“Vineyard Wind has withdrawn its construction and operation plans from the federal permitting process, suddenly throwing the future into limbo for the international consortium that has been at the front of the pack in the race to build offshore wind farms off the American eastern seaboard.”
– Noah Asimow | The Vineyard Gazette, December 14, 2020.
Part I yesterday reviewed the history and current status on three (of four) U.S. offshore wind projects: one proposed, one defunct, and one (barely) operational. They are:
A proposed six-turbine project eight miles offshore, Icebreaker (Ohio) has been in the cooker for a decade or more…. The consensus is that even with the “poison pill” feathering requirement removed, Icebreaker faces enormous obstacles and crippling delays.
Going back to 2001, the Cape Wind (Massachusetts) project planned to erect 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound. The opposition was relentless, and eventually, “no turbines were ever anchored to the ocean floor, no blades ever spun, no power was ever generated.”
It won permits and was constructed, but the $300 million Block Island, RI project has been a monument to planning failures. Transmission cables, improperly trenched and insufficiently buried, are floating dangerously, requiring a shut down of the turbines to facilitate costly repairs.
Wind turbines are the ultimate in environmental consequence, wasting and contaminating land, water, and vistas, as well as harming wildlife and people.…
Continue Reading“Is the human environment better because of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the usage of carbon-based energies? The answer is a resounding yes. That is triumphant news, whether the human influence on climate is net ‘bad’ or net ‘good’ by a physical, stasis metric.”
Statistics and history matter. Particularly when a shared narrative is contradicted by the interaction of man and nature.
A recent Facebook post by Bjørn Lomborg cannot be emphasized enough in this regard. Over the last century, climate-related deaths have plummeted as societal wealth has overcome the limits to nature. I am reminded of an Alex Epstein quotation, mirroring a major theme of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels:
… Continue ReadingNature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe.