Politicians and regulators have imposed mandates forcing consumers and utilities to use the “right” types of electricity, with higher costs given little attention.
Onshore wind development is becoming more difficult. Local opposition to siting massive new wind farms has increased, from concerns about health impacts from low-frequency noise, loss of productive farmland, and they are also very ugly. The remote location of many wind farms requires long. expensive and ugly transmission lines to bring the electricity to cities and towns. In several East Coast states, there is also not enough suitable land available to site industrial-scale wind farms. All these concerns have led science-ignorant politicians to shift their focus to offshore wind projects.
Arguments made for offshore wind are inaccurate or fake. I will focus on the high costs, environmental issues, and the ridiculous concept of putting very expensive metal equipment in a salt water environment.
The current offshore projects planned to be built off the Atlantic Coast will raise the cost of electricity, reduce the electric grid’s reliability, and require fossil fueled backup generation, or very high-cost battery storage.
Offshore wind projects in Europe revealed the newer, larger turbine blades have been accompanied by significant reliability and maintenance issues. Those issues cause the amount of electricity the turbines generate per year to decline by almost half in 10 years. Declines in electricity output may lead developers to abandon their facilities, leaving electric power consumers and taxpayers to pay for decommissioning and dismantling the units. Even if the wind turbines did operate for their full claimed lifetimes, will any funds will be set aside to pay for decommissioning?
Offshore wind development will make no meaningful reduction in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, so will have no measurable impact on the global climate.
Onshore wind turbines have benefited from federal subsidies and state renewable energy mandates for decades. Over 100,000 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity has been constructed in the 48 states. 9,000 MW of that came online in 2019. Onshore wind capacity has surpassed installed nuclear power capacity. But nuclear power is almost always "on”, while wind power is usually "off", so electricity generated from nuclear plants FAR exceeds electricity generated from onshore wind, Nuclear power is exceeded only by natural gas- and coal-fired generating capacity.
DETAILS:
The most significant environmental concern is getting the rare-earth minerals required to manufacture turbines. Almost all are supplied by China, from mines in Mongolia. China’s environmental laws are far less stringent than ours. That means by promoting “clean” wind energy, the U.S. states are outsourcing pollution, including toxic lakes where radioactive material—primarily thorium in mineral deposits—is dumped, and high levels of air pollution too.
Another concern:
Shredded sea birds.
Another concern:
The proposed spacing between the offshore turbines will be too small to allow commercial fishing.
Another concern:
The underground cable delivering electricity to the shore may be exposed because of strong tidal currents, as happened with the Block Island Wind Farm Project cable in August 2019.
Another concern:
Fiberglass blades currently cannot be recycled and are already creating disposal issues for landfills because of their huge size.
Another concern:
Wind turbines are 70%–80% steel (of the total mass). Steel manufacturing requires burning coal. The largest monopile foundations, used for about 80% of all offshore wind turbines, weigh over 1,300 tons. Each new 2020 12-MW GE Haliade-X turbine will weigh 2,800 tons, including the 2,000-ton steel monopile foundation. Making one ton of steel requires about 1.4 tons of iron ore and 0.8 tons of coal, so each foundation implies about 2,800 tons of iron ore and 1,600 tons of coal.
Concrete gravity foundations, the other major alternative to monopile foundations, also require large amounts of materials. A gravity base foundation for a single 6-MW turbine in the North Sea requires more than 5,000 tons of concrete, and more than 700 tons of steel.
The materials requirements for offshore (and onshore) wind turbines to become a major source of electricity in the U.S. will be huge. The vast quantities of raw materials to manufacture and install offshore wind turbines is larger than required for gas gas-fired generators or nuclear units.
When the intermittent output of offshore wind plants is backstopped with gas-fired generators, the latter will operate less efficiently, producing more emissions, and less output. Just like a gasoline-powered car operates less efficiently in stop-and-go traffic than at a steady speed on a highway.
My Recommendations:
-- Subsidies for all wind power facilities should end.
-- State mandates that electric utilities purchase increasing quantities of green power should end.
-- Private sector developers should bear all investment risks, rather than be allowed to transfer those risks to electricity consumers.
-- Developers should fund decommissioning costs and post deposits with state governments to fully fund those costs. Decommissioning cost estimates change over time, so project developers should be required to adjust their contributions to decommissioning. That is already being done for nuclear power plants and individual pipelines that are subject to asset retirement obligations.
-- Developers should pay for the additional costs of backup generating resources needed to compensate for the inherent intermittency of their wind power.
-- Developers should pay for the costs to connect their projects to the bulk power system, rather than having those transmission line costs be paid for by electricity customers.
You may be thinking with all those requirements, there would be few, if any, green power projects developed. And you would be right. Offshore wind is not cost-effective. Forecasts of rapidly declining costs through increasing economies of scale are unrealistic. Without subsidies—such as state mandates for offshore generation and renewable energy credits, which force electric utilities to sign long-term agreements with offshore wind developers at above-market prices—it is unlikely any offshore wind facilities would be built.
These subsidies include consumers paying for additional transmission line infrastructure, and backup sources of electricity. They significantly increase the cost of electricity. Higher electricity prices would send more manufacturing jobs from the US to Asia.
The federal production tax credit (PTC) -- created in 1992 -- today pays qualifying wind plant owners about $23 per MWh of electricity generated for 10 years. That large subsidy began to phase out in 2017. The PTC has decreased by 20% per year. Wind projects whose construction begins after January 1, 2021, will no longer be eligible.
The total environmental impacts of multiple offshore wind projects along the Atlantic Coast—including on fisheries and endangered species—may be significant, but hard to predict.
The first offshore wind facility was constructed in 1991, about one and a half miles off the shore of Denmark. The facility consisted of 11 450-kilowatt (kW) turbines—a total generating capacity of just under 5 MW. Utility-scale offshore wind turbines in Europe and the U.S. today are far larger than the 1.5-MW turbines of two decades ago. The largest currently operating turbines are 8.5-MW units manufactured by Vestas.
General Electric’s 12-MW turbine, the Haliade-X, is scheduled to begin commercial operation in 2021. A prototype unit, installed onshore, began operation in the Netherlands in late 2019. Haliade-X is 853 feet high and has turbine blades that are about 350 feet long. In March 2020, Siemens- Gamesa announced a 15-MW turbine, with 110-meter blades, which the company hopes to have available by 2024. It will be used by Dominion Energy’s 2,600-MW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project.
The prices offered by offshore wind developers include only direct costs -- the costs to build, operate, and maintain the generators. They exclude the costs associated with providing backup power for times when the wind does not blow. As more offshore wind is integrated onto the bulk power grid, the costs of addressing wind power’s inherent intermittency will also increase, further increasing the costs borne by electricity consumers and requiring new gas-fired generating units to operate on standby or highly expensive battery storage systems.
New research on European offshore wind turbine performance over the last decade shows that performance degrades rapidly over time, especially for newer and larger wind turbines. The performance of offshore wind turbines degrades, on average, 4.5% per year. As output declines and maintenance costs increase, project developers will have a growing incentive to abandon their projects before the end of their contracts to supply electric power. It is not clear if offshore wind project owners will be required to set aside sufficient funds to decommission their facilities. Electricity consumers and state taxpayers will most likely end up paying to decommission offshore wind turbines, or pay higher prices to keep the projects operating.
The costs estimated by EIA in its Annual Energy Outlook do not provide a complete accounting of offshore wind’s costs. A more accurate picture must account for at least three factors: (i) output degradation— the tendency for offshore wind turbines to produce less electricity as they age, owing to unexpected equipment failures, which may lead to premature abandonment of offshore wind facilities; (ii) the costs of ensuring that the bulk power system can provide reliable electricity supplies, which becomes more difficult and costly, the greater the amount of intermittent generation like wind is integrated onto the system; and (iii) future decommissioning costs, which are unlikely to be fully accounted for by developers.
The costs published by EIA in its Annual Energy Outlook all assume that there is no reduction in the amount of power generated by an offshore wind project as its turbines age. In reality, output tends to decrease as generating units age. This can be caused by the need for additional downtime for maintenance.
The output degradation in offshore wind turbines means costs increase as output declines. Eventually, the expected costs of maintaining a project will exceed its expected revenues, so the project’s owner might shut down.
Gordon Hughes, an economics professor at the University of Edinburgh, examined the performance of onshore wind farms in Britain and Denmark, and the performance of offshore wind farms in Denmark. Hughes’s analysis found that the average load factor (i.e., the ratio of a generator’s average annual output to its rated capacity) for offshore wind farms in Denmark fell from over 40%, when the units were new, to less than 15% after 9 or 10 years. The performance degradation of onshore wind farms in Denmark was much less, but the performance of onshore wind farms in Britain fell faster!
In 2020, Hughes published an update of his 2012 study. The performance of larger offshore wind turbines decreased an average of 4.5% per year for turbines installed after 2011. So after 10 years, the average output of these newer offshore wind turbines was just over half the initial output. The performance of newer, much larger, turbines was far worse than that of older ones. His findings are relevant for the U.S. offshore wind projects planned to be relying on a newer generation of even larger turbines, including GE’s 12-MW Haliade-X turbines.
Hughes’s study also noted subsea transmission lines “are notorious for the severity and length of their outages.” His study shows that the likelihood of major outages lasting at least one month increases by at least 10% per year. In other words, in the first year of operation, a turbine has a 10% likelihood of a major outage ... increasing to about an 80% probability of a major outage by the time a turbine is eight years old. Major outages require back up power sources.
At the 4.5% average annual degradation rate calculated in the Hughes study, the increase in "levelized" cost is 58%, and, after 10 years, the expected output will be about half the initial output . Output degradation over time is likely to cause another hidden cost for consumers and taxpayers: the cost of project abandonment.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has specific requirements for decommissioning offshore wind turbines. All turbine components, from the blades to the foundation, must be removed to a depth of 15 feet below the mud line (what happens to the underseas power cables is unclear).
Except for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project to be built and operated by Dominion Energy, all the other offshore wind projects will be owned by single-purpose entities. For example, Mayflower Wind will be developed by Shell New Energies and EDPR Offshore North America, two large multinational companies. However, the actual project owner is Mayflower Wind Energy, LLC, a single-purpose entity. The only assets owned by these companies will be the turbines and undersea cables connecting them to the shore. Once the projects are no longer economical to operate, the companies can simply walk away, leaving electric ratepayers and U.S. taxpayers to pay the decommissioning costs.
Electricity-consuming devices—lightbulbs, motors, etc.—are all designed to operate within a narrow band of voltage and frequency. If those bands are breached, the effects can range from flickering lights to a large-scale blackout.
Electricity produced by offshore wind farms must be integrated onto the bulk power system that provides electricity to local electric utilities and their ultimate customers. The supply and demand must be matched continuously by a Regional Transmission Organization (RTO).
Many gas-fired generators have the ability to “load-follow”—to have their output ramped up or down to match instantaneous changes in electricity demand (called “automatic generation control”). Other generators are kept on hot standby, equivalent to a car that is in neutral gear. At a moment’s notice, the generator can be engaged to meet electricity demand.
Unlike fossil-fuel and nuclear plants, wind and solar are inherently intermittent, generating electricity only when the wind blow,s or the sun shines. Their output can change from moment to moment. This inherent intermittency must be compensated for by relying more on natural gas-fired generators that can be brought online quickly, on very expensive pumped-uphill water storage hydroelectric plants, or even more expensive battery storage.
Small percentages of intermittent wind and solar energy can be accommodated on the electric grid at a relatively low cost. But the costs increase as higher percentages of green power are used. Grid-support costs will not be paid by offshore wind developers. They will be paid by electricity consumers through the electric transmission rates that are charged by the grid operators, and included in your electric bill.