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Earth Power

What's Holding Back Wind Energy in the US? (msn.com) 209

The Washington Post reports that "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States at the moment. In Europe, there are more than 5,000. China also has thousands."

And yet 17 wind-power projects in the eastern U.S. are facing "considerable" resistance, while shareholders "are pressuring companies not to invest in more projects beyond the wave that has already begun, said Paul Zimbardo, an analyst at Bank of America." Surging costs from inflation and labor shortages have developers saying their projects may not be profitable. A raft of lawsuits and pending federal restrictions to protect sensitive wildlife could further add to costs. The uncertainty has clouded bright expectations for massive growth in U.S. offshore wind, which the Biden administration and several state governments have bet big on in their climate plans. "We're trying to stand up an entire industry in the United States, and we're having natural growing pains," said Cindy Muller, a lawyer who runs the Houston office and co-chairs the offshore wind initiative at the law firm Jones Walker.

State leaders and the Biden administration have homed in on the industry because the power of offshore winds can produce a rare round-the-clock source of greenhouse-gas-free electricity — and one difficult for future administrations to undo once turbines are in the ground. The administration set a goal for 30 gigawatts of new power from offshore wind by 2030. That is about 3 percent of what the country needs to get to 80 percent clean electricity by that time, according to estimates from a team led by University of California at Berkeley researchers.... Delays make it unlikely that the Biden administration will meet its 2030 goal, lawyers and analysts said.

The article notes that last fall three wind developers"moved to renegotiate their contracts, saying they can no longer afford to deliver power for the prices promised because of soaring costs." And meanwhile a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents."

Though the project has finally started laying cable, now an oil company-funded advocacy group "is providing the financial backing and legal expertise for litigation...taking up the cause of the whales in court." (This despite the fact that America's ocean-montoring agency, the NOAA, says whales aren't affected by wind power.) The Post notes that the project's construction finally began "a little more than a year ago...in the same area where a die-off of humpback whales began seven years ago." NOAA says about 40% of the whales showed evidence they'd been struck by a ship or entangled in nets, and both whales and fishermen "may be following their prey (small fish) which are reportedly close to shore this winter."

Ironically, the Sierra Club tells the Washington Post that "The biggest threat to the ocean ecosystem is climate change."
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What's Holding Back Wind Energy in the US?

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  • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @06:47PM (#63247673)

    The U.S. has more wind capacity than any country but China, and more than all of Europe combined.

    The U.S. added more wind capacity last year than any country but China, and added more than all of Europe combined.

    Nearly all of that was on-shore ... because that usually makes more sense, especially in a country with vast windswept prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges.

    Stupid articles are stupid.

    Wind power by country [wikipedia.org]

    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @06:51PM (#63247683)

      Yeah, apparently the author is oblivious to the fact that the US has slightly more wide-open space than Europe.

      Europe's putting these turbines off shore because they don't have adequate open space available anywhere else!

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Europe's putting these turbines off shore because they don't have adequate open space available anywhere else!

        Not only. Off-shore is far more reliable and efficient than on-shore.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Mr0bvious ( 968303 )

          Care to elaborate?

          • by shilly ( 142940 ) on Sunday January 29, 2023 @03:09AM (#63248181)

            You really don't know? Offshore turbines are much taller, hence much more swept area, hence more power, hence more efficient. And the wind blows more constantly at sea than on land, and there's no human objects to get in the way.

            Here's a whole article about it from the UK's grid operator:
            https://www.nationalgrid.com/s... [nationalgrid.com].

            • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday January 29, 2023 @04:06AM (#63248233)

              That's true, but they are also more expensive to install and maintain.

              "Power per turbine" isn't important.

              "Power per euro/dollar invested" is what matters.

              • Power per turbine is critical. More turbines, more maintainence, more anchorage and so forth. The offshore ones are more expensive that onshore, but quicker to put up and with a higher capacity factor.

              • by shilly ( 142940 )

                And, per the comment below, it turns out the extra capex for offshore cf onshore provides an excellent ROI. Just to be clear, I think onshore is great too: countries need diverse sources of power for their grids -- different types of generation, different locations, etc. The UK, where I'm based, has the opposite problem at the moment: politics & ideology are holding up *on*shore while offshore is doing really well. Both countries need both on- and off-shore.

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                Not just power per Euro/dollar, but as you get more and more wind power in your mix it becomes advantageous for it to be more consistent.

                The other advantage of off-shore is it's far from NIMBYs.

                • The other advantage of off-shore is it's far from NIMBYs.

                  Oh, you'd be quite surprised!

                  • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                    Indeed. As these fuckers do not operate on fact or insights (which seems to be quite beyond for them), they will find some complaint about energy being generated and human future being assured.

              • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                It does work out well for off-shore. Off-shore is in no way a stand-in for on-shore. Unless power-transfer adds too much cost, off-shore is by far the preferred option. With advances in HVDC, power-transfer also gets cheaper.

        • by dfm3 ( 830843 ) on Sunday January 29, 2023 @08:28AM (#63248561) Journal
          That's true in Europe, but the landscape in the US is entirely different.

          For starters, aside from the Appalachians and land west of the Rockies, much of the central, southern, and midwestern US is significantly flatter than most of Europe. Especially in the plains from Montana to west Texas, you get a LOT of wind and it blows very reliably.

          The US is more landlocked: the landmass of western Europe is much smaller and thus you are closer to the coast, usually you can't get more than 500km inland. I live more than 500km from the nearest coastline and that's just over in the next state.

          Winds off of the US coasts are not always reliable, especially in the Gulf of Mexico. In places like Florida you don't really get constant "sea breezes" but you'll get intense wind in localized thunderstorms or during tropical storms, then calm winds on most other days. Try to build an offshore wind farm in Pensacola and it will sit idle a lot of the time, then be destroyed in the next hurricane. Exceptions are off the California coast and in New England, which is where some of these projects are located.
      • Actually parts of Europe are blanketed in (onshore) wind turbines. There's ten times as much capacity onshore as offshore.
      • Europe is also putting them offshore as offshore wind is more reliable.
    • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:05PM (#63247703)
      The most basic fact check says the article is bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    • The U.S. has more wind capacity than any country but China, and more than all of Europe combined.

      Well ya, election season has started back up ... :-)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by johngen86 ( 8411289 )

      > The U.S. has more wind capacity than any country but China, and more than all of Europe combined.

      Your own source says Europe has double the installed wind capacity as the US. What are you going on about?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by magzteel ( 5013587 )

      The U.S. has more wind capacity than any country but China, and more than all of Europe combined.

      The U.S. added more wind capacity last year than any country but China, and added more than all of Europe combined.

      Nearly all of that was on-shore ... because that usually makes more sense, especially in a country with vast windswept prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges.

      Stupid articles are stupid.

      Wind power by country [wikipedia.org]

      I love how an article called "Wind Power by Country" lists the EU as a country when it is not, and then it lists the individual countries too.

      • by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @11:31PM (#63248017)

        article called "Wind Power by Country" lists the EU as a country

        There are good reasons to do this. 1) It is pointless to compare anything USA to, say, Luxembourg (a country in Europe, population 645,000), due to the large difference in size and population. Of course the internet is full of these pointless comparison, like people who will try to compare police violence in USA and in Iceland (population 200,000). It only makes sense to compare blocks of similar size and population. You either compare USA to e.g. the EU (or to Brazil, India...) and average out the internal diversity, or you compare individual US states to individual EU countries so you can start thinking of the explaining factors (if they are more climatic, demographic, political).

        2) From the point of view of a Wikipedia article, it is irrelevant to know if EU is or is not a country. It is sufficiently similar to a country such that if a value for the metric (wind power or else) can be obtained, EU will be listed. Most Wikipedia articles "list of X by country" don't list EU because the data does not exist in the sources, or because nobody bothered to look for the sources. What Wikipedia does not do is to make the sum on their own, since it would be Original Work, which is not allowed there.

        3) While EU is not a regarded as a country, the Commission does all it can to make it look like as much as possible as a country. EU nominates ambassadors to every country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and receives ambassadors in Brussels, for example here the list of ambassadors of USA to the EU (in Brussels) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . EU is also a permanent observer at the UN General Assembly, and is member of the G7, invited alongside the European countries themselves (like in the wind power list).

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Additionally, the EU's electrical grid is highly integrated, and power is regularly transferred between countries. For comparison purposes it's more interesting to compare it to the US grid.

      • An EU aggregation is common for many statistics and does allow, as a trading bloc, an easy comparison with USA, China, India, etc.
    • The U.S. has more wind capacity than any country but China, and more than all of Europe combined.

      From your source (link below): EU 187,497 MW, US 132,738MW?

      The U.S. added more wind capacity last year than any country but China, and added more than all of Europe combined.

      Nearly all of that was on-shore ... because that usually makes more sense, especially in a country with vast windswept prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges.

      Stupid articles are stupid.

      Wind power by country [wikipedia.org]

      I'm not able to reference those claims in your link.

    • Nearly all of that was on-shore ... because that usually makes more sense, especially in a country with vast windswept prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges.

      Not really. Offshore makes sense because winds are stronger and steadier offshore:

      Here's a map of wind energy at 80 meters above surface level in the US, including both land and offshore: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/asset... [nrel.gov] Offshore is very clearly better.

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:09PM (#63247709)
    where it wants to be the number 1 player. we want to dominate in basic science? So we stood up the NSF.
    Space? we got NASA.
    Advanced medicine? The NIH budget is even bigger. Military? The DOD budget makes everything else look like a tiny sliver of the pie.

    Offshore wind? We've obviously decided to leave renewable energy on the slow burner. We'll get around to it, but AFTER a bunch of other countries iron out the wrinkles in the technologies. And after we let every whiny environmental group and rich house owner on Martha's Vinyard have their year in court. So..... US renewables are gonna be years behind other countries.
  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:21PM (#63247735) Homepage

    Ironically, Texas has 3x more wind power than any other state, and 6x more than California. https://neo.ne.gov/programs/st... [ne.gov] It seems ironic to me because Texas has a reputation for being all about oil, and against green energy, while California has a reputation for being all about everything "green." What gives?

    I have a theory, that the very lack of regulation in Texas, is what has led to it becoming the US leader in the green energy space.

    • being practical and saying "let people try everything and may the best solution win", on the one hand, and virtue signalling married with activism and forced government action, on the other hand.

      And I'm saying that as a Californian who has watched time after time as politicians pushed policies on pure leftist ideology, only to be stymied by even more "pure" leftist activists and groups who have an endless supply of reasons why things cannot be allowed to be done. The political actors cannot overcome the obj

    • Part of this is because the flat geography of many parts of Texas provides great economics for large wind farms. In California those opportunities are restricted more to the desert or off-shore. Yes, you can build elsewhere in CA but if you are a company seeking to invest in wind then Texas is a much better prospect. There are also NIMBY issues, but even without that you'd expect limited investment within the USA as a single investment area to go to Texas first.
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:36PM (#63247749)

    But we have thousands of turbines on land. We have different economics than the EU. We have a butt-load of flat-as-aboard plains land, much of it federally owned, where we can build turbines cheap. It's not worth wading out in the middle of the ocean and stringing underwater cables when we can hire tower erection companies and buried utility companies cheaper than marine construction.

  • Litigation from opponents.
    Who are those opponents?

    Let's see, from the article:

    Fishing industry groups fear regulators are overlooking potential harm to marine life... Note the word potential. An oil company-funded advocacy group working to stop renewable energy expansions, is providing the financial backing and legal expertise for litigation filed by New England fishing businesses.

    Not a part of FTA, on the West the California Coastal Commission is often used to hinder development:

    https://www.baltimoresun.c [baltimoresun.com]

  • Greed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xeoron ( 639412 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:49PM (#63247773) Homepage
    There is a wind farm project that is trying to build where I live that a lot of people are against. We are against it merely because when it was announced they said it would be X cheaper and Y more profitable to build, and they wanted to charge the locals Z more than the current rate of energy that we pay. Investors want to be greedy so we will tied it up until they give up or change their tune about prices energy will be sold for that is cheaper to make,
  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @07:54PM (#63247781)

    Back in the day when property rights were sacrosanct, a developer could by land or air rights or ocean leases and get to work.

    But decades of environmental regs have created a mechanism where nimbys were empowered to do whatever they wanted to extort developers into concessions from their own property or just plain shit can infrastructure projects 8f their sensibilities were offended.

    That great liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, got the ball rolling on harassing Windyard Wind because he got it into his head that it would spoil the view from the beaches on Cape Cod...where his house was.

    This got started in the 2000s and went to all sorts of crazy ass directions. At one point the Air Force was dragged into this because someone claimed the turbines would interfere with the missile warning radar on Otis and the Air Force had to go through the exercise of showing that no, a stationary structure barely popping above the horizon less than 100 miles away would not interfere with a warning radar scanning for missiles at 2 km/sec several hundred to several thousand miles away and way above the horizon.

    But what seems obvious in a slashdot comment takes months to compute and write up and push up and down the chain to be presented in court, which is a nice way to add a few months of delay to the developer and cost him more money sitting on his hands.

  • People don't want to actually see where their electricity is coming from whether it's wind or solar (or coal, gas, oil or nuclear). They want the juice, but they'll fight like hell to have it come from somewhere else. And then they'll fight the pipelines and transmission lines to bring the power or fuel to them....
  • "A raft of lawsuits and pending federal restrictions to protect sensitive wildlife could further add to costs."

    So, let me get this straight. A environmental plan to replace fossil fuels and save the planet is being hindered by an environmental plan to...save the planet?

    Pick a fucking lane, America. The rest of the planet is laughing.

  • by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @09:13PM (#63247911)
    The problem of wind energy is what the hell to do with the blades that wear out. Typical lifespan is only 20 years. These almost 200 foot fiberglass behemoths are incredibly expensive to replace and usually end up "somewhere" - https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-bo... [ny1.com]
    • Figure out what percent of solid waste in the US will be turbine blades 30 years from now and get back to us.
    • Re:turbine blades (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Saturday January 28, 2023 @10:32PM (#63247977)

      Fiberglass is mostly hardened oil (epoxy or polyester resin). The glass is minor. Get it hot enough and it will burn. And then we get the energy of the oil back. Yes an afterburner is required for clean combustion. No big deal.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      If the link doesn't work, look up "Texas wind turbine fire:" on you tube.

    • How much of a problem is that, really? Twenty years is a pretty decent lifetime, and should have paid for themselves and replacements by then. Fiberglass and resin are neither toxic nor rare. Break them up and bury them somewhere. Big deal. Or we'll find some marginal use for them later. Let's please not make perfect the enemy of good. Pretty much every method of low-carbon or zero-carbon generating power has serious drawbacks.

    • Just bury the blades and call it carbon sequestration.
  • Fix NIMBY or forget about progress, including climate change, energy independence, etc.

  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Sunday January 29, 2023 @02:20AM (#63248125)
    Last week, after some rather spicy tacos my mother in law made, I tried very hard to hold back my wind energy.

    No good will come of it, mark my words.
  • Wind blowing in the wrong direction, maybe ?!?
  • You want to see wind power in action, look here:
    https://gridwatch.co.uk/WIND [gridwatch.co.uk]

    The UK is unusual in the amount of data it makes publicly available on energy generation. There are three sites which all derive their data from the same source:

    gridwatch.co.uk
    gridwatch.templar.cop.uk
    https://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com]

    The source, more than you ever wanted to know, is here:
    https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs... [bmreports.com]

    And you can find for just about any period and any source what it generated, and download it in csv format.

    What the last d

    • by Budenny ( 888916 )

      Sorry, misspelled the links.

      www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
      www.gridwatch.co.uk
      https://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com]
      https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs... [bmreports.com]

      and there is another, still more detailed

      https://enact.lcp.energy/?trk=... [enact.lcp.energy]

      With making these sources available its like the UK is conducting a public real time experiment in the attempt to decarbonize its power generation. And the conclusion is pretty simple: its not working. Net Zero is not going to work. You cannot get there from here. All you can do is increase your depe

  • Having lived for a few years across the road from a wind farm in eastern Lake Ontario I would like to observe that wind turbines are actually weather-driven power generators and when the wind is either too weak or strong, no power is generated. That is the downside of weather-driven power generation -- it has to be favorable to work. Where we lived, the pinwheels were turning about 1/3rd the time. The rest of the time, power came from other sources. Ontario, despite frantic moments of virtue signaling, gets

  • It's too easy for a small group that's opposed to something to use the legal system as a weapon with delays, legal costs and repeated "environmental studies". There needs to be a way to end legal challenges once and for all.

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