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The Death of a Wind Farm

Why the United States is No Country for Old Wind

From Substack

By ISAAC ORR  AND  MITCH ROLLING

What can one wind facility in Southwestern Minnesota tell us about the state of the American electric grid? Quite a lot, actually.

In 2007, Minnesota began its quest to power the state with wind turbines and solar panels when the Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA) was signed into law. This legislation mandated that 25 percent of the state’s electricity come from “renewable” energy sources by 2025.

These mandates, along with generous federal tax subsidies and monopoly utilities seeking to maximize their government-approved profits by building new infrastructure, led to a building boom in wind turbines and solar panels.

From 2007 through 2022, Minnesota built thousands of wind turbines totaling 3,690 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity and 1,143 MW of solar capacity en route to meeting the mandates in 2020, five years ahead of schedule.

However, many of the turbines built to comply with the 25 percent mandate are already being refurbished or “repowered” long before the end of their supposed 25-year useful lives. In fact, one of these wind facilities, the Nobles wind farm, has already been repowered after just 12 years in service.

But why was Nobles refurbished more than a decade before the end of its useful life at a cost of $240 million? The official reason provided by Xcel Energy for repowering Nobles was to spur economic activity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and extend the retirement date of the facility from the year 2035 to 2045.

This story makes for a good newspaper headline, but the data tell a very different story. Digging deeper into the reasons surrounding Xcel’s decision to repower the Nobles facility illustrates how our state and federal energy policies are causing America’s energy decisions to grow increasingly irrational.

What is Repowering, and Why Does it Occur?

To fully understand the depth and gravity of this situation and why it has a profound impact on energy policy moving forward, it’s helpful to take a closer look at what repowering is and why it is done.

Repowering is the process of retrofitting or replacing wind turbines in full (full repowering) or in part (partial repowering). Full repowering is the act of completely decommissioning smaller existing wind turbines at a facility and replacing them with larger, but typically fewer, wind turbines.

Partial repowering is the most common form of repowering, and it consists of replacing portions of old turbines, such as the gearbox, hub, main shaft, bearing assembly, rotor, and blades, while maintaining the original steel towers and concrete foundations.

NREL researchers replace an existing gearbox (front) with a fully instrumented Winergy gearbox and SKF main bearing in the DOE-owned GE 1.5-megawatt wind turbine at NREL’s Flatirons Campus. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

New gearboxes can be needed because the bearings responsible for helping convert the relatively slow rotations of a turbine’s blades into the high speeds needed to generate electricity can develop cracks, reducing the wind turbine’s efficiency. Larger rotors and longer blades are frequently placed on the original steel towers to increase the wingspan of the wind tower, thus allowing it to access more wind energy and convert it to electricity.

All of these actions help increase the productivity of wind turbines, but the biggest reason that companies seek to repower wind turbines has nothing to do with how they perform and everything to do with money. Repowering wind projects allows them to requalify for the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), a lucrative federal subsidy that expires after the first 10 years of a project’s life.

It should come as no surprise, then, that data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the wind facilities partially repowered in 2021— totaling 1.6 GW of capacity, down from 3 GW in 2020 — ranged in age from 9 to 16 years old, with the median age being 10 years.

In essence, the lucrative federal subsidies paid to wind turbine operators are creating a perverse incentive to prematurely refurbish or replace wind projects long before the end of their useful lifetimes, including the Nobles wind project in Minnesota.

Nobles: Promises Made

Nobles is a 201-megawatt (MW) wind facility consisting of 134 turbines spanning 26,880 acres just outside of Reading, Minnesota — about 45 miles east of the South Dakota border. Construction of the wind “farm” cost $538 million (in 2010 dollars), and it began commercial operation in December 2010.

According to documents filed by Xcel Energy to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the project was supposed to produce 40.9 percent of its potential energy output — a metric known as its “capacity factor” — every year over the course of an assumed 25-year lifetime.

From 2011 through 2020, Nobles did a relatively good job of meeting Xcel’s expectations, producing an average output of 38.2 percent of its theoretical potential during these years. But things changed in 2021 when the annual capacity factor of Nobles plummeted to 19.5 percent, and it performed only moderately better in 2022, with a capacity factor of 23.6 percent. These down years brought the 12-year average capacity factor of the facility down to 35.4 percent, which you can see in the accompanying graph below.

But why did electricity generation at Nobles fall so dramatically in 2021 and 2022 when the Nobles 2 wind project, a newer, larger wind project which is located just six miles to the northwest of the original Nobles, had a capacity factor of 42.7 percent in 2021, and 49.9 percent in 2022?

The answer illustrates how federal subsidies and state mandates are incentivizing the construction of so many wind turbines that the energy produced by them is often wasted.

Lost in Transmission, Congestion

Nobles is located in a very windy part of the state, which prompted the construction of dozens of wind facilities nearby to meet Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate and to maximize the generation of electricity and federal tax credits.

From NREL Wind Resource Maps and Data

Currently, there aren’t enough transmission lines to move the power generated from these wind facilities to other areas of the 15-state regional grid that could use it. This is because the existing transmission lines can only transport so much power at a time, similar to how water flowing down a sink is governed by the width of the drainpipe. As a result, the oversupply of electricity frequently causes power prices to go negative, which sends a signal to wind turbine operators to scale back supply, at least it works that way in theory.

In reality, the PTC pays wind projects $26 for each MWh of electricity the facility produces, whether or not that electricity is needed. The subsidies mean that electricity generated from wind farms could potentially be sold into the market at a price of negative $25 per MWh and still turn a profit for their owners. This is why the areas with the most wind turbines see the most negative prices, which you can see in the map below.

Map from Lawrence Berkeley Labs

Without the subsidies, however, wind turbine operators are forced to reconcile with the realities of supply and demand because selling wind generation at negative prices would lead to substantial losses. This causes the turbine operator to shut the wind turbine down — an industry process called curtailment — when wind generation is high but wholesale power prices are low in an effort to avoid losing money.

Data from Minnesota PUC filings show a large increase in curtailment at Nobles in 2021 when 47.6 percent of the potential output from Nobles was curtailed, and in 2022, when curtailment rates reached 38 percent, as you can see in the graph below.

The spike in curtailment is important to understand because it suggests that wind facilities around the country are at risk of becoming uneconomical once the PTC expires after 10 years, long before the 20 to 25 years that are commonly cited as their useful lifetimes.

Wind advocates argue that we need to spend billions of dollars building hundreds of miles of new transmission lines — which routinely cost $2.5 million per mile — to transport larger quantities of wind-generated electricity to reduce the amount of wind power that is ultimately wasted.

However, this solution would be temporary, at best, because the availability of federal subsidies would once again distort the market and encourage utility companies to build an excess of wind facilities in an area where there isn’t adequate transmission capacity. In the end, we would end up in the same situation after spending more money at great cost to taxpayers and ratepayers in Minnesota.

Costs to Consumers: Is Repowering a Bait and Switch?

When Xcel Energy proposed its Nobles repowering project to the Minnesota PUC, the company claimed that customers would benefit from this and six other repowering projects by saving $160 million in energy costs over the next 25 years. But the biggest beneficiary of the Nobles repowering project was Xcel Energy because repowering means the company will earn millions of dollars in profits for their shareholders at taxpayer expense.

Because investor-owned utilities in Minnesota, like Xcel Energy, are regulated monopolies created by the state of Minnesota, they are not allowed to make a profit on the electricity they sell. Instead, they are only allowed to charge enough to cover the cost of providing electricity to everyone, plus a government-approved 10.2 percent profit, or rate-of-return on equity, when they spend money on capital assets such as new power plants, transmission lines, and even new corporate offices, so long as the PUC approves those expenses. However, the 10.2 percent profit declines every year as the capital assets depreciate or lose value over time.

This gives Xcel a powerful incentive to spend millions of dollars building as many wind turbines as possible and to spend millions more repowering them long before the end of their useful lifetime.

The graph nearby shows the unsubsidized annual cost of the Nobles wind facility from 2011 through 2045, depicting the yearly cost of the project before and after the repowering project. As you can see, the total annual cost of the project jumps from around $51 million in 2022 to $74.8 million in 2023 after repowering. Xcel’s profits constitute the largest cost increase, rising from $22.9 million in 2022 to $39.6 million in 2023, a substantial dividend of $16.7 million that year.

We present the unsubsidized annual cost of the Nobles project because subsidies don’t change the cost of a good or service, they simply change who pays for it. In this instance, federal taxpayers, or future generations, are picking up part of the tab on behalf of Xcel Energy’s customers.

Our analysis did find that repowering the Nobles facility to requalify for the tax credit and extend the “book” life of the facility by ten years would slightly reduce the cost per MWh at Nobles for Xcel’s ratepayers compared to allowing the facility to run at lower capacity factors due to curtailment and allowing the subsidies to expire. That is, only if the facility operates for the “expected” 25 years this time.

However, we also concluded that even the subsidized cost of the repowered Nobles project would never be lower than the cost of generating electricity at the Sherburne County (Sherco) coal plant or the Prairie Island nuclear plant, which produced electricity for $38.80 per MWh and $41.13 per MWh, respectively, as illustrated in the nearby graph. This is because the PUC allowed Xcel to continue earning profits on the original assets that were replaced through 2045.

Nobles would theoretically cost less than Prairie Island in 2034, but the PTC would expire after 2032, and Nobles would go back to being 75 percent more expensive than the existing nuclear plant.

These concepts are complex, but they are not impossible to understand. Unfortunately, it appears the five commissioners on the Minnesota PUC — all of whom were either appointed or reappointed by Gov. Tim Walz — do not seem to understand that voting to approve the repowering of the Nobles wind facility would increase electricity costs to Minnesota families and businesses compared to encouraging Xcel Energy to run the Sherco plant more frequently.

If the PUC commissioners were interested in protecting ratepayers from Xcel Energy’s bait-and-switch tactics and holding electricity prices to the standard of the “just and reasonable” clause in Minnesota statutes, they would question Xcel Energy’s perpetual money machine of building wind turbines and repowering them long before their 20-to-25-year useful lives. Instead, all five rubber-stamped the Nobles repowering project and the associated costs.

Final Thoughts: What Nobles Means for America

The life, premature demise, and repowering of the Nobles wind facility suggests the United States is No Country for Old Wind, and Nobles is no anomaly.

Data from the U.S. Department of Energy show that 30,000 MW of wind capacity will have been repowered by 2026, which would constitute 21.4 percent of the total wind capacity installed nationwide in 2022. It also isn’t unreasonable to think that the Nobles and other wind facilities will undergo another round of full or partial repowering if the federal subsidies are still available in 2032.

Taxpayer subsidies and utility profit motives are converging to incentivize the premature destruction and replacement of wind installations throughout America, and this trend will almost certainly become more common as an increasing number of wind turbines are added to the nation’s electric grid. Utility companies and wind turbine operators will seek to renew their access to the PTC to reduce the need for curtailment and to increase their government-approved profits on capital expenditures as long as these subsidies are available.

It’s a green grift all the way down.

Be sure to like, subscribe and share this piece, or YOU will need to be “repowered.”

Also, enjoy this song from The Kinks, which was the inspiration for the title of this article.

Judge Orders Wind Farm Dismantled in Win for Tribal Sovereignty

By Bonner Russell Cohen

Capping a legal battle that had raged for over a decade, a federal judge in late December handed the Osage Nation a major victory by ordering wind farm developers to dismantle dozens of turbines they had erected on tribal land in northeastern Oklahoma.

By ordering the scuttling of 84 turbines spread over 8,400 acres of land, along with the removal of underground lines, overhead transmission lines, and meteorological towers, U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves essentially ruled that the renewable energy project, known as Osage Wind, should never have been constructed in the first place because the developers – Osage Wind LLC, Enel Kansas LLC, and Enel Green Power North America – did not have the required lease from the Osage Minerals Council.

“The developers failed to acquire a mining lease during or after construction, as well as after issuance of the 10th Court of Appeals’ decision hold that a mining lease was required,” Choe-Groves ruled, according to Tulsa World (Dec. 22). 

“On the record before the Court, it is clear that Defendants are actively avoiding the leasing requirement,” Choe-Groves said. “Permitting such behavior would create the prospect for further interference with the Osage Mineral Council’s authority by Defendants or others wishing to develop the minerals lease.

“The Court concludes that Defendants’ past and present refusal to obtain a lease constitutes interference with the sovereignty of the Osage Nation and is sufficient to constitute irreparable injury.”

The reference to minerals is key to understanding the case. Wind turbines not only soar into the air from the surface of the land. Their construction also requires the subsurface smashing of rocks and other excavation necessary to ground the turbines.  The Osage Nation and its Minerals Council have claimed for years that this subsurface excavation activity constitutes mining and is covered by the tribe’s mineral rights.  And for that the developers needed a lease from the Osage Mining Council which they never sought. The developers began leasing the surface rights in 2013 but never bothered to acquire the subsurface mineral rights.  In the end, that was their undoing.

“A Win for Indian Country”

Still, the long, and expensive, court battle took its toll on the ultimately victorious Osage Nation.

“I hope no other tribe has to do what we had to do,” Osage Minerals Council Chairman Everett Walker to Tulsa World in an interview. “This is a win not only for the Osage Minerals Council; this is a win for Indian Country.”

“There are a lot of smaller tribes that couldn’t have battled this long, but that’s why we’re Osages,” Walker added. “We’re here, and this is our homeland, and we are going to protect it at all costs.”

The battle between the Osage Nation and the wind-farm developers got underway in 2011 and has lasted through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.  Throughout the litigation, the Interior Department, which administers the tribe’s mineral rights, has supported the Osages’ claims. Even the Biden administration, whose political appointees at Interior have enthusiastically greenlighted wind and solar projects on federal land, stuck with the tribe on the question of mineral rights.

While seeing 84 giant wind turbines disappear will be a bitter pill to swallow for Biden climate crusaders at Interior, they appear to have concluded that this was the wrong fight under the wrong circumstances.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Shell Exits US Southcoast Wind Farm Contract, Agrees to Pay Penalty

Shells finance chief said on Thursday the firm had exited a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the planned SouthCoast windfarm off the coast of Massachusetts, agreeing to pay a penalty rather than face rising costs for building the project.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-exits-us-southcoast-wind-farm-contract-agrees-pay-penalty-2023-11-02/

LONDON (Reuters) – Shell’s finance chief said on Thursday the firm had exited a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the planned SouthCoast windfarm off the coast of Massachusetts, agreeing to pay a penalty rather than face rising costs for building the project.

Energy firms from BP to Orsted have announced hefty writedowns in recent days for their U.S. windfarm projects in the face of high inflation.

 Read the Original article here. 

Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal

German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm — to make way the expansion of its Garzweiler open-pit mine (Photo: Alle Dörfer bleiben)

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dave Ward

German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.

One wind turbine has already been dismantled, with a further seven scheduled for removal to excavate an additional 15m to 20m tonnes of so-called ‘brown’ coal, the most polluting energy source.

The demolitions are part of a deal brokered last year between Robert Habeck, the Green party’s minister for economy and climate action and Mona Neubaur, who is the economy minister for North Rhine Westphalia, to allow the expansion of the mine.

In return, RWE had to agree to phase out coal in 2030, eight years before the previous deadline. “It’s a good day for climate protection,” Habeck said at the time.

But this week’s move has sparked sharp criticism from activists.

“The current climate emergency requires urgent and concerted efforts to accelerate the deployment of every single wind turbine, solar panel and heat pump that we can muster,” said Fabian Hübner, a senior campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, a German-based coalition of climate activists.

“Anything that diverts from this critical endeavour, especially the dismantling of renewable energy sources to extract more fossil fuels, must be unequivocally prohibited,” he added.

But RWE and Germany’s government have persistently justified the expansion of the so-called Garzweiler coal fields by pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis.

According to RWE, the expansion is necessary “due to the energy crisis.” The government in Berlin follows this logic. Indeed, some of the leading advocates of RWE’s coal expansion plans come from the Green Party, one of three ruling parties in Germany’s current ‘traffic light’ coalition with centre-left SPD and business-friendly FPD-party.

Habeck has defended the expansion as the “right decision.” Green party politician Oliver Krischer has described the expansion and earlier phase-out as “one of the greatest advances we’ve made in recent years,”

But energy consultation firm Aurora has found that expanding the Garzweiler open-pit mine would cause the country to overshoot its climate pledges. Researchers also said lignite coal is likely to end in 2030 anyway because it is rapidly becoming uneconomical compared to other cheaper energy sources such as solar and wind.

https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364

CfD Indexation Is A Rip Off

FromNOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

We have been looking at indexation of CfD strike prices. So let’s look at an example of how it works in practice.

Beatrice is an offshore wind farm off the Scottish coast. It has been operational since 2019.

Their first three years of full accounts show:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC350248/filing-history

Profits increased by £53 million between 2021 and 2022, despite lower output, on the back of higher revenue, mainly due to indexation of 8.1% on strike prices.Finance costs fell as debt began to be repaid. Most of the debt is spread over 15 years, on floating interest rates. As with most businesses with large capital expenditures, Beatrice has covered all of its long term debt with interest rate swaps, meaning the interest rate it pays is fixed for the full maturity of the loans.

The only real risk to the business profitability therefore is the actual output of the wind farm.

In the y/e March 2023, Beatrice received another uplift in strike prices of 8.1%, and a further 6.1% was added last month. Together these will increase revenue by another £55 million, assuming output remains the same.

It was grossly negligent and a misuse of public money for Ed Davey to have drawn up contracts guaranteeing full indexation of strike prices. I know of no private business which would have offered such generous terms.

It is plainly evident that his only concern was to get as many wind farms built as he could, regardless of the cost to the public.

It has been suggested that offshore wind farms simply would not have been viable without such generous terms. If so, it gives the lie to the claim that wind power is as cheap as advertised.

Massive expansion of offshore wind power planned

From KlimaNachrichten Redakteur

We can see from the Tagesschau that a huge expansion of wind power plants is planned off Belgium.

“The Belgian authorities want to triple the output by 2030. Then every household in the country should be able to get wind power from the North Sea. An artificial island – 45 kilometres off the Belgian coast – is to connect offshore wind farms to the high-voltage grid on land – and to the lines of the neighbours. After all, the hunger for clean energy is growing throughout Europe. By the middle of the century, the continent aims to generate more than 300 GW of North Sea wind. 

Belgium’s Prime Minister de Croo will discuss how this is supposed to work today in Ostend with the heads of state and government from seven other North Sea countries and Luxembourg: “For us, this summit is not about formulating ambitious goals. We have enough of that. For us, the importance of this summit is to speed up the execution.” According to the host, governments need to better coordinate construction plans and permitting procedures. So far, according to de Croo, everyone has done it for themselves – with the result that in some years nothing is progressing at all, while in others there are so many tenders that the industry can’t keep up.” 

An article in ESKP (Earth System Knowledge Platform), the Helmholtz Institute’s knowledge platform Earth and Environment, fits in with these plans. Whoever reads the report must admire the scientists who wrote it. Again and again, they have well-founded concerns that the expansion of wind power in the North Sea will also have undesirable side effects, but they don’t really want to say it. The danger of being seen as an obstacle seems to be too great.

“Here, the focus will be on the physical aspects: wind turbines and entire wind farms influence atmospheric and oceanic processes. Turbulence and wake vortices occur in the surrounding air and seawater. Questions here are, for example: What effects do wake vortices have on the environment and what role do possible interactions between individual wind turbines that stand together in a cluster play? How do wind farms influence each other and how do they possibly affect the local climate? And last but not least: How do atmospheric and oceanic processes interact with each other? Due to the intensive expansion, it is necessary, but also possible, to investigate these effects directly on site. The dynamics are extremely complex and are influenced by various factors in the atmosphere, but also by properties of the water surface. 

The wind yield can be reduced by wake vortices in the lee of wind turbines and wind farms (“windward” = side facing the wind, “leeward” = side facing downwind). In order to estimate the economic potential of planned wind farms, the wind industry is therefore very interested in the analysis of wake vortices. 

The Institute of Coastal Research of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (HZG) conducts research on a wide range of issues in the field of offshore wind energy use (Fig. 1). Questions about turbulence and wake vortices are investigated in an interdisciplinary approach. The turbulence researchers led by Jeff Carpenter investigate, for example, small-scale flowing, mixing and transport processes in the ocean by means of direct measurements with ocean gliders and theoretical models. Using measurement data and numerical models, the department led by Joanna Staneva and Johannes Schulz-Stellenfleth is investigating the wind fields behind large wind farms on a large scale. And together with the radar hydrographs (working group led by Jochen Horstmann), they are trying to track down the interactions between wake vortices and swell in the future.” 

The report deals with air turbulence, wake vortices, water stirring and sediment dynamics. Overall, it is well worth reading. The conclusion, as described, is very cautious. Basically, the report says that there are already known effects, there could be significantly more. Whether research funds will be available for such areas, however, remains to be seen.

“An exciting question and task of future research projects is the investigation of coupling, i.e. the interdependencies of processes in air and water. How exactly do the current, the swell and the wind field influence each other? How does the swell change in the turbulence drags in the slipstream of wind turbines and entire wind farms? Even without the influence of wind farms, coupling processes are already extremely complex and become a particularly exciting challenge for scientists from different disciplines due to the additional interactions of the turbines with the boundary layer. Research in the field of process coupling is of broad interest and applicable in many respects, for example for studies on climate change.” 

In spirit, one can add another 1 tonne of heavy metal per year as a burden for every plant in the open sea. Helmholtz Hereon also had a very interesting articleon this. It reads something like the aforementioned report. There are strong hints, but it is better not to say them openly, otherwise a false picture could arise.

“The experts are currently investigating the corrosion protection of wind turbines, in which galvanic anodes, the so-called “sacrificial anodes”, are used. Sacrificial anodes are large metal blocks that are attached all around to the outer skin of the foundations. They are made of aluminum, to which a whole range of other elements are added. The sacrificial anodes prevent the steel from corroding in salty seawater. Instead of steel, the seawater attacks the inferior aluminum-metal mixture.  

While the steel is protected, the sacrificial anodes dissolve over time. This dissolution process is continuous and leads to the sustained release of anode material and the elements it contains. The quantities used in the wind farms are enormous. For example, depending on the type of foundation on its surface, a single wind turbine requires sacrificial anodes with a total weight of up to 10 tons to ensure adequate corrosion protection.

All in all, the many sacrificial anodes in a wind farm release various metals in addition to aluminum over time, including known toxic elements such as lead and cadmium, but also exotic elements such as gallium and indium, about whose behavior in the environment very little is known.”  

Russian ’spy ships‘ linked to North Sea wind farms sabotage plan

From Tallbloke’s Talkshop

April 19, 2023 by oldbrew

Hornsea Offshore Wind Project, Yorkshire, England
[image credit: nsenergybusiness.com]

This puts a whole new slant on claims of wind power boosting energy security.
– – –
Russia has a programme to sabotage wind farms and communication cables in the North Sea, according to new allegations, says BBC News.

The details come from a joint investigation by public broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

It says Russia has a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels in the North Sea.

They carry underwater surveillance equipment and are mapping key sites for possible sabotage.

The BBC understands that UK officials are aware of Russian vessels moving around UK waters as part of the programme.

The first of a series of reports is due to be broadcast on Wednesday by DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden and Yle in Finland.

A Danish counter-intelligence officer says the sabotage plans are being prepared in case of a full conflict with the West while the head of Norwegian intelligence told the broadcasters the programme was considered highly important for Russia and controlled directly from Moscow.

The broadcasters say they have analysed intercepted Russian communications which indicate so-called ghost ships sailing in Nordic waters which have turned off the transmitters so as not to reveal their locations.

The report focuses on a Russian vessel called the Admiral Vladimirsky. Officially, this is an Expeditionary Oceanographic Ship, or underwater research vessel. But the report alleges that it is in fact a Russian spy ship.

The documentary uses an anonymous former UK Royal Navy expert to track the movements of the vessel in the vicinity of seven wind farms off the coast of the UK and the Netherlands on one mission.

Full article here.