I ask as I'm not getting the national security risks they claim are the reason to stop the projects. I've read about them and about President Trump's reasoning (he has said they kill whales and birds, which they likely do) but then oil spills do the same from time to time.
More important, these are giant projects with billions of dollars involved, jobs, etc, and building new fossil fuel power plants would take many years, so I'm confused there as well.
My liberal brain goes back a decade or more when Pres. Trump got into a fight with windfarms off the coast near his Scottish golf course - and he lost, so to my biased mind I lean toward thinking this is more "retribution" than it is national policy.
Links below, and thank you!
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-halts-east-coast-projects-in-latest-blow-against-wind-power
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Sure is quiet here.
I wonder why.
Even his die hard supporters aren't supporting this or posting some what about isms. That when you know this makes no sense. Than again I probably get flag by mods for saying that out loud.
A slightly different version was asked yesterday
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/1pt59jk/do_you_agree_with_the_trump_administration/
I think I heard some passing wind
I wonder how many people agree that Republicans need to accept renewable sources, other then Ethanol which they support, are not bad. And a lot of Dems and Liberals have to come to grips that nuclear power is their best bet for replacing the fossil sourced fuels we currently rely on.
I don’t think modern day conservatives have anything against nuclear. I’m kinda all for it. It’s basically the best option we have right now unfortunately, as most other renewable sources have more cons than pros.
It's the liberals who have issues with nuclear and conservatives who have issues with most every renewable except for ethanol.
Oil, gas, and coal are the present and nuclear and renewables are the future. Renewables are still being developed and the infrastructure built out.
To give some perspective the esteemed Michelin restaurant guide was created by the Michelin tire company to give people a reason to drive. They were trying to create demand for cars and driving, something we couldn't imagine being without today.
Electric cars just keep getting better and the cost per watt from solar power is becoming more and more competitive every year when compared to fossil fuels.
There's a reason why Saudi Arabia is investing in renewables.
Electric cars are only like one small part of a much bigger energy footprint. Fully solar powered cities are not a true possibility now or in the near future based on geography. Commercial applications use WAY more energy than just 1 sector of consumer goods(cars).
If anything, people will end up charging their electric cards with nuclear powered electricity.
It's not realistic to think that solar alone will be able to power the world. Solar plus wind plus hydo + nuclear on the other hand have a very reasonable chance.
We subsidize the hell out of fossil fuels and there are health costs to mining and burning coal.
Just like we let Japan innovation decimate our domestic car industry we have the choice to let foreign innovation into new energy technologies put us behind or we can look at what we need to do to improve our infrastructure so we can invest, lead, and benefit from new innovations.
The world isn't waiting for us and will more than happy to license us their technology so we become dependent on them.
Personally I think your way to bullish on some of the other renewables. I’m not going to really support the huge investment they need until I see more effective ways of storage and transportation. As a medium, liquid is just so much more malleable than batteries.
You’ve got some good points on combining multiple forms of energy together, but I haven’t really seen a true proposal that is realistic about the potentials and drawbacks of each energy source. Every special interest group just wants to convince everyone that “their special sauce” is what is going to solve all our problems
But it requires a lot of refinement and transportation requires large ships or pipes running at pressure running across thousands of miles. We've invested a lot of money to create the current status quo.
In the 90s and 00s governments across the United States gave a lot of incentives to build out data infrastructure. We went from 14400 bud modems to fiber in a crazy short amount of time and without that investment we wouldn't have the world we have today. For transportation we'll need to expand on what we have using direct and indirect investments to build the world we don't have today.
As for batteries that technology is developing and we can own it or we can rent it from the countries that do. China would be excited to own it and rent it to us.
Have you looked?
That is certainly a problem with ethanol.
Thank god as we all know if there were noise from wind turbines it could give us cancer
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trump-windmills-cause-cancer/4789848
You might even say, as quiet as a ... windmill.
😏
The total output of the windfarm can never equal the amount of energy expended to create the windfarm. They have been found useful to power drilling rigs for oil wells. But they are heavy polluters, in the sense that nothing can be recycled. They do not last.
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The figures I'm seeing online are that that the paused/canceled wind projects were going to generate electricity with cost per kilowatt hours in the range of 12-13c, while new natural gas power plants in that region could produce power in the range of 9-10c. Does anyone here have reliable figures?
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These projects are not viable without government subsidies so whatever it takes to shut them down is good for our economy. If these projects are so important why can't they be built without subsidies?
Wind power is expensive and especially offshore wind. That is why the private sector never built them. It is much more economical to built NG plants
Does that mean you actually support AOC for preventing Amazon from building in Queens? I always thought conservatives attacked her for that.
No. That is not the same. Amazon is a viable business and would create 25K-40K jobs which would have been a significant contribution to the NYC economy. The offshore wind farms not so much.
In Amazon's case it was demand that created the opportunity for the investment. In the wind farm example it was the subsidies that made it possible to build.
Amazon ultimately build their center somewhere else. Will these wind turbibes get built without the subsidy? I doubt it.
But there wasn’t enough demand in NYC, they just found subsidies somewhere else.
Building windmills is creating jobs. You even pointed out they would get bonuses for high paying jobs.
Both cases are trading subsidies for jobs. Other than you believing wind farms don’t create jobs, I’m still not seeing the difference. Sounds like she saved the taxpayers big bucks.
The OP said they were privately funded. Is he wrong?
The government has long subsidized nascent industries - like building railroads that made oil transportation possible. Fossil fuel to this day has massive subsidies. See below. Think also space travel - started as government now is private sector (still with absolutely massive subsidies). Air travel (think government payed ATC personnel) Think the Army Corps of Engineers building dykes that protect private industry. Consider the billions we're going to spend to get chip manufacturing back to the US. Without the investment, we're reliant on a risky place - Taiwan. Without billions from the fed government, Musk wouldn't exist.
I'm not criticizing them mind you - to the extent government investment in infrastructure makes life easier / cheaper for Americans, I'm all in.
We are falling behind China on new energy. If it takes the government to boost it a bit to catch up and remain competitive doesn't it make sense for the government to help?
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs
They are privately funded but they all qualify for substantial tax credits that amount to a subsidy. 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) or Production Tax Credit (PTC) under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with extra bonuses for meeting wage, apprenticeship, and domestic content rules, potentially reaching 50%
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I think it sets a bad precedent for the government to cancel previously approved projects that involved significant investment of private capital.
I’d guess people who have or manage capital or going to have second thoughts about investing that capital in the US.
Note: I’m taking at face value the OPs claim that this was privately funded.
I confess I haven't read everything - there's likely a fair amount of federal funding from the idiotically named "Inflation Reduction Act" (which I support, just hate the name) but we provide subsidies for all forms of energy from oil to coal... If the President wants to cancel funds enacted by law, he could of course go back to congress to claw the funds back it seems.
Your second link is totally unrelated and is about a Scottish court case about windmills off the Scottish Coast. I don't think retribution is a good link here considering it's completely two different countries and different people behind said projects.
The first link details the fact that the Pentagon believed that the planned windmills off the Eastern seaboard would scatter radar preventing good locks and fixes which makes it a legitimate National Security concern. Given that the source is PBS, and it's clearly a pro-renewables anti-trump hit piece, there's probably a host of other legitimate factors that they didn't care to bring up.
Personally, I'm not a fan of windmills, there's only a few locations with constant year-round wind where they make economic and environmental sense and in every other place it's just environmentally destructive virtue signaling.
Is burning fossil fuels environmentally destructive?
Burning fossil fuels creates an issue that we'll either need to adapt to or mitigate in some way. "Destructive" implies permanence, and, in this context, suggests a pessimism that I don't share.
Don't you think the DoD would have raised these issues decades ago or does the timing not seem suspect?
I'm pretty sure they raised them and the previous administration didn't give a damn about their concerns.
Is that a "belief" or something you know based on reporting?
So if we go out on a limb here, and assume / admit that President Trump loves a good vendetta and retribution for those he feels have snubbed him, given the years long battle he had with the ocean wind projects visible from his golf course, can you not see a possible connection? "Windmills ruined my view for my golf course, so I'll make them pay" doesn't seem such a stretch no?
I was worried about posting from PBS (which I believe is unbiased, but you know) so there's another link below from non-wind industry which provides context. First, President Trump had issued an executive order blocking all wind projects country wide. (Texas, by far, has the most wind projects in the country). They can't claim windmills in Texas are hurting our radar capacities - that's just silly.
Off shore windmills are static - they don't move. They can be easily accounted for in any radar effectuation models. We know where they are, how tall they are, what the average rotation is, etc.
So I guess I'll ask - if the concern is off shore wind impacting radar, why did President Trump order a halt to ALL wind in the US (which has been ruled arbitrary and capricious - admittedly by a Clinton appointee).
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/pentagon-flags-offshore-wind-risks
https://atdi.com/assessing-the-impact-of-wind-turbines-on-radar-a-structured-approach/
On that point, most of the issue is permitting. I do not think it is a bad thing to encourage states to severely cut their permitting process. With sufficient motivation and available fuel, a natural gas plant can be up within 2-3 years. which is within the range of when the median paused/canceled wind projects were due to come online.
Fair enough - I think there's a pretty solid consensus that permitting in the US is a nightmare (NYT's The Daily just did a podcast called "The messy reality of made in America" which details the nightmare building a semiconductor chip plant in the US compared to Taiwan. They have one authority to go to for one permit. In AZ there are literally hundreds of permits, inspections, approvals, unions, etc. That said, the cost of wind power is plummeting and will continue to go down as supply increases - standard market forces, so I'm still not understanding why it makes sense to cancel so many projects so close to being online (and one already 1/2 way there and currently producing power).
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