From Robert Bryce Substack
Robert Bryce
These 11 charts show how America’s biggest NGOs are colluding with foreign companies that want to industrialize our oceans with thousands of turbines that will harm whales and ratepayers.
Two of Europe’s largest energy companies leave SS Offshore Wind.
In May, Shell, the UK-based oil and gas giant (2023 revenue: $317 billion), announced that it will cut staff from its offshore wind business because, according to Bloomberg, the company has decided to focus on markets that “deliver the most value for our investors and customers.Bloomberg also reported that staff cuts followed the departure of top executives in the company’s offshore wind and renewable energy businesses.
Last month, Murray Auchincloss, CEO of oil and gas giant BP, imposed a “hiring freeze and pause on new offshore wind projects.” According to Reuters, the new CEO is putting more “emphasis on oil and gas amid investor dissatisfaction with the energy transition strategy” and BP (2023 revenue: $208 billion) is reducing investment in “big-budget, low-carbon projects, especially in offshore wind, which is not expected to make money for many years.
The move by BP and Shell is just the latest example of the problems facing the offshore wind sector, which has seen higher interest rates, citizen opposition, and ballooning costs. In the past year, many projects on the Eastern Seaboard, including Skipjack Wind in Maryland, Park City Wind in Connecticut, and South Coast Wind in Massachusetts, have been canceled due to the bad economy. In all, about 14,700 megawatts of offshore wind capacity has been canceled, according to data compiled by Ed O’Donnell, a nuclear engineer and principal at New Jersey-based Whitestrand Consulting. For comparison, approximately 15,500 megawatts of capacity are currently under development, under construction, or operational.
Of course, these figures don’t like the tsunami of hype about offshore wind energy that is surfacing in major media outlets. But the hard truth is that America’s offshore wind sector is a subsidy-dependent industry dominated by foreign companies that are in bed with some of America’s biggest climate NGOs, including the NRDC (gross receipts: $555 million) and the Sierra Club (gross receipts) . : $184 million).
These NGOs and others, including the National Wildlife Federation (gross receipts: $142 million) and the Conservation Law Foundation (gross receipts: $17.5 million), are leading the most shameful environmental betrayal in modern American history. Instead of working to protect marine mammals and stop the industrialization of our oceans, they passionately promote the installation of hundreds of offshore wind platforms located in the middle of the known habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.
Last week, I gave public talks in Nantucket and Newport on the energy transition and offshore wind energy. The event allowed me to dive deep into the cesspool of offshore wind and the entities that drive it. Two small groups, ACK 4 Paus and Samudra Ijo, supported the lecture. (The group is so new that it doesn’t even file Form 990s.) The lecture allowed me to meet dozens of committed and interesting people of all walks of life, income levels, and political persuasions, who are fighting the offshore wind craze. Among them is Vallorie Oliver, a Nantucket native who is president of ACK 4 Whales. Oliver’s father worked as a carpenter and fisherman on the island. They have been fighting offshore wind projects since 2019.
Oliver reminds me of dozens of other Americans I’ve had the privilege of meeting over the past decade as I’ve reported on the backlash against Big Wind and Big Solar deployments. When we talked in a humble home in Nantucket last Friday, I told Oliver that he is special, but not unique. Oliver – and many others I’ve met who oppose the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with alt-energy – all share a common value. What is that? It is the desire to protect homes, neighborhoods, viewsheds, and property values ​​from climate change carpetbaggers who are only interested in the profits they can make by opening wide swaths of territory with solar panels and wind turbines.
In an email on Sunday afternoon, Oliver told us what motivates him: “Nothing was done when the last whale was killed,” he explained. “There are less than 350 North Atlantic Right Whales left. Is Big Wind going to say when they kill the last whale? ‘Sorry’?”
These 11 charts show the offshore wind energy scandal is even worse than you think.
Chart 1: About two-thirds of offshore projects operating, under construction, or proposed are wholly, or partially, owned by foreign companies.
Chart 2: These foreign companies are eating subsidies. As shown below, foreign companies pushing for offshore wind in US waters, according to data from Good Jobs First, have collected more than $9 billion in local, state, and federal subsidies, loans, or loan guarantees, and they are eager to . . How profitable are offshore wind subsidies? Consider Vineyard Wind, an 800-megawatt offshore project owned by Avangrid, a Spanish company, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The construction cost of the project is estimated at $4 billion. With an investment tax credit of about 40%, the two foreign outfits could collect up to $1.6 billion in federal tax credits on Vineyard Wind alone.
Chart 3: If there is a better example of how climate NGOs have sold out to big business – and Big Oil – I can’t name it. Here is an image from the New York Offshore Wind Alliance website showing the NGO-corporate industrial climate complex at work.
Chart 4: Yes.
Chart 5: Ibid.
Chart 6: I’m old enough to remember when environmental groups cared about whales. Alas, it’s been a long time. On Sunday, the Daily Mail published an article about Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who built a software system to analyze dozens of whale deaths that have occurred in the Eastern Seaboard over the past few years. Gerasoulis wanted to determine if the whale deaths were related to sonar blasts used by offshore wind survey ships. The conclusion: “Offshore winds are killing whales … Numbers don’t lie. There’s a cause. We’ve shown that the cause of whale deaths is offshore winds. Period.” (H/t fellow Substack writer David Blackmon.)
Chart 7: Can we replace the Sierra Club with an environmental group that cares about protecting marine mammals? The text below is from the club’s website.
Chart 8: This bureaucratic mumbo jumbo is buried in the environmental impact statement the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did on Vineyard Wind. Here’s my English translation: “These projects won’t make a difference in terms of climate change. But they’re good because they allow state-level bureaucrats to say they’ve achieved their policy goals.
Chart 9: Big NGOs claim we need to build gigawatts of offshore wind because of climate change. But given the sheer size of the U.S. electricity grid (1,300 gigawatts), any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that could be achieved with offshore wind would be equivalent to a fart in a hurricane.
Chart 10: Short of throwing currency into the kettle, offshore wind energy is the most expensive way to generate electricity. The recent announcement that New York state will pay $155 per megawatt-hour for juice from the Empire Wind project proves that point.
Chart 11: States on the East Coast that are building offshore wind have some of the highest electricity prices in the country. Those rates will be higher because of offshore wind. (California also plans to spend billions on offshore wind, but that’s a topic for another Substack.)
I will close by repeating the famous line of W. Edwards Deming: “In God we trust, everything else must bring data.” The data shows offshore wind energy is a bad deal for whales and ratepayers.
