Lake Erie’s Icebreaker Windfarm Project Put on Ice
Another green energy domino falls.
Another green energy domino has fallen, this one in the Great Lakes region.
Politically connected green energy barons dreamed of putting up a wind farm in Lake Erie, just offshore of Cleveland, OH. The project was suppose to be the first freshwater wind farm in North America. Those plans have now been put on ice.
The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation’s board of directors said last week that court challenges and rising costs played into the decision. LEEDCo is the public-private partnership behind Icebreaker. The project has been in the works since 2009.
…Similar projects are currently in development in New York and Illinois. The pause described as indefinite could mean Ohio loses the lead it had on the region for wind generation.
“Demonstrating that we can generate electricity from wind energy in Lake Erie would have been, in and of itself, a really important step as we try to develop alternative forms of energy in response to climate change, and so that we have ample energy to supply to users here in Ohio,” LEEDCo Board Member and Port of Cleveland President Will Friedman told Ideastream’s Zaria Johnson.
The project has been halted, mainly because the regulations were too burdensome to make the venture profitable . . . or even possible.
A nearly 15-year long effort to develop what would have been the first, and possibly only, freshwater wind farm in the United States has been shelved with the developer lashing out at the obstacles and delays created by regulators. Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LeedCo) says it is not ready to concede but admits that the project is “financially untenable in the immediate future.”
LeedCo points to the long delays and legal challenges it faced while specifically calling out “a project killing condition by the Ohio Power Siting Board which significantly impeded the project.” The company was involved in an extended battle with regulators and legal appeals after the Ohio Power Sitting Board initially ruled that the wind farm would have to cease operations in the evening to protect birds.
The company highlights the board spent 18 months of extensive study and review before determining that the wind farm “serves the public interest.” LeedCo says it invested great amounts of time reviewing any potential impact on birds.
Hot Air‘s Beege Welborne reviewed the history behind the 15-year trail-of-flaming-hoops, including an intensive signature campaign to show that local citizens wanted the project (even if their energy bills went up) and submitting poorly done and incomplete environmental impact statements. But the stake driven into the heart of this project came from genuine environmental concerns about the bird life in the region.
They got their thumbs up, but it came in a mitten. Sure they could put their turbines out in the lake, the new chair of the OPSB [Ohio Power Siting Board], Sam Randazzo said, but the blades had to be “feathered” – or stopped – at night for nine months out of the year to protect waterfowl, raptors, and bats. LEEDCO went ballistic, calling it a “poison pill.”
By the time the firm got the approvals to proceed, the funding was freezing up and the Republican legislature nixed the plans for a “surcharge.”
But, as this is the Christmas season, I would like to end on a positive note for our friends in Ohio. A more reliable and efficient energy project is being planned for the state.
A California company has signed an agreement to open two new cutting-edge nuclear power plants by the end of the decade on the site of a long-shuttered Southern Ohio facility built to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Oklo Inc., announced this week it intends to build two small, advanced nuclear power plants on part of a 3,700-acre site south of Piketon that once was home to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. They would be the first nuclear power plants built in Ohio in decades.
The two plants, if and when they’re built, would look and operate differently than traditional nuclear power plants, as they would be smaller and able to use the nuclear waste from other reactors as fuel, according to WOUB Public Media.
I am looking forward to counting even more falling green energy dominoes in 2024 with you! There are sure to be plenty.
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Comments
Sure, the ‘dominos are falling’ but in the meantime the progs have bilked trillions out of our economy.
That was the primary goal.
Thank God
The three largest wind turbine manufacturers have admitted that their products won’t actually last the 20 year lifespan they were sold as having. At 20 years, only subsidies and low interest rates made them possible. With a 12 year life, high interest rates and falling subsidies they are not close to practical.
“Windfarm put on ice”
That’s cold!
Demonstrating that you CANNOT is an even more important step.
Everyone involved in this should have to repay the taxpayers for every penny invested in this crap. All the politicians and businessmen involved. Everyone who doled out or sucked up this money to waste on their lies.
I’m all for alternative energy. People have the freedom to try whatever they can think up … but not a penny from the public trough for any of it. Eitjer it succeeds on its own merits and makes money or it dies.
Yeah.
When the people in charge are “deciding” based on wish fulfillment — that quoted sentence says only what imagined thing would be good — you don’t even get good experiments.
that depends on how n defines a “good” experiment. In this case it would appear the “good experiment” has succeeded.. in learning just how much public money can be bilked out of they who supply it before the plug gets yanked out and the project folds. In this case it seems they will get only a small fraction of what WOULD have been cadged had the project been allowed to move backward, er, squeeze me I meant forward… (yeah sure)
The only “blinking red light” on the California nuke project is that it comes out of California…. I’d want to take a VERY up close and personal deep look at that firm’s track record before giving a go-ahead.
“The project has been halted, mainly because the regulations were too burdensome to make the venture profitable . . . or even possible.”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha.
Once you set up a graft system, it’s as happy to extract from you as the targets you had in mind.
Ha. Snort. Snerk. Hic.
If you’ve been building a windfarm for half a year and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.
“but the blades had to be “feathered” – or stopped – at night for nine months out of the year to protect waterfowl, raptors, and bats.”
lol
Hehehehe…so the same regulations the greenies jammed through and use to stop mining, oil drilling, building etc are now being used against them? The irony is delicious.
Civilization to revert back to cottage industry, with small shop on ground floor, and living space above on 2nd floor. Small garden in back to grow vegetables.
zoning regs will prohibit living and working in the same space, meaning further separation of family, higher expenses maintaining two separate facilities, commute costs, etc.
Dont be fooled. The issue is not which TYPE of energy production is on the current ‘bad list” but that ALL energy production is bad. Because they WANT us to slide back twocenturies into the stone age, the better to contrl and manage us. Its all of a piece….. anything to suppress any form of progress is “bad” right out of the box. California are blowing up hydro dams to further starve their population of electrical energy, and at the same time passing laws mandating electric powered cars, lawnmowers, chainsaws, weed blowers, and also at the same time banning gas stoves so ore electricity will be needed to even cook your brekkie.
Think all that through… there can be ONLY ONE explanation for all this, and it ain’t pretty.
As has been the pattern of late, California are in the lead in the race to perdition.
Exactly. The left are anti-HUMAN. They want Man to disappear. Sure … they might be okay with letting a few thousand savages run around the Earth in loincloths, but that’s about it, so far as they’re concerned. The Western Left are insane, self-hating nihilists who want the practical extinction of modern Man.
I highly suspect this was nothing more than a money making scam and there was never any intention to complete the project.
Not to worry, Biden just announced 600 million for environmental justice, the good times roll for the grifters.