The saga of Vineyard Farms offshore blade failure near Nantucket continues. A few weeks ago the facility was closed because of the failure of Vineyard Wind’s newly installed wind turbines, and the city was poised to sue.
After one blade failed and ended up in the water, the beaches were cluttered with sharp fiberglass shards, which is a sub-optimum condition at the height of the summer tourist season. Continuing investigation into the cause of this environmental contamination incident determined that a manufacturing flaw in the blade was responsible for the failure.
More recently, a “flotilla” of about two dozen commercial and recreational fishing vessels steamed to the wind farm to protest offshore wind development.
Given the scale of impact, one might think the event would warrant a remark of some kind from the latest instigator of the “green new deal.” But, no. During a recent discussion of wind farms, Biden was silent on the subject.
… Biden’s first remarks on his administration’s push for offshore wind energy developments since Vineyard Wind’s turbine blade failure on July 13, he renewed the commitment to one of the pillars of his climate change agenda but declined to mention the incident off Nantucket or the fact that the signature project remains suspended by the federal government.”When I came into office, the United States had zero approved offshore wind projects in federal waters, and the industry was struggling to gain a foothold,” Biden said in the statement released Thursday morning.”But now, following my Administration’s investments in our clean energy future, the private sector has mobilized and the federal government has approved 10 offshore wind projects – enough to power more than five million homes and equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve our goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
Meanwhile, green energy schemers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are still going ahead with new offshore wind farm projects.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island announced New England’s largest-ever offshore wind project at a press conference on Friday afternoon.The energy savings from the project are predicted to be the equivalent of taking one million gas-powered cars off the road.Massachusetts selected three sites to procure offshore wind–totaling 2,878 megawatts–that will power 1.4 million homes across the state.This project will represent almost twenty percent of the state’s total electric demand.
Based on the evidence, I am going to predict that there will be more equipment failures, dead whales, delays, and cost over-runs. I also suspect that supplying 20% of the state’s energy demands is more aspirational than realistic.
It must be noted that these projects have been in the pipeline and the focus of political pandering for quite some time.
As part of a regional solicitation that has been in the works for more than a year, Massachusetts also selected two other projects, New England Wind 1 and Vineyard Wind 2, that would add up to another 1,591 megawatts of offshore wind capacity to its energy portfolio. Connecticut, which also took part in the tri-state process, did not choose any proposals.All told, the three new projects selected by the two states would provide enough power to 1.4 million homes in Massachusetts and 125,000 in Rhode Island. While both states have separately agreed to contracts in the past with offshore wind developers, the new joint procurement is the biggest in the region to date.
It’s hard to switch gears and narratives in the middle of election season and graft money distribution.
A little farther south in New Jersey, is a different story entirely. A wind project is facing major headwinds because the backers do not know how they will generate the power they promised to deliver.
Another New Jersey offshore wind project is facing significant uncertainty, again imperiling Gov. Phil Murphy’s clean energy and “green economy” goals. Leading Light Wind, a partnership of Invenergy and co-developer energyRe, is asking state utilities regulators to pause its project while it shops for turbines, the engines that help turn wind into electricity.As a result, the backers of the largest offshore wind project ever approved in New Jersey do not know how they will generate the power they promised to deliver or how much it will cost. In January, the state Board of Public Utilities tried to reset the state’s then-ailing offshore wind industry by green-lighting ratepayer subsidies for a pair of projects that would provide enough power for 1.8 million homes. The 2,400-megawatt Leading Light Wind project was the larger and costlier of the two. A smaller, 1,342-megawatt project by TotalEnergies subsidiary Attentive Energy still appears to be on track.
Beege Welborne notes that this situation in the Garden State may herald the beginning of the end of new offshore wind projects going into the pipeline to get funded in the first place, directly as a consequence of the blade failure in Nantucket.
This Pelosian “have to build it to find out” concept seems to be perfectly fine by the Rat Man, but it doesn’t sit so well with residents, businesses, and the local officials in the state who are far more intimately involved with the end results of Murphy’s vanity projects.And Leading Light is a massive project with, surprise, a massive price tag attached.Here we have a case of grand plans falling apart because the underpinnings were all smoke and mirrors to begin with. When the smoke started to clear away, thanks to the Vineyard Wind blade accident earlier in July, well…people got nervous and the apples started tumbling out of the cart.
I suspect the poison apples are going to be tumbling for quite some time, as it is going to take this country decades to recover from the climate crisis pseudoscience that was cited as an excuse to foist those projects on Americans in the first place.
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