Tag: Maine

Maine’s floating wind program takes another hit

The US Energy Department recently suspended a large grant at the University of Maine for research on floating wind technology. The full significance of this suspension will not be known until it plays out, but it is useful to see the context. This research plays a central role in Maine’s massive offshore wind development program, which CFACT has been fighting for some time with sizable success.

From CFACT

By David Wojick

The US Energy Department recently suspended a large grant at the University of Maine for research on floating wind technology. The full significance of this suspension will not be known until it plays out, but it is useful to see the context. This research plays a central role in Maine’s massive offshore wind development program, which CFACT has been fighting for some time with sizable success.

Maine averages just a mere 1,500 MW of electricity consumption, but they want to have a crazy 3,000 MW of offshore wind. This target assumes complete electrification of cars, trucks, home heat, etc. – the full transition, which is never going to happen.

Even worse, given the great offshore depths, this has to be floating wind which costs around three times as much as fixed bottom wind, which is already way too expensive. Floating wind is also environmentally destructive with a vast undersea web of anchoring cables.

It also requires a big factory to make the huge floaters that carry the turbine towers. Maine’s objectionable choice of a factory site is Sears Island, the largest uninhabited and undeveloped island on the East Coast. Maine legislator Reagan Paul’s district includes Sears Island, and she is adamantly against this project. CFACT has worked closely with her in this fight.

Central to the Maine plan is the use of floating wind technology being developed by the University of Maine. You can see some of their research work funded under the now stopped grant here: “Optimized Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Substructure Design Trends for 10–30 MW Turbines in Low-, Medium-, and High-Severity Wave Environments”.

https://www.mdpi.com/2411-9660/8/4/72

Thus, the DOE funded research that was just stopped is on the critical path for the Maine plan. In fact, the University researchers were in the process of building, launching, and operating a small-scale version of their floater design. The floater is sitting at a dock waiting for its turbine tower to be erected.

However, Maine’s entire offshore program has already been stopped, at least for now, which might make the research moot. This stoppage is an event that CFACT likely played a key role in.

The Sears Island floater factory was going to cost a lot of money, so Maine applied to the US Transportation Department for a roughly half billion dollars grant to pay for most of it. DOT had already given a similar huge grant to California.

CFACT research found that this DOT grant program was intended for projects that improved US freight traffic, which a floater factory certainly does not do. Thus, the grant would be a misallocation of federal funds.

So we filed a complaint with GAO’s Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Reporting System. They examined it and sent it to the DOT Inspector General. Not long after that, DOT notified Maine that their grant application would not be funded.

It is possible that DOT turned Maine down for other reasons, but the timing makes it likely that we blew the telling whistle. Of course DOT did not say the grant would be inappropriate as they had already made one just like it. But President Trump was about to take office, so maybe they decided it was time to abandon Biden’s illegal grant practice once it was pointed out.

For more on the foolishness of the Maine program see my report here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Maines-massive-floating-wind-folly.pdf

Getting back to the DOE research grant stoppage, it would be great if they were joining EPA and Interior in carrying out the President’s policy of stopping offshore wind. EPA and Interior have each recently stopped a major offshore wind project.

However, as with the DOE research stoppage, all of these actions are temporary, at least on paper. Each says there is an investigation going on, as does the President’s offshore wind executive order.

So, there is a lot left to be done when it comes to stopping offshore wind. CFACT will be active throughout this process. Stay tuned to see how it all plays out.

Feds refuse to fund floating offshore wind project in Maine

Dealing a stunning financial blow to a controversial renewable energy project off the New England Coast, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Oct. 21 rejected a grant application for $456 million to build offshore wind turbines and install them on floating platforms in the Gulf of Maine.

July 8, 2013 – Windfloat Floating Offshore Foundation and Vestas V-80 2MW Offshore Wind Turbine, Povoa de Varzim, Portugal. (Photo by Senu Sirnivas / NREL)

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Dealing a stunning financial blow to a controversial renewable energy project off the New England Coast, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Oct. 21 rejected a grant application for $456 million to build offshore wind turbines and install them on floating platforms in the Gulf of Maine.

The decision marks a setback for Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), a coterie of environmental groups, and – in an odd twist – the Biden-Harris administration, an enthusiastic backer of offshore wind projects. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced the awarding of more than $4.2 billion in grants for 44 green-energy projects nationwide. DOT officials did not say why the Maine project was not among the recipients.

Unlike traditional offshore wind installations, in which giant turbines are anchored to the ocean floor, the Maine project is designed to be a port, where turbines are to be assembled at what is essentially a boatyard. The turbines are then transported to and mounted on floating platforms at sea, where they are attached to the ocean floor by means of flexible anchors, chains, or steel cables.

From the beginning, however, the Maine project encountered stiff local resistance. After some wrangling, the project’s backers settled on state-owned Sears Island, “the largest undeveloped, uninhabited, causeway-accessible island on the eastern coast of the United States,” according to State Representative Regan Paul (R).

“Sears Island has long been known as a place of tranquility and home to abundant wildlife, migratory birds, botanical resources, and historical sites,” Paul, who led the fight against the project, points out. “It boasts a wealth of Wabanaki [tribal] history as well as historical sites dating back to the Revolutionary War.”

Floating wind turbines are still in the experimental stage, and the State of Maine has yet to conduct a thorough assessment of the Sears Island project’s environmental and economic impacts. An indication of what could be in store for coastal Maine – and anyplace else considering such a project – was provided by a September 2023 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Though the report focused on the impacts of floating wind turbine development on the West Coast, its conclusions are a cautionary tale for projects like the one in Maine. The NREL study says communities likely to be impacted by development of a wind port will face “diverse environmental, health, educational, economic, and accessibility burdens that could impact how much they benefit from new or expanded ports and job opportunities …”

That finding was echoed by a recent Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) assessment of the Vinyard Wind Project off the coast of Massachusetts. BOEM concluded that a wind port upgrade would increase revenues and create some jobs but would lead to displacement or reduction of commercial and recreational fishing opportunities, potential harm to wildlife, increased vessel traffic and noise, visual impairment of the seaside scenery during daytime and nighttime hours, and disturbances of cultural resources.

This comes at a time when the commercial viability of offshore wind energy – both stationary and floating – is in doubt thanks to the failure of numerous projects along the Atlantic Coast. The Biden administration pledged to install 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, but the rollout has fallen far short of expectations. Currently, the U.S. has only two operational, industrial-scale wind facilities – one in Massachusetts, the other in Rhode Island. In addition to ongoing inflation and supply chain bottlenecks, high interest rates have boosted the already substantial upfront costs of offshore wind power. While some states, including Maine after DOT’s rejection of the Sears Island grant, are eager to stay in the hunt, offshore wind’s contribution to the “clean energy transition” is still likely to face delays.

For residential and commercial power customers in Maine, the proposed Sears Island project would result in higher utility bills. The current fixed-bottom offshore wind costs are $95 per megawatt hour as opposed to $145 per megawatt hour for floating wind turbines, according to Blackridge Research & Consulting. Both are intermittent, and the part-time energy they produce will never meet the demands of a full-time economy.

Rep. Paul, whose coastal district would host the wind port, is supported in her opposition to the project by local citizens, assisted by the Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Her arguments go far beyond dollars and cents by putting today’s government-backed energy transition into perspective.

“The climate has been changing ever since the earth started turning, and it will continue to change long after us,” she notes. “There is no climate crisis that justifies Maine take these extremely damaging actions, as Maine accounts for a mere .000098 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.”

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Can American conservation survive ‘Green’ energy?

It’s summer, the ACs are cranking, SUVs are loaded, and families are hitting the road for beaches, forests, mountains, and National Parks. Thanks to our unique history of conservation and a culture of preservation, Americans have, for many decades, taken for granted their access to natural beauty. Reverence, even love of that natural beauty, is epitomized by our country’s 400 National Parks, hundreds of miles of protected coasts, and 800 million acres of forest, only 40% of which falls under government management.

From CFACT

By Portia Roberts

It’s summer, the ACs are cranking, SUVs are loaded, and families are hitting the road for beaches, forests, mountains, and National Parks. Thanks to our unique history of conservation and a culture of preservation, Americans have, for many decades, taken for granted their access to natural beauty. Reverence, even love of that natural beauty, is epitomized by our country’s 400 National Parks, hundreds of miles of protected coasts, and 800 million acres of forest, only 40% of which falls under government management.

Organizations like Save the Bay and thousands more founded by concerned citizens serve to champion habitat restoration and protection. Indeed, such was the very foundation of the modern environmental movement spawning nonprofits that advocate for policy, educate, install oyster beds, guard sea turtles, clean woodlands, “save the whales,” remind drone operators about the negative impacts of unmanned vehicles on wildlife, and, of course, constrain or prevent drilling and mining projects to preserve species and habitats.

But now, the environmental movement is at odds with itself. The movement’s full-throated embrace of so-called “green energy,” successfully amplified by unprecedented government mandates and subsidies, is leading to habitat-invading and beauty-destroying energy projects at scales that not only rankle onlookers but also those environmentalists still committed to stewardship and conservation—and would shock the founders of the preservation movement.

In California, a 2,300-acre solar project requires destroying thousands of 150–200-year-old Joshua Trees, also the habitat of endangered desert tortoises. Locals object. Officials approve. The power generated in the eastern part of the state will reportedly benefit communities hundreds of miles west.

Disputes in Maine about where to put massive wind turbine projects pit environmental groups against conservationists intent on protecting wilderness and wildlife. Paradoxically, the state has the nation’s strictest mining laws, precluding any possibility of directly sourcing even a portion of the raw materials necessary to construct the turbines and solar panels slated for deployment to Maine’s electrical grid. Meantime, in Vermont, a solar panel project that would cover 227 football fields of pristine landscape is being vigorously opposed.

These so-called “green” technologies, useful in generating intermittent power in discrete conditions and geographies, not only impact the visual environment but also have, as yet, unknown impacts on our environment when deployed at scale. However, we are starting to get some indications.

Scientists are still studying impacts of massive off-shore wind installations on sea temperatures and marine life. Only now are some communities and environmental groups coming to terms with the monumental scale of non-recyclable plastic blade trash on the horizon as those turbines age out. Just this month at Vineyard Wind, a partial blade from a single Eiffel Tower-sized wind turbine failed, dropped into the ocean, and necessitated several beach closures. Add to this other newly discovered consequences such as, for example, studies showing that massive solar installations often proposed for the Sahara Desert would contribute to higher global temperatures. We also know large-scale solar installations cause loss of habitat, confuse birds, drive runoff, pollute waterways, degrade soil health, and disrupt animal migration.

Despite ample evidence that we should proceed with caution regarding industrial-scale  deployment of land-invading green energy, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises trillions to subsidize such projects. So-called green energy, with the notable exception of nuclear, is—from mine to deployment—extraordinarily land and resource intensive. Some environmental groups are beginning to raise alarms about both deep sea mining and expanding conventional mining for the vast quantities of critical materials needed for aggressive electrification and large-scale solar and wind projects.

In total acres used per megawatt, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power have tiny footprints compared to wind and solar. A solar power plant typically requires 5 to 10 acres per megawatt, while a natural gas plant uses less than a half an acre per megawatt. These estimates don’t even account for the increases in land mined for the necessary metals and mining.

In the 100 years since modern environmental conservation began, we have become increasingly more efficient in the resources and land we use to supply energy. But now, ‘green’ energy policies come at the expense of far greater land and water use. ‘Green’ policies also ignore increased foreign resource dependence and environmental impacts overseas. The production of useful energy, which drives economic productivity, is always about tradeoffs. Americans are unlikely to tolerate increasingly obvious ‘green’ tradeoffs.

A future with denser, cleaner urban footprints that preserve natural habitats requires that we continue to decrease the natural resources and land we consume, particularly with our population predicted to peak anywhere from 20 to 60 years from now. In addition to affordable cars, air conditioners, and smartphones, virtually all Americans want clean air and abundant, biodiverse seas and wide-open spaces our 19th-century forebearers helped to realize.  You can bet future generations will, too. It’s in our nature. And our energy policies and choices should reflect that.

Portia Roberts is the Policy Director for the National Center for Energy Analytics and holds an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Floating wind madness in Maine

The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision.

From CFACT

By David Wojick

The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision.

Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland.

The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while a floating tower sits on a huge complex structure called a floater. We are talking about massive 500-foot towers with 500-ton turbines on top and 300-foot blades catching the wind.

The floater has to be large enough to keep this monster tower from blowing over. Then, it has to be even bigger to contain enough air to be buoyant. It also has to be anchored to the ocean floor in ways that require a lot of different mooring lines.

The small existing floating generator systems cost around three times what fixed wind costs per MW, but the big and hurricane-proof generators might cost even more. Over a hundred designs have been proposed, which shows just how immature Floating wind technology is.

Which brings us to Maine’s floating green dream, a costly nightmare for its people. When it comes to electricity use, Maine is a small state with average generation of just around 1,500 MW. But in an act of madness, they passed a law saying they will buy 3,000 MW of floating wind. Fixed wind is not an option because the Gulf of Maine is too deep.

How do they justify buying so much floating wind? Simple, it is a net zero fantasy. They have a 115-page “Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap” that explains it.

For a start, they shut down all their existing combustion generators, mostly burning either gas or wood. Maine is 90% forest, so there is a lot of wood. Then, they electrify all the other forms of combustion. For example, 60% of homes are heated with fuel oil, so they switch to heat pumps or something that works in really cold weather. Of course, all the cars and trucks are electric.

The projected cost of the 3,000 MW of floating wind is huge. Using the reported three times fixed wind figure, I get a rough estimate of $50 billion for construction and an equal amount for financing and profit, giving a total cost of around $100 billion. It could be a lot more once large-scale and hurricane-proof technology is developed if it ever is.

Apparently, the astronomical cost is no object because it is never mentioned. Not in the law, roadmap, or various technical support documents. Jobs are frequently mentioned, but they are part of the cost. But then, too, there is the much larger cost of the energy transition, without which the floating wind is simply not usable.

Clearly, the floating wind development may never occur, which brings us back to the present day, where things get really crazy. The State of Maine has started the process to build a huge new port specifically to handle this floating wind fantasy. I am not making this up.

With fixed wind, the shore facility is merely a marshaling yard where the pieces are held until barged out to the offshore site for assembly. There are just four big pieces: the monopile, tower, turbine, and blade set.

Floating wind is completely different because the huge floater is built at the port. The tower, turbines, and blade set are mounted on the floater there as well. Then, the whole assembly is towed to the site and anchored to the sea floor using eight or more mooring lines.

So this is really a highly specialized shipyard, a floater factory, not a port. There will have to be one or more dry docks to build the huge floaters in, plus a great deal of specialized equipment, especially cranes. Reportedly, steel floaters for a 15 MW turbine could typically weigh 3500 to 4500 tons, while concrete floaters would be in the range of 17,000 to 22,000 tons.

The final configuration is completely unknown until the floater design is finalized. Note, too, that this shipyard might only be in operation for the few years it takes to build 3,000 MW of floating wind generators.

The presently estimated cost of this shipyard/port is a bit under a billion dollars but it could easily be more depending on the complexity of the design. The cost of a unique new system tends to go way up when the engineering is actually done.

Starting this billion-dollar port project now is just foolish. It is highly likely that the required energy transition will not occur. The electricity will be very expensive, perhaps four to five times the present cost. Plus, we have no idea what the technology will look like, assuming it can be made to work in the tempestuous waters off Maine.

The people of Maine are unlikely to accept these onerous conditions, nor should they. This whole nutty project needs to be reconsidered.