{"id":284782,"date":"2023-10-24T13:03:16","date_gmt":"2023-10-24T11:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=284782"},"modified":"2023-10-24T13:03:20","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T11:03:20","slug":"wind-blows-excellent-news-for-ratepayers-birds-bats-landscapes-and-whales-as-offshore-and-onshore-wind-projects-get-scuttled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=284782","title":{"rendered":"Wind Blows: Excellent news for ratepayers, birds, bats, landscapes, and whales as offshore and onshore wind projects get scuttled"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Dead whales keep washing up on the US Atlantic coast. While radical climate activists like Extinction Rebellion insist that their motivations are selfless, their advocacy of a technology that threatens the hoary bat and golden eagle with extinction betrays something closer to the opposite.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From Substack<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Robert Bryce<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and calf. Photo credit:\u00a0NOAA<\/a>.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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The only thing dumber than onshore wind energy is offshore wind energy.<\/em><\/strong> The good news for ratepayers, taxpayers, birds, bats, landscapes, viewsheds, and the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, is that both sectors are getting hammered by market forces that make their projects uneconomic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Monday, Avangrid, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility Iberdrola,  announced that it was abandoning the 804-megawatt Park City Wind project offshore Connecticut because the project was \u201cunfinanceable.<\/a>\u201d In a statement that includes a marvelous but unintended pun, the company blamed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unprecedented economic headwinds facing the industry including record inflation, supply chain disruptions, and sharp interest rate hikes<\/strong>, the aggregate impact of which rendered the Park City Wind project unfinanceable under its existing contracts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Avangrid will pay a $16 million penalty<\/a> to cancel the contract to sell electricity from the offshore wind project to Connecticut. The move is the latest blow to the Biden Administration\u2019s plans to construct 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind on the East Coast over the next several years. In August, Shell and Ocean Winds North America agreed to pay $60 million to cancel contracts to sell power to Massachusetts from the proposed 2,400-megawatt SouthCoast Wind project. In July, Avangrid agreed to pay $48 million to cancel its contract with Massachusetts to sell power from the proposed 1,200-megawatt Commonwealth Wind project. Also in July, Rhode Island Energy announced it was canceling a power purchase agreement with \u00d8rsted and Eversource on the 884-megawatt Revolution Wind project because the power from the offshore facility was too \u201ctoo expensive for customers to bear<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This news shouldn\u2019t be surprising. Offshore wind energy has always been insanely expensive. Indeed, the only method of generating power that\u2019s more expensive than offshore wind is by burning currency in a power plant\u2019s boiler. One of the main reasons offshore wind is so expensive (aside from the corrosive effects of salt water) is its high resource intensity. As I noted in my August 13 Substack, \u201cThe Power Of Power Density<\/a>,\u201d offshore wind requires vast amounts of copper, manganese, zinc, and other critical metals and minerals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Although the companies developing offshore wind on the East Coast claim that they will rebid the projects sometime in the future, that\u2019s not certain. In August, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of producing electricity from offshore wind has soared over the past two years<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The levelized cost of electricity of a subsidized US offshore wind project has increased to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms, according to BloombergNEF calculations. Increases in capex and opex have added $16.90\/MWh to the LCOE. The higher cost of capital, thanks to interest rate hikes, has increased levelized costs by another $27.20\/MWh, assuming project owners continue to expect to make a 5-percentage-point premium over their cost of debt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Further, BNEF pointed out that even \u201ca 40% investment tax credit benefit\u201d due to the Inflation Reduction Act will only help \u201coffset a minor share of these cost increases.\u201d The article included the graphic below on the soaring cost of capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The cancellations of these offshore wind projects are welcome news for conservationists and commercial fishermen, who have been fighting offshore wind plans for years. About five dozen whales have washed ashore on the East Coast this year alone. Those whale deaths have coincided with the increased boat activity and high-decibel sonar mapping in the region being performed by offshore wind developers. As I reported here in January<\/a>, the locations for the offshore wind projects are often on top of, or adjacent to, known habitat for the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis<\/strong><\/em>). In that article, I published a pair of maps. I wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The maps clearly show that the offshore wind projects being approved by the Biden Administration could be built right on top of the habitat of the North Atlantic Right Whale, a species that is seeing huge population losses. Over the past decade or so, the whale\u2019s population\u00a0has plunged by about 26% and there are only about 70 breeding females left<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A dead 28 foot endangered right whale calf was found in the waters off of Chatham, Massachusetts. Researchers plan on performing a necropsy on the whale on Thursday, May 6, 2016. (David G. Curran)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I also noted that last year, a top NOAA official warned his counterpart at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management<\/a> about the impact that offshore wind development could have on the whales:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cAdditional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline<\/strong>.\u201d The author of the letter was Sean Hayes, the chief of the protected species branch at the NOAA\u2019s National Northeast Fisheries Science Center. Hayes said that disturbance to the whales\u2019 foraging areas \u201ccould have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species<\/strong>.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For more on the whale story, I highly recommend you watch the new film,\u00a0Thrown To The Wind<\/em>, which stars my friend, Lisa Linowes. (Lisa has been on the Power Hungry Podcast twice.\u00a0Her most recent appearance was in June<\/a>.) Acoustician Robert Rand also plays a prominent role in the film. His recordings of whale noises and the subsea noise being created by the ships doing high-decibel sonar mapping for the wind industry, are among the key moments in the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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