Off-Shore Wind Boondoggles- NH Says Deal Me In - Granite Grok

Off-Shore Wind Boondoggles- NH Says Deal Me In

windmill off shore wind

New Hampshire has expressed an interest in “milking” the sacred cow of offshore wind. To that end Governor Sununu recently asked the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to establish an intergovernmental offshore renewable energy task force for New Hampshire. The move is the first step in a multiyear process whose goal is to screw taxpayers for the cost of inefficient underperforming bird choppers that will fail long before their time.

It Started with a Resolution

A House Joint Resolution, HJR1 asked the governor to reach out to the BOEM.  So, reach out he did.

You can read HJR1. It’s enviro-babble, but I am particularly fond of this.

Whereas, the Department of Energy has determined that the Gulf of Maine has a total potential wind power capacity in excess of 200,000 megawatts within 50 miles of the coasts of New Hampshire, Maine, and northeast Massachusetts, and that utilizing just a small percentage of this potential, combined with other renewable resources, could provide most of the future power needs of our region.

That sounds great if any of it is true. But there’s not that much data on this. It’s all guesswork. Prediction. And to date, the previous guesses on wind and solar (and global warming as ‘science”) have been overstated or flat-out wrong.

Do we have anything to go by?

There is one floating wind farm running off the coast of Scotland. After three months it’s doing well. It’s averaging 65% of theoretical maximum capacity. It that’s true, and it holds, “floating wind” blows away terrestrial wind farms except for the cost. Clearly, the manufacturer would like to lower that. Some competition will help. 

But does it matter when the premise behind all of this is completely flawed?

CO2 is not a driver of temperature. Mans influence is not proven. The models are consistently wrong. The promised catastrophes never come. There is no reason to believe that any prophesied warming would do any of the things they claim.  And yet here we are, considering insanely expensive power production for a region that already has some the highest electric rates in the country.

Want to hear something crazier? If they can get the costs down and reliability up, ditch the government mandates and taxpayer bailouts and prove it’s not a bigger threat to the “environment,” I might support it. If it can compete without Big G thumbing the scale, why not?

Let me know when that happens.

Better yet, I’ll let you know. 

Don’t hold your breath.

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