The Biden administration aims to establish 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power on U.S. coasts by 2030 and has put half a billion into just Offshore Wind—with a focus primarily on the East Coast.
Offshore wind is not even reasonably priced! The cost of electricity from offshore wind is taking off, as New York awarded contracts to two developers in February 2024 at prices more than double what Massachusetts negotiated during its last procurement.
A press release issued by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul indicated the average cost of the two contracts in New York is $150.15 per megawatt hour. The press release said the price “is on par with the latest market prices,” but it’s a sticker-shock leap from the $76.73-per-megawatt-hour price that Massachusetts negotiated with Avangrid in March 2023.
Avangrid paid a $48 million penalty to terminate that contract in July last year, saying rising interest rates, inflation, and economic upheaval caused by the war in Ukraine made the contract terms unworkable. That decision set off a domino effect in the industry, as a number of projects up and down the Atlantic seaboard were terminated.
We want to thank Julie P. for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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On the banking front, a $1.5 Trillion ESG Debt Market Has Started Bleeding Clients. Bankers say clients are wary of “greenwashing” allegations. Sustainability-linked loan issuance is down 74% year-to-date. [“Greenwashing”: Misleading the public to believe that a company or other entity is doing more to protect the environment than it is, greenwashing promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay concrete and credible action. ]
That is what is going on, and our oceans are paying the ultimate price. In comes Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, and TRowe, all jumping onto the “Energy Transition” business, flushing money into the laundromat.
Where’s all the Biden offshore wind money going? Most of it is to foreign companies and their employees. Vestas (Danish), Siemens Gamesa (German), Orsted (Danish), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan), and Even GE’s involvement in wind is located in Europe, primarily in France, NOT the USA!
Then there is the “Jones Act” or the USA getting all those “green” jobs and green industries Biden promised. The Jones Act is a 100-year-old law that means that only US‐built and US‐registered vessels can transport goods by water in the United States. No existing Wind Turbine Installation Vehicles (WTIVs) comply with these restrictions, barring them from transporting wind turbine components to installation sites from nearby US ports. Jan 2, 2024…
But they found a way around that problem by using a feeder vessel. They bring it to New York on a barge. They hire stevedores (a person employed or a contractor engaged at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships) to unload from the barge onto land. They wait for a different vessel to show up at the barge, and then the stevedores take the stuff off of land and put it back on to the barge so that they can, with the different vessel, pick it up and then put it down.
They pulled this for the Block Island (US first Offshore Wind Farm) Wind Farm, too. That one tested the waters for the rest of them. So much for the USA getting all those “green” technology jobs.
The Vineyard Wind project (off Martha’s Vineyard) promised jobs to local workers, yet out of the nearly 1,800 union and nonunion workers hired by Vineyard Wind since January, only eight were from the Vineyard. Only one of those hires was a union job. Foreign companies bringing foreign workers and using foreign technology. That is not what the current Green New Deal and their people promised.
Wind and Solar are “Energy Transition” action items and are ripe for investors, seeing the billions pumped into Offshore Wind. They are the new “gold ring” for investors like Blackrock, Vanguard, and others, pumping money in and draining money out—our money. Our government has become the world’s biggest Laundromat.
Part 1 – The Whales; Part 2-The Money; Part 3-The Data and Part 4- What this means for NH