Guest post by Willis Eschenbach (@weschenbach on eX-Twitter)
Back on March 29, 2021, the Biden White House set the following goals:
Well, sez I, seems a bit ambitious. There is currently only 0.17 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity connected to the U.S. grid…so we need to accomplish about 175 times what has been accomplished to date in just six years.
So I separated it. There are still 65 months until 2030.
29,826 MW divided by 65 months means we have to add offshore wind generation 465 MW of new power generation capacity added every month. every month. Start now.
Get real. This is simply impossible. The largest offshore wind farm in the United States has just come into operation, with a capacity of 132 GW. To achieve the goals of the White House, every month we need to build Three new wind fields That size. This can't happen. These are just randomly picked numbers to gain popular support.
Next, I looked at the time it would take for an offshore wind farm to come online. The following is the content of ChatGPT:
The time from proposal to grid connection for offshore wind farms is generally 7 to 10 years. This timeline can be divided into several stages:
Early development and planning (1-2 years): This phase includes site selection, feasibility studies and preliminary environmental assessments.
Licensing and Approvals (3-5 years): Obtaining the necessary permits and approvals is often the most time-consuming part of the process. This includes a detailed environmental impact assessment, consultation with stakeholders and obtaining state and federal permits.
Construction (2-3 years): Once all approvals are obtained, construction of the wind farm will begin, including the installation of turbines and subsea cables. This stage also includes the grid connection process.
Debugging and testing (months): After construction is completed, the fans are tested and the wind farm is gradually brought online.
It seems unreasonable, but it's probably true. This means that unless the project progresses smoothly now, it will not come online until after 2030.
Under the Biden administration, Nine offshore wind projects were approved. The proposals build a total of 13 GW of offshore wind capacity. However, only two of those projects are actually being built or completed—Vineyard Wind, located on the coast of Massachusetts; South Fork winds, located off the coast of Rhode Island and New York.
The South Fork wind just came online. This gives us a chance to get some real cost data. This is the largest wind farm ever built 132 MW Except for offshore wind power. Cost $637 million.
(Note that to achieve the 30 GW target we would need no less than 225 wind farms of this size…but I digress)
However, federal subsidies increased by $191 million, plus another few hundred million or so from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)).
Stop and think about it. Some private companies are building a $600 million white elephant in the middle of the ocean and paying $400 million in taxpayer money to do it.
So… what else can New York consumers get out of all this, besides generous support?
The cost for consumers to obtain wind power is four times the current cost of electricity in New York.
Stop and think about it. Even if developers get two-thirds of the cost paid by taxpayers, offshore wind still costs four times as much.
Of course, that doesn't even touch on the cost of maintaining backup power when there's no wind… Cartoonist Josh clearly sees this.
Here's more on the real costs of offshore wind in New York.
What to do next?
Well, I'm sure the Harris/Walz campaign will next declare that they 100% support expensive, intermittent, unreliable wind power and claim that if elected, they will do what they have already said Harris When she was last elected, she squeezed consumers and ratepayers with huge subsidies, tax breaks and power costs for offshore wind.
Oh yes. They claim that 30 GW of offshore wind will “avoid 78 million tonnes of CO2 emissions”. Tens of millions of tons, sounds impressive, right?
But if the IPCC is right, and that's a big assumption, then temperatures will be cooler in 2050…
…
……etc……
…
…0.0016°C. That's almost three thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit.
Can we pass a law that says anyone proposing any law or regulation in the name of “climate change” must tell us (and show them their math) how big the actual temperature difference will be by 2050?
go ahead. Ask people in New York, “Would you be willing to pay four times the going rate for electricity for the rest of your life in order to cool the planet by three thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit in a quarter of a century?”
Greetings everyone,
w.
as always: I ask that you quote the exact words you are discussing when you comment. Avoid endless stupidity.
math. Trigger warning! I did say “show math” didn't I… but that's just arithmetic. cheer up.
Anything after the pound sign “#” on a line is a comment. Lines starting with “>” are instructions to the computer. Lines starting with “[1]” is the result of calculation.
> (gtco2 = 78e6 * 20 / 1e9) # "gtco2" is total gigatonnes CO2 avoided, 2030-2050
[1] 1.56 # billion tons
> (deltappmv = gtco2 * 12 / 44 / 2.13) # convert GT C02 to GT carbon, then to ppmv (2.13 gt C = 1 ppmv)
[1] 0.20 # ppmv difference in 2050 due to wind farms
> (fullchange = (gettrend(co2ts) * 26 + 425)) # current atmospheric CO2 trend extended from 2024 to 2050
[1] 467.6 # Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration ppmv in 2050
> (theforce = log2((fullchange + deltappmv) / fullchange) * 3.7) # W/m2 forcing change due to 2050 CO2 difference
[1] 0.0023#W/m2
> (tempchange = .7 * theforce) # temperature change from the CO2 forcing
[1] 0.0016#°C
Relevant
