Wind floats are not highways.
From CFACT
David Wojiick
The Biden administration illegally diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in road grant money to finance the construction of floating wind manufacturing facilities.
The funding mechanism is the INFRA Grant Program of the Biden Department of Transportation. To begin with, here’s how the website describes the Program:
“What is the INFRA program?
INFRA (Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight & Highway Projects program) provides competitive funding for multimodal cargo and highway projects of national or regional importance to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of the movement of goods and people in and around rural and urban areas. “
Projects typically range from $8 million to $200 million. Here is a list of eligible jobs, which is pretty clear and simple:
“Eligible projects:
Freight projects on the National Highway Freight Network
Road or bridge projects in the National Highway System
A freight intermodal, cargo rail, or freight project within the boundaries of public or private freight rail, water (including ports), or intermodal facilities and is a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate exchange, transfer, or intermodal access directly to or from facilities
Crossroads or grade separation projects
Wildlife crossing project
Surface transportation projects across borders or are functionally connected to international border crossings that improve facilities owned by Fed/State/local governments and improve throughput efficiency.
A project for a marine highway corridor that is functionally connected to the NHFN and can reduce road mobile source emissions.
Road, bridge, or freight projects in the National Multimodal Freight Network”
But INFRA was recently awarded $426,719,810 for the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind MVP (Minimum Viable Port) in Northern California. It is not a port in the transportation sense where goods and people board and disembark. There they will build a number of floating wind turbines, which will then be towed out to sea and installed in federal offshore wind lease areas. In short, it is a great boatyard.
A boatyard is clearly not eligible for INFRA funding, given the list above. Even clearer is this entitled statement from the website:
“To be eligible under INFRA, a project at the border of a freight rail, water (including port), or intermodal facility must be a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate direct exchange, transfer, or access to or from the facility. and must promote the movement of goods in NHFN.
NHFN is the National Highway Freight Network, which the Humboldt Bay production facility has nothing to do with. It certainly won’t “improve cargo movement on the NHFN”, which is a big INFRA grant requirement. In fact, carrying the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel or concrete needed to make the floaters for the giant turbines can add to the freight congestion.
Of course, it is illegal for a Federal Agency to take money that Congress has allocated for certain programs like INFRA and spend it on something else. It seems clear what’s going on here unless there’s some hidden exception loophole, which I highly doubt. To hell with the rules seems to be a hallmark of Biden.
Nor is this a one-shot deal. The State of Maine has applied for a larger $456,000,000 grant to build the Sears Island floating wind production site. Maine is called the Floating Atlantic Dirigo Offshore Wind Port, but it is not a port in terms of transportation either. This is a boatyard, a place where boats are built, in this case, giant turbine floaters. (Dirigo is Latin for “I lead” and is Maine’s state motto.)
So here we have almost a billion dollars that may have been illegally diverted from INFRA. That means a lot of highway projects don’t get funded. In addition, there are more floating wind production facilities in the planning stages to work on large subsea leases.
Whoever has the authority should check this INFRA offshore production facility grant and stop it if it is in fact illegal, because it is. If the Biden Administration wants to spend billions on offshore wind production, then Congress must provide the funds. That’s how the American system works.
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