubt that this bill will increase the amount the developer earns on this project and will result in higher … prices being paid by ratepayers. That is the inevitable result of this bill,” he was quoted by AP as saying.
The final language of the bill is still being hashed out as lawmakers scramble to deal with what is seen as a sweetheart deal for Orsted and potentially a raw deal for ratepayers.
Meanwhile, the number of whale deaths along the East Coast since December has risen to 50. Uncertainty over what’s behind these deaths has led to calls for a pause in offshore wind development until the cause of the spike in mortality can be ascertained.
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments.
Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country.
He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.
He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh.
He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
Vertical axis wind turbines generator farm for renewable sustainable and alternative energy production along coast baltic sea near Denmark. Eco power, ecology.
The sole justification offered for the offshore wind stampede is that we need to reduce CO2 emissions from electric power generation. A quick look at the numbers shows that this is a truly terrible idea. Here is a very simple gander at the likely costs and supposed benefits.
First let’s do what I call a “fantasy cost benefit analysis” for offshore wind emission reductions. It is a fantasy because it simply assumes (1) every MWh of wind generation eliminates a MWh of gas fired power and (2) there are no environmental costs or cost increases. We are isolating the simplest possible case
Mind you we are also going to use the so-called Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) to calculate the supposed benefits from the CO2 reduction. This SCC is also a fantasy but that is another issue.
As always we will use New Jersey’s wishful target of 11,000 MW of offshore wind capacity as our example. This is merely a convenient example as the the analyses are quite general.
The fantasy cost benefit calculation is deliberately simple, as follows. Let’s assume a constant 40% capacity factor and a generator life of 20 years, both of which are commonly used. There are 8,760 hours in a year so 40% of 20 years is roughly 70,000 hours. (I like simple numbers so do a lot of rounding off.)
Thus our 11,000 MW generates around 770,000,000 MWh over its lifetime. The standard gas fired CO2 emission factor is roughly 0.5 tons per MWh. (Note that this combines peakers and combined cycle plants which have very different emission factors, so it is sensitive to the local generation mix, which we ignore here.)
This gives us a fantasy total of 385,000,000 tons of CO2 of emissions avoided. Given our previously estimated direct cost of $100,000,000,000 we get a cost for avoided emissions of about $260 per ton.
The official Biden Administration SCC is just $51, making the offshore wind cost over five times the benefits for the fantasy case. Note that this SCC includes the mythical damages in the whole world. Damages in just America give a SCC of a mere $7/ton, in which case the costs are 37 times the benefits.
So even in the fantasy case the costs are at least four times the benefits, making offshore wind a very bad way to reduce emissions.
Not let’s consider a somewhat more realistic case, although we still ignore nasty stuff like environmental damage and the cost increases that are bound to occur. We simply take into account the fact that the CO2 reduction will be nowhere near a big as the fantasy case assumes. This fact is briefly explained in my article:
As explained in the article cited above, the intermittency of wind power greatly reduces the efficiency of the gas fired backup generators. That is, a lot more gas has to be burned to generate the same amount of electricity. This means that wind power will not reduce emissions by very much.
Let’s assume the CO2 reduction is only 20% of the fantasy case. This gives a cost per ton of $1300 which is roughly 26 times the global SCC benefits of $51 and a whopping 186 times the US $7.
Thus, assuming SCC is real, offshore wind is a terrible way to reduce CO2 emissions. The cost of offshore wind will be enormously greater than the benefits. A more complex analysis could, and should, be done but it would only make these bad numbers worse.
And of course SCC is itself a false claim. There is no evidence that our emissions are causing any real damage. In that case it is all cost with no benefits, so there is simply no possible justification for destructive offshore wind development.
If reducing CO2 emissions is the justification for industrializing the ocean with offshore wind, then we need to know what the cost per ton of CO2 reduction is. This number is likely to be ridiculously large, on the order of thousands of dollars a ton.
We have already discussed the reduction analysis part, finding that the reductions are likely to be relatively small per MW of wind generating capacity.
On the cost side, offshore wind is already very expensive, but it is bound to get much worse. The global stampede to build huge numbers of industrial wind-generating facilities is widely predicted to strain the supply chain seriously. The inevitable result will be shortages and price spikes.
There is growing technical literature on this supply chain shortages issue. However, so far, it seems to be focused mostly on the material and facility shortages that are likely to occur, not on the specific cost increases that are bound to follow.
A good recent example is “Future material requirements for global sustainable offshore wind energy development”, Li et al., “Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews”, August 2022.
“We show that the exploitation of OWE (offshore wind energy) will require large quantities of raw materials from 2020 to 2040: 129–235 million tonnes (Mt) of steel, 8.2–14.6 Mt of iron, 3.8–25.9 Mt of concrete, 0.5–1.0 Mt of copper, and 0.3–0.5 Mt of aluminium. Substantial amounts of rare earth elements will be required towards 2040, with up to 16, 13, 31 and 20 fold expansions in the current Neodymium (Nd), Dysprosium (Dy), Praseodymium (Pr), and Terbium (Tb) demand, respectively.”
Given that this is a whole new area of need, coming on top of today’s production, it suggests that shortages are clearly possible. The rare earth numbers are especially interesting. Total production of each has to increase from 13 times today’s up to an incredible 31 times. Is this even possible?
If you want to explore this literature, go to the Advanced Search function at https://scholar.google.com/. (Find it under the triple bars upper left.) Enter “Future material requirements” in the “exact phrase” box and hit search. It should be one of the first hits, and you need not go to the article. Part of the hit is one button that finds every article that cites this one. There is also a powerful button called “Related articles” that returns about 100 closely related articles. This gets you into the middle of the literature.
A more encyclopedic approach is “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions”, IEA, May 2021, 287 pages.
It is not specifically about offshore wind, but it discusses the prospect of shortages and price spikes in both wind and solar development.
Nor are the foreseeable shortages confined to basic materials. There is an enormous amount of specialized equipment that has to be made, often in factories that do not now exist. Here too, price spikes are likely inevitable.
For example, an industry analyst recently reported the near-term need for an additional 200 specialized construction ships. These are projected to come at an estimated cost of twenty billion dollars, but it could be a lot more if that is based on today’s costs.
See “US$20bn of spend is needed to build 200 new vessels”, offshorewind.biz, March 30, 2023.
The point is that multiple studies are finding looming shortages, the cost impact of which is not being estimated and considered. Given that offshore wind development has become an industrial stampede of monster proportions, this is not at all surprising.
As the cost of offshore wind development goes up, the cost per ton of CO2 emissions avoided goes up with it. So does the cost of electricity. We need to see what those future costs look like.
Dr Capell Aris PhD who has spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a former Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology
As the United States sets its sights on a significant expansion of offshore wind capacity, it would do well to examine the cautionary tale unfolding in Britain. With the UK already grappling with the consequences of an aggressive pursuit of green energy, American policymakers and citizens must carefully assess the feasibility and potential risks of such a rapid energy transition. In this article, we explore the concerns that Britain’s experience should serve as an awful warning to Americans.
The exorbitant costs associated with offshore wind power in the UK provide a significant cause for concern. Offshore wind farms, such as Hornsea Two and Moray East, were built at a capital cost of £2.77 billion and £2.75 billion per GW, respectively, which is more than four times the cost of gas-burning Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs). The maintenance expenses for offshore wind farms are also substantial, estimated to be as high as £200 million per GW installed, per annum.
The intermittent nature of wind power presents a fundamental challenge.
leading to fluctuations in energy output. Unlike conventional generators, wind turbines cannot be relied upon to deliver energy on demand. Furthermore, the capacity factor of wind farms in the UK has been far from optimal, operating at 33 percent in 2022 and a mere 29 percent in 2021. These factors not only impact the reliability of the electricity supply but also increase the overall cost to consumers.
The strain on the transmission grid system becomes significant when renewable generators are located in remote or offshore locations. The National Grid estimates that connecting these new renewable generators will cost £46 billion, or £1,533 per household, by 2030. Additionally, wind power’s inability to provide grid inertia, coupled with the growing proportion of renewables, raises concerns about system instability and the increased risk of blackouts.
These additional costs, combined with the high capital and maintenance expenses of offshore wind farms, significantly impact the price of electricity. The true cost to consumers for offshore wind generation ranges from £200/MWh to £220/MWh, much higher than the cost of CCGTs.
Even if one wanted to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, for example, to preserve petroleum as a resource for future generations, an overly ambitious and rapid energy transition is not the most prudent path. Urgent attention should be given to the construction of new nuclear plants as a reliable, affordable, and practical means of achieving and energy mix while ensuring secure energy supplies.
The cautionary tale of Britain’s green energy disaster serves as a sobering reminder that an overly ambitious and hastily executed energy transition can have profound consequences. The high costs, intermittency issues, strain on the grid, and limited storage capabilities associated with offshore wind power demand careful consideration. Instead of rushing headlong into an untested energy landscape, policymakers must weigh the potential risks and costs against the desired benefits. A balanced and pragmatic approach that embraces a mix of energy sources may prove to be a more reliable and cost-effective solution in the pursuit of a sane and reliable energy future.
The Telegraph article referenced for this piece was written by:
Dr Capell Aris PhD who has spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a former Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology
Last year, the Biden administration set an ambitious new goal for the USA: to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030, increasing US offshore capacity more than seven hundred times over. The UK already has 15 GW of offshore wind, more than 300 times as much as the USA: and our experience should be a terrible warning to Americans.
The UK’s electricity prices are the highest since records began in 1920 and are now amongst the highest in all Europe. One reason for this is obvious: slightly less than half our electricity comes from gas-burning Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs) and gas now costs £90 per megawatt-hour (MWh), nearly five times higher than normal. CCGTs are cheap to build (around £650m per GW) and operate. In normal times they would generate electricity at a total cost of £40 per MWh. That’s now risen to nearly £150/MWh, thanks to Vladimir Putin and his impact on the gas market.
But that’s not the whole story. The other reason why British electricity is so expensive is because we have so much wind power: particularly, so much offshore wind power. Bad though the current situation is, we would be an even worse state if we had built even more offshore wind, as the British government plans to.
As an example, the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of £2.77 billion per GW and £2.75bn/GW, more than four times the cost of CCGT capacity. They’re expensive to maintain, which is not surprising since offshore windfarms have all their many generators mounted at the top of 200-metre tall masts far away from land. Estimates of maintenance costs are as high as £200m per GW installed, per annum. The nominal cost of offshore wind generation is £170/MWh – noticeably higher than that for CCGTs, even in these dire times of high gas prices.
The other factor to bear in mind is that not only is wind capacity extremely expensive to build, wind farms do not deliver anything like their rated capacity over time. This is bad news for the customer, because the higher the capacity factor – that is, the higher the percentage of the rated capacity the powerplant actually delivers over time – the cheaper the energy. In 2022 the UK’s onshore and offshore windfarms operated with a capacity factor of 33 per cent. In 2021 it was only 29 per cent.
It gets worse. Like most other renewable generation technologies, wind power is unpredictably intermittent and highly variable. Also, since wind turbines are not synchronously connected to the grid, they provide no “grid inertia” – more on that shortly. Wind turbines cannot be asked to deliver energy when it is required, and their output changes rapidly. These failings must be mitigated and costed, and users have to pay for these costs on top of the price of the electricity.
In 2021 the UK annual grid balancing costs reached £4.19 billion, £150 per household. For context, back in 1995 when we didn’t have much wind power the balancing cost for the grid was a mere £250 million per annum. A large, and growing, contribution to these costs is constraint management, as when a wind farm producing electricity which isn’t wanted – perhaps when it is windy in the middle of the night – is paid not to put that electricity into the grid.
The problems and costs don’t stop there. Our transmission grid system was originally designed to link generation centres close to sources of fuel (coal, gas) and load centres such as cities. Now our generation sites are moving further away from load centres. Our grid transmission system has to be expanded to connect the new renewable generators, which is bad enough when they are on a remote hilltop and worse still when they are out at sea. The National Grid estimates that on current plans this work will cost £46 billion – £1,533 per household – to 2030.
Then there’s grid inertia. The British grid is termed an island grid, which means that we are solely responsible for controlling the grid frequency between tight limits so that things plugged into the grid will work as expected. Frequency control becomes easier as the inertia of the grid system increases. Grid system inertia is a key measure of how resilient the system is in response to transient changes. Inertia is the sum of the energy stored within the rotating mass of the machines (generators and motors) connected directly to the system. Low system inertia increases the risk of rapid system changes, which may then lead to disconnection of load or generation and then system instability. Apart from tree-burning biomass stations and hydro generation, renewables plants bring no inertia to the grid: as the proportion of renewables rises, system inertia falls and the risk of major problems such as blackouts increases.
We have attempted to reduce the issue of intermittency by expanding our connections to the European electricity grid – the hope being that the wind will be blowing somewhere else even if it is not blowing here – but we’re still exposed to periods when wind generation across the whole of Europe falls near to nothing. And these connections do not help with inertia and stability either because few of the connections to the continent are synchronous connections.
In 1995 the problem of grid frequency stability required provision of rapidly responding generators capable of changing their combined output at a rate of 0.13 GW per second in order to deal with fluctuations. With the arrival of so much unpredictable wind power, that figure has now increased almost tenfold to 1.15 GW per second!
Extra services like very rapid response gas generators, required in order to make it possible to connect renewables to the grid, add between £30/MWh and £50/MWh to renewables’ cost. Thus the true cost to the customer of offshore wind generators is actually between £200/MWh and £220/MWh, much more than CCGTs even in these times of ruinously high gas prices.
Phasing out CCGT production will therefore increase domestic electricity prices painfully.
But it seems that CCGTs will be phased out much sooner than planned. The government has proposed an expansion to 60 GW of offshore wind by 2030 (capital expenditure £122 billion) and solar to 70 GW by 2035 (capital expenditure to 2030 £30 billion).
This is extremely unwise: we still have no way of storing electricity at scale and the planned transitions of home heating and transport to electrical power are progressing weakly and may yet stall completely. Creating such a large solar generation fleet raises the nightmare scenario of early summer mornings, with little demand and the vast majority of generation being solar with zero inertia: massive grid collapses would be all but a certainty. Vast amounts of energy will be generated only to be expensively constrained off and probably wasted, and the scenario of unmet demand – with attendant blackouts – will become unavoidable.
The UK grid is simply not able to cope with the proposed amounts of renewables.
And we simply cannot afford all this. If we add the costs of an even more extended National Grid, this programme of wind and solar generation expansion will cost £232 billion – more than £8,000 per household this decade – all to be paid for by the suffering energy user. It should be emphasised that these figures do not include the costs of the huge energy storage industry which will also be necessary, whatever that may turn out to be: hydrogen or ammonia or something even more dangerous and expensive. Heat pumps and switching to electric vehicles could lift total costs above £1 trillion.
Truly, Americans should look at the British renewables disaster and give thanks that today they have hardly any offshore wind. And they might, looking at the UK, recoil with horror from the plans of the Biden administration: especially as most US offshore wind will need to be floating offshore wind rather than built on the seabed, and so even more expensive.
If either nation would like to reduce carbon emissions and/or reduce its dependence on fossil fuels supplied by unsavoury overseas regimes, an immediate measure would be to build new, modern, high efficiency CCGT plant which would immediately cut the need for gas and reduce emissions without requiring vast, expensive alterations to the grid and special measures so that they don’t cause it to collapse. We should also begin building new nuclear plant with some genuine urgency, as that is the only genuine, affordable, practical way to seriously cut emissions and achieve secure energy supplies.
Dr Capell Aris PhD has spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a former Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology
There is a common assumption that offshore wind electricity generation greatly reduces CO2 emissions. In fact this is the primary justification for the horrendous cost and adverse impact of these offshore megaprojects.
As with many green assumptions, this may well be false. First, given the way power generation actually works the reduction in fossil fuel emissions may not be all that great. In fact offshore wind could actually increase fossil fuel emissions. This is explained below.
Let’s take New Jersey as an example because they aspire to be the leader in offshore wind development. Their stated goal is a whopping 11,000 MW of offshore generating capacity, at a cost of something like $100 billion. If reducing CO2 emissions is the justification for this incredible cost, there had better be a lot of reduction. Turns out there may be very little, which makes the project very expensive, or even an increase which would make it worse than worthless.
On the generation side there are several factors to consider. To begin with New Jersey already shut down its 2,000 MW of coal fired power so those potential emission reductions are gone. Even worse half of their present generation is nuclear, which has no CO2 emissions. So if wind replaces some nuclear output there is no reduction.
The remaining half of the generation is gas fired and here things get interesting, as well as complex.
Keep in mind that the gas fired system is designed to generate when people need electricity. Wind on the other hand generates when the wind blows. It generates most when the wind blows hard, less when it blows less, and none when it blows low. Roughly speaking output increases linearly from no power at 10 mph to full power at 30 mph.
These are sustained wind speeds, not gusts, so 30 mph is rare. On the other hand less than 10 mph is relatively common, with no power produced, sometimes for days at a time. In between what happens is that the wind and power output go up and down, up and down. A 20% change in output in an hour is common.
These irregular wind oscillations will have a profound impact on gas power emissions. This is because there are two very different kinds of gas fired power plant. These are called, respectively, the simple cycle and the combined cycle plant.
A simple cycle plant is a generator driven by a combustion turbine. This turbine is like a jet engine running on natural gas. These plants are relatively inefficient, with an efficiency of 30 to 38% depending on how old they are
Combined cycle uses a combustion turbine too, but it then uses the extremely hot exhaust to boil water that in turn runs a steam turbine generator, so there are two different generators run in combination, hence the name. Combined cycle plants are much more efficient than simple cycle at around 60%.
Simple cycle plants feature quick start so they are used mostly for meeting peak needs when power usage spikes. For this reason they are often called peakers. Peak need is unlikely to coincide with strong wind, especially heat waves and cold snaps which are often marked by very low to no wind. Both weather extremes are often caused by stagnant high pressure systems.
Thus it is unlikely that offshore wind will do much to reduce the peaker emissions. The coal emissions are gone, nuclear has no emissions and the peaker emissions mostly remain, so this just leaves the combined cycle emissions for possible reduction.
Here the constant variability of wind creates a huge obstacle to emission reduction. The problem is that the huge amount of water in the combined cycle boiler takes a long time to heat up, and once heated the combustion turbine must run flat out to keep it boiling.
This is not a rapid response technology, in fact it is designed to run more or less steadily. It cannot ramp up and down in time to match the wind’s rapidly ramping down and up.
There are two ways the combined cycle system can be run in order to supply the erratic need created by the oscillating output of the wind generators. Unfortunately both are highly inefficient, meaning a lot more gas must be burned per unit of electricity produced, which creates a lot more emissions.
One way is to keep the steam pressure up during the time the wind output is high, which means burning a lot of gas with little or no generation. The other way is to shut down the steam system and just run as a simple cycle combustion turbine. This burns a lot more gas than was the prior-to-wind case when the combined cycle unit ran relatively steadily.
In short adding a lot of intermittent offshore wind to the generation mix radically degrades the efficiency of the gas fired generation. The result is that CO2 emissions are not likely to be greatly reduced and can even increase.
What actually happens is a research question I have not seen studied. A lot depends on the specifics of the intermittency, which likely vary from year to year and place to place.
The point is that if the primary justification for building enormously expensive offshore wind megaprojects is to reduce CO2 emissions then there may be no justification.
Spektrum.de is working on a study that finds a dramatic decline in birds in Europe.
“The birds of Europe are fighting for their survival right now before our very eyes: the EU states have lost 600 million birds in the last four decades – the equivalent of a loss of 40,000 birds every day. You can even hear it now. The bird choir every morning has already changed noticeably due to the loss of more and more individual singers and bird species. It becomes quieter and more monotonous.
A completely “silent spring” is not yet a reality, but it is getting closer. This is because the trend is continuing, as systematic recording programs in many countries show. In Germany, experts estimate that 1980 million birds have disappeared compared to the 16s.Particularly hard hit by the worst bird crisis since the beginning of scientific research are bird species that have their habitat in fields, fields or pastures. The number of these so-called agricultural bird species has plummeted by almost 60 percent in the last four decades, significantly more than the average for all common bird species, whose populations have declined by 25 percent. Individual farmland bird species are hit even harder. For example, partridges and lapwings in Germany have had to contend with slumps of over 90 percent in the last 25 years.”
The cause is therefore directly and indirectly agriculture. But there are other factors as well. In any case, this is not good news for the environment. In stark contrast to the popular “What About” comparison of cats, cars and window panes, they are taking action in the Netherlands. Although wind turbine operators try to downplay any danger to birds, as Orsted has done, for example, including the stupid “What About” argument, of course, something is happening in our neighboring country. But it’s probably not quite that simple, because according to n-tv, the Netherlands now wants to switch off plants during bird migration. What now? Either there is no danger or you shut down the systems.
“It is expected that from autumn 2023 onwards, the wind farms will be shut down more frequently after the pilot phase that is now underway, it added. In order to enable the birds to pass through safely, the wind farm owners are to reduce the speed of the wind turbines to a maximum of two revolutions per minute during the predicted nocturnal migration period.
At the end of 2022, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam presented a model that, among other things, uses weather data – it predicts bird migration two days in advance. This is intended to give the grid operator Tennet time to ensure the stability of the high-voltage grid and to initiate the shutdown of the turbines.
Study with hundreds of animals Not all migratory birds fly around offshore installations
Bird protection expert Tim van Oijen said: “Twice a year, in spring and autumn, millions of birds migrate across the North Sea on some nights.” Due to the increasing number of wind farms there, it is extremely important that this expansion has minimal impact on the ecosystem of the North Sea.”
In August 2022, we reported on a very interesting, but also sobering podcast from SWR, which quotes Nabu expert Lachmann. Now, however, bird migration does not work according to a fixed timetable. Each species has its own times and even within a species the migration can drag on for a long time. Does this mean that the plants will be shut down for a very long time? Will not only the wind be decisive for electricity production in the future, but also the birds?
The climate Left is touting all the jobs that will be created by offshore wind development. They never mention that those fine jobs will all be paid for by those who use electricity, including the low income ratepayers.
They think the huge offshore wind costs are benefits because somebody gets the money. In fact jacking up electric rates is a highly regressive tax. Electricity is a big cost in low income household budgets. The poor will get hit the hardest, paying for other people’s good jobs, for no good reason.
Plus most of those good jobs will be in other countries, especially Europe and Asia. We do not have a domestic offshore wind production industry so almost all of the equipment, which is most of the cost, will come from someplace else. Even the boats are foreign.
New Jersey is arguably the leader in stupidity here, although there are several serious contenders, so let’s take them as a quick example. Keep in mind that NJ already has all the power generating capacity it needs. More on this later.
Their stated offshore wind development goal is a huge 11,000 MW. Dominion Energy has decided to own Virginia’s offshore wind facility, instead of buying the juice from developers, so we have some public information on what this stuff costs. Their present estimate is around $4 billion per thousand MW for construction.
Thus NJ ratepayers are looking at something like $44 billion just to build their target. Dominion says finance charges are a bit more than construction so let’s say NJ’s green dream will cost $88 billion to build and pay for.
Then their is operation, maintenance and repair. It was recently reported that the new giant turbines that are planned to be used are having high failure rates, so this could be a big number.
Another big number that I have seen nothing on is the grid upgrades required to handle all this new juice. The New England ISO estimates that around 4,500 miles of transmission lines will have to be rebuilt and newly built to handle their proposed offshore wind, which is much smaller than New Jersey’s.
All things considered, a round $100 billion is a good working number for New Jersey’s proposed offshore wind. Electric bills will be going way up to pay it. Most of that money will be leaving the State and the Country.
Here’s a hoot. The majority owner of the biggest offshore developer (Ørsted) is the Government of Denmark. So the people of New Jersey will be sending big bucks to Queen Margrethe for the use of her juice. She probably has a better job than they do.
The stated reason for hammering the people of New Jersey this much is to reduce CO2 emissions. Here it is also nutty.
To begin with NJ already retired its roughly 2,000 MW of reliable coal fired power plants (in just the last six years) so that emission reduction is out. What is truly funny is that the State now gets about half its juice from nuclear power plants, which already have zero emissions.
Pretty much the rest of the electricity comes from gas fired plants, but here things get tricky. A significant fraction comes from peaking plants that only run when a lot of energy is needed, typically during very hot or very cold weather. Both cases usually have low to no wind, so all those offshore turbines will not reduce the peaker emissions.
The regular gas fired plants will also run frequently because low wind happens off and on year round. Moreover they typically have to run on standby when the wind is blowing. They have huge boilers that take days to start up, so cannot be shut down if they are backing up the wind generators. This “spinning reserve” as it is called is yet another big cost of offshore wind. New Jersey does not need more generating capacity
The real kicker is that building all this wind capacity creates enormous emissions.
Here is a simple example, among many. Each turbine tower stands on a giant monopile driven into the seabed. Each is a steel tube, say 300 feet long and 30 across, weighing around 2,500 tons. Assuming each turbine is 14 to 15 MW, which most plans call for, that is around 750 monopiles, weighing in at just under 2 million tons.
That is a lot of iron that has to be mined somewhere, processed, turned into steel, fabricated into monopiles and shipped to New Jersey, probably from Europe. I suspect the combined emissions dwarf the tiny reduction in gas fired NJ electricity.
And this is just the monopiles. There are also the emissions stemming from creating the towers, turbines, blades, offshore substations, undersea power cables, etc., plus all the onshore grid upgrades.
In fact the enormous steel substations might well be made in Singapore or Indonesia, with tremendous shipping emissions. The Empire Wind project off New York just ordered substations from both places. New York is a strong contender in the offshore stupidity contest.
Bottom line is the offshore wind stampede will cost the people of New Jersey a fortune with no real benefits. Local jobs are nice but they are a cost not a benefit.
As Russia threatens UK energy supplies, Britain needs to restart fracking now
London, 4 May – Campaigning group Net Zero Watch has warned the Government that its ban on fracking is now a direct threat to national security and has called for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to change course as a matter of urgency.
It has been reported this week that NATO officials are extremely concerned that Russia may have mined gas pipelines and windfarm cables in the North Sea.
According to Net Zero Watch analysis, offshore wind generates 10% of the UK’s electricity supply, a figure that is rising rapidly.
According to Net Zero Watch director, Andrew Montford:
Offshore wind generation is increasingly concentrated in a small number of huge windfarms. If someone takes out the undersea grid connections of just the ten largest, 6% of our electricity supply could be eliminated at a stroke, and nobody would know who had done it.”
In addition, 77% of the UK’s gas imports come by undersea pipeline from Norway, and are thus also at risk. With geopolitical tensions on the rise, it is clear that pipelines, undersea wires and interconnectors have become a critical vulnerability, and experts are calling for an urgent rethink.
Security expert Professor Gwythian Prins said:
In time of ‘grey war’ the only secure energy sources are ‘firm’ power sovereign assets. That means onshore gas – and coal – starting with fracked gas. National security requires fully exploiting those resources, while giving the Royal Navy and the RAF the wherewithal fully to defend firm energy assets – first and foremost oil and gas rigs and pipelines and the Norwegian gas pipeline in the North Sea.”
Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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