A damaged wind turbine blade has closed a Massachusetts beach. What do hurricanes do?
Paul Driessen
Photos of oil-soaked seals and birds during the 1969 Santa Barbara, Calif., blowout helped launch the environmental and stop-oil movements. Some 90,000 barrels polluted the water, yet twenty years later, as I dived beneath it, the same production platform support structure once again hosted a magnificent ecosystem of millions of sea anemones, mussels, starfish , crabs and fish.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon drillship disaster killed 11 workers and flushed 3 to 4 million barrels of oil and massive amounts of natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico. However, in the short time after the runaway well was capped, wave action, displacing chemicals, dusty oil droplets slowly sinking to the seafloor and other natural forces had purified the water of oil.
Other forces are hydrocarbon-degrading microorganisms, which are always present in seawater around the world but multiply rapidly when they sense oil around them. After depleting the hydrocarbon food source, the microorganisms die back to normal numbers and new organisms degrade the byproducts produced by the original foragers until these nutrients are gone as well. Then, in the newly clean ocean, their numbers also dropped dramatically.
These disasters have prompted industry to implement better blowout prevention technologies and procedures.
Anti-oil activists say it is irrelevant that they also highlight why we must eliminate oil and gas and replace fossil fuels with clean, green wind, solar and batteries. Otherwise, wildlife, beaches and tourism will be repeatedly threatened by oil spills.
It is becoming increasingly clear that these so-called alternatives are not going to work – especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, data centres, government-mandated electric heating and cooking, and charging, doubling or tripling power generation for grid backup batteries. demand side. Intermittent electricity cannot power a modern country. Wind and solar power cannot produce thousands of basic products that require petrochemical feedstocks. These energy sources are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They harm wildlife.
A recent incident off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, highlights another reason why hundreds or thousands of giant wind turbines are not allowed to be installed in U.S. coastal waters.
Debris, chunks, and finally what's left of the turbine blades fall into the ocean. One blade… from a 62-turbine project that was only three-quarters complete… was damaged by its own weight, not the storm.
However, during the peak tourist season, the beach had to be closed while staff picked up fragments of the fiberglass-resin-plastic-foam blades and boats dodged large debris floating in the water. To make matters worse, Vineyard Winds didn't tell Nantucket officials about the problems until two days after the blades began to disintegrate.
Each blade is 350 feet long and weighs 140,000 pounds. That's more than a full Boeing 737 jetliner. Vineyard Wind involves 186 blades: a total length of 65,000 feet (12 miles) and a total weight of 26,000,000 pounds!
The Biden-Harris offshore wind plan calls for 30,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2030. That doesn’t even meet New York State’s current summer peak power demand before all of this additional demand kicks in. 2 billion US dollars pounds and spans a total of 5,250,000 feet (995 miles)!
Even more disturbing is the fact that the entire Atlantic coastline is hurricane country. Year after year, almost without exception. The only questions are how many hurricanes there will be, how powerful they will be, and where each one will strike.
NOAA's records of landfalling hurricanes (those that actually hit U.S. beaches and cities) show that from 1851 to 2023, 105 Category 1-5 hurricanes hit the Atlantic coast from Florida to Maine. The number may double.
Of those, 23 were Category 3-5 (wind speeds of 111-157 mph or higher). Among them, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are the most serious. But 39 made landfall between North Carolina and Delaware, and 19 hit northeastern states, including nine Category 2-3 hurricanes (winds of 96-129 mph).
Be aware that these turbines can be weakened by persistent corrosive salt spray and sub-hurricane storms. When the inevitable major hurricane hits the coast, disaster ensues.
Kamala Harris is bullish on offshore wind. For the past 3-1/2 years, she has helped run an administration determined to shift the U.S. toward wind, solar and battery power, speed up permitting for onshore and offshore “clean energy” projects and even exempt offshore wind developers from Requires the issuance of bonds and pays for the removal of damaged, damaged and obsolete offshore wind towers.
She supported a ban on plastic straws but never asked how many plastic straws would be needed to equal 15,000 offshore wind turbine blades. (In nautical terms, that's an unfathomable number.) Additionally, plastic straws contain no dangerously sharp fiberglass shards and are unlikely to sink a fishing boat on a collision course with a giant but hard-to-see turbine blade plate.
Ms. Harris, Tim Walz and other wind fanatics dismiss concerns about hurricanes destroying forests of offshore wind turbines as anti-wind alarmism. History says otherwise.
The 1935 Labor Day hurricane hit Florida with winds of over 200 mph and Georgia with Category 1 winds. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 hit New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts with winds of 115-120 mph. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 – Category 2 winds hit the coast from North Carolina to New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Edna hit the Northeast in 1954 with Category 2 winds, Donna hit the area again in 1960, and Gloria hit the Northeast in 1985 with 96-115 mph winds Sweeping the region, even reaching New Hampshire and Maine! In 2003, Isabel struck North Carolina and Virginia.
This summary includes just a few that hit the northern and central Atlantic states, as well as a few that hit Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—prime areas for offshore turbine forests anchored to the ocean floor or wildly nestled in Maine on giant floating platforms near states and other countries. They will all get into trouble.
Replacing hundreds or thousands of torn, damaged and shattered turbines and blades would take years or even decades. Meanwhile, there will be no power on the East Coast under the all-electric East Coast mandated by the Harris-Biden-Walz-Democrat administration. If homes, hospitals, and other facilities lack heating, air conditioning, and electricity, millions of people will be displaced and thousands will die.
Hopefully politicians and bureaucrats will speed up the construction of new gas turbines and modular nuclear power plants. This means only a few years of poverty and blackouts, not many years, or even decades.
Otherwise, floating broken turbine blade plates will endanger ships for months or years until they are recovered, towed ashore and landfilled. Cleaning up the billions of sharp fiberglass shards—each one an inch to several feet long and barely visible—could take decades, during which time they puncture and endanger beach walkers, swimmers, fish species, whales, dolphins and other sea creatures.
I'm not a microbiologist, but I don't know of any microbes that eat fiberglass, resin, or plastic foam.
Without bonds or requiring Gale to pay for cleanup and turbine removal, ratepayers and ratepayers who lose power will be solely responsible.
Before we delve any further into the “renewable energy transition,” can we do some realistic, common-sense analysis? we can at least think Before voting this fall?
Paul Driessen is a senior policy analyst at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
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