Despite the spectacular 2022 lease sales, not all is rosy for US offshore wind development.
In 2011, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Obama administration had set a goal of “10 gigawatts of offshore wind generating capacity by 2020 and 54 gigawatts by 2030.” How has that worked? Well, 11 years after Salazar’s speech, the US has seven turbines operating offshore with a total of capacity of 42 megawatts — or some 9,958 megawatts short of the goal laid out by Salazar.
Gordon Hughes, a professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, has found that the output of Europe’s offshore wind turbines has been declining by about 4.5% per year. In a report titled “Wind Power Economics: Rhetoric and Reality,” published by the London-based Renewable Energy Foundation in 2020, Hughes concluded that declining output will result in higher operating costs that will start to exceed revenues “after 12 or 15 years.
Forbes
Opposition to NJ offshore wind projects dominate DEP hearing
…addressing climate change through ocean “industrialization” using an “inefficient, expensive and largely untested strategy” was not the right path forward – Kari Martin, Clean Ocean Action
“By undertaking an industrialization project this big, it far outweighs any (climate change) benefit anybody’s ever talked about, or even tried to quantify,” he said. “The harms of this undertaking is, in my view, far worse than any benefits we could realize.” – Michael Dean, Middletown, NJ
Offshore Wind Farms Change Marine Ecosystems
In their latest publication, (scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) now show that large-scale wind farms can strongly influence marine primary production as well as the oxygen levels in and beyond the wind farm areas. Their results were published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
… For example, Nils Christiansen’s team proved that wake turbulences—air vortices caused by wind turbines—change the flow and stratification of the water beneath them. But the climate just above the sea surface is also being permanently changed, as another team led by Dr. Naveed Akhtar was able to show.
PHYS.org
Annual mean response of net primary productions (netPP) to atmospheric changes due to offshore wind farms
More:
Commonwealth Wind project paused indefinitely
Park City Wind project delayed
RODA files a motion for a summary judgement in its lawsuit over approval of the Vineyard Wind 1 project, touted as the nation’s first commercial scale offshore project.
Discouraging Spectator article on UK onshore wind.
