Tag: wind turbines

Gone with the Wind: Joe Biden’s Last Minute ‘Green’ Project Cancelled in Idaho

The Department of the Interior announced Wednesday that it is moving to terminate the Lava Ridge Wind Project in southern Idaho, reversing an approval made by the Biden-Harris administration in December 2024.

The Department of the Interior announced Wednesday that it is moving to terminate the Lava Ridge Wind Project in southern Idaho, reversing an approval made by the Biden-Harris administration in December 2024.

The agency cited legal deficiencies in the project’s authorization and pointed to widespread opposition from Idaho residents, many of whom raised concerns about the project’s proximity to a World War II memorial site.

The Lava Ridge Wind Project was slated to include up to 231 wind turbines spread across nearly 60,000 acres of land.

The Biden-Harris administration’s approval of the project came during its final weeks and was met with criticism from lawmakers, local officials, and residents concerned about its impact on the Minidoka National Historic Site.

“Under President Donald Trump’s bold leadership, the Department is putting the brakes on deficient, unreliable energy and putting the American people first,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in a statement.

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The Green Lobby’s Dishonest Crusade for Solar and Wind

You wake up to an alarm, flick on the light, brew coffee, and drive to work. Every step requires energy – the stuff that shares the coin of physical reality with matter, the E in E = MC2.  It keeps homes warm, food fresh and economies running. 

Supplying 80% of the world’s primary energy, coal, oil and natural gas make up the lifeblood of modern civilization. Yet, there continue to be calls for the abandonment of these fuels without any feasible, scalable replacement in sight. 

It is dishonest for “green” lobbyists to claim that electricity from wind and solar can replace fossil fuels, when currently most of the energy used in the world is not even in the form of electricity.

Electricity represents only about 20% of global final energy consumption. That means four-fifths of the world’s energy use comes from fuels that power ships, planes, trucks and industrial furnaces. Oil fuels vehicles, natural gas provides heat for homes and industry, and coal is critically important for the manufacture of steel from iron.

Demand for hydrocarbons is expected to exceed that of electricity for many decades.

You’ve probably heard it before: “Solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels.” This is a falsehood supported by a misleading metric – the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). When Mark Twain spoke of “lies, damn lies and statistics,” he had LCOE in mind.

LCOE purports to present an apples-to-apples comparison between various energy sources. However, the measure is meaningless because it ignores key costs such as those of providing backup power to compensate for the intermittency of solar and wind. Something must be available to step up when the wind and sun are not available for power generation.

While it may be true that sunshine and wind are “free,” converting them to a form of energy that works with modern power grids and integrating them into the 24-hour operation of electrical systems supplying millions of customers is difficult and expensive. 

A 2022 study by Robert Idel exposes LCOE’s flaws.

First, LCOE assumes constant output, but solar and wind produce only 20%-30% of their designed capacity, compared to 80%-90% for plants running on coal, natural gas or nuclear fuel.

Second, integrating solar and wind requires expensive infrastructure, including new transmission lines between population centers and remote industrial installations of wind turbines or solar panels or to natural gas plants standing by as backups. 

Third, LCOE ignores more subtle but, nonetheless, important operational considerations. For instance, as the output of solar and wind rises and falls with changes in the weather or daily westward progression of the sun, fossil fuel plants must ramp up or down, reducing efficiency and raising costs.

The rosy numbers of LCOE don’t reflect the reality of electricity bills. In California, where so-called renewables make up more than 50% of electricity generation, residential rates hit 30 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2023 – more than double the U.S. average.

Higher energy prices infiltrate every corner of life – manufacturing, logistics, heating, cooling, farming, data storage and more.

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Wind Turbine Blade Hospitalizes One Person After Crashing Onto Busy Interstate in Maryland

A wind turbine blade crashed onto I-70 in Maryland on Monday morning.

The Maryland State Highway Administration reported, “At approximately 5:30 a.m., a tractor trailer traveling westbound on I-70 was pulling a wind turbine blade that struck the guardrail causing the blade to go partially into the eastbound lanes.”

SHA added, “The blade was then clipped by a tractor-trailer traveling eastbound.”

The incident hospitalized one person and closed the westbound lane on I-70 for several hours.

A video of the incident was uploaded on X.

Per Fox 5 DC

A wind turbine blade detached from a tractor-trailer early Monday, blocking traffic in both directions of Interstate 70 in Washington County, Maryland State Police said.

The crash occurred around 5 a.m. near Exit 26 at Interstate 81 when the blade crossed the center median and landed in the eastbound lanes.

Maryland Department of Transportation traffic cameras showed the massive blade stretched across the highway. Officials say one person was transported by ambulance to Meritus Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries.

Drivers experienced delays throughout the morning commute.

In the last year, Democrat Governor of Maryland Wes Moore, who is speculated to run for President, has signed legislation to create offshore wind energy off Maryland’s coast.

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Trump Says No More Windmills, Calls Them ‘Bullsh*t’ and a Blight on Our ‘Beautiful Plains’

Calling power-generating windmills “bullshit” and a scenic disaster, President Donald Trump said this week his administration would not approve any more development of wind energy except in cases of emergency.

“We’re not going to let windmills get built because we’re not going to destroy our country any further than it’s already been destroyed,” Trump said. “You go and look at these beautiful plains and valleys and they’re loaded up with this garbage that gets worse and worse looking with time…What bullshit this is.”

The National Desk posted his profane dislike of the towering wind turbines on YouTube.

Trump made the comments during a speech Thursday ahead of his policy to overturn California’s phaseout of gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles.

It’s not the first time the president has criticized wind energy. Shortly before taking office in January, he told reporters, “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built. They don’t work without subsidy. … You don’t want energy that needs subsidy.”

On the campaign trail, he vowed to end offshore wind production, spoke out against unsightly turbines near his golf course in Scotland, and has blamed turbines for deaths of birds and whales.

His latest remarks signal Trump may be getting even tougher than the executive order he issued on January 20, the day he took office, that halts approvals of new wind projects, but described the policy as temporary.

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Wasting Away In Wind-And-Solarville

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals—not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines—pose no threat current to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent—or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

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Wind and solar can never be a meaningful power source, and they are more expensive

The subsidised wind and solar chickens are coming home to roost: power prices are rocketing out of control in any jurisdiction attempting to run on sunshine and breezes. Adding mega-batteries only makes matters worse. With the ever-present threat of total blackouts, rent-seekers and their propaganda machines are still attempting to deflect and bury what occurred in Spain and Portugal last month, but the mob always works you out.

Which brings us to this week’s roundup.

First up, Guy Mitchell taps into the laws of physics – the very same immutable laws that mean dilute, diffuse weather and sunshine-dependent wind and solar can never amount to meaningful power generation sources. Ever.

Read: The Achilles Heel of Wind and Solar, American Thinker, Guy Mitchell, 15 May 2025

Meanwhile Down Under, hard-pressed households and embattled businesses are being lined up for another 10% hike on what are already the world’s highest power prices and, as the team from Jo Nova explains, the worst is yet to come.

Read: Bang! Price bomb sinks Transmission lines: Plan B says let’s pretend cars, home solar and batteries will save “Transition”, Jo Nova Blog, Jo Nova, 27 May 2025

In this two-part essay, Russ Schussler places focus on how subsidised and intermittent wind and solar have totally wrecked once orderly power markets and why you pay the ever-increasing and exorbitant price for that entirely deliberate destruction.

Read: Why “cheaper” wind and solar raise costs. Part I: The fat tail problem, Climate Etc, Russ Schussler, 13 May 2025

Read: Why “cheaper” solar raises costs. Part II: The hidden costs of residential solar, Climate Etc, Russ Schussler, 22 May 2025

In this video, David Turver takes a look at the same phenomenon in the UK – where colossal subsidies to wind and solar are driving out cheap and reliable gas-fired power and, you guessed it, consumers are paying the price.

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‘Cheap’ solar and wind is a lie, green countries pay more!

Ask families in Germany and the UK what happens when more and more supposedly “cheap” solar and wind power is added to the national power mix, and they can tell you by looking at their utility bills: It gets far more expensive.

The idea that power should get cheaper as we get more green energy is only true if we exclusively used electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

But modern societies need power around the clock. When there is no sun and wind, green energy needs plenty of backup, often powered by fossil fuels. What this means is that we pay for not one but two power systems.

And as the backup fossil fuel power sources are used less, they need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.

This means real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher. One study looking at China showed that the real cost of solar power on average turns out to be twice as high as coal, while a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels.

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Department of Interior emails reveal Biden’s offshore wind waivers could cost taxpayers millions

Newly uncovered emails from the Biden administration’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) show that taxpayers could be on the hook for $191 million in removal costs for Vineyard Wind, a 62-turbine wind farm being constructed off the coast of Nantucket, as a result of waivers the administration granted Vineyard Wind and other East Coast projects. 

In its rush to fulfill former President Joe Biden’s goal of constructing 30 gigawatts of wind farms off the coasts of America, the Biden administration had issued waivers for financial assurances on offshore wind projects, saying they present an unnecessary burden to the industry. 

The financial assurance requirement protects the public from decommissioning liabilities. If companies can’t afford to remove the wind towers they’re building after their useful life, the public has an assurance that those liabilities will be covered.

In 2017, Vineyard Wind requested a waiver to delay the assurances for 15 years after the project was built, and it was denied. They requested the same waiver in 2021 under the Biden administration, and the request was granted. The waiver cited long-term power purchase agreements, which guarantee the facility operators a set price for the electricity they produce over 20 years, “robust insurance policies,” and the “use of proven technology.”

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Trump officials allow NY wind farm project to resume construction following intervention from Hochul, Adams

The Trump administration lifted a stop-work order that threatened over 1,000 jobs at a wind farm project off the coast of Long Island Monday — at the behest of Gov. Kathy Hochul and Big Apple Mayor Eric Adams.

Construction at the Empire Wind 1 site was halted on April 16 after the Department of the Interior concluded that the project and its permit approval were “rushed through” by the Biden administration.

The project, just one cog in New York’s grander push to become fossil fuel-free by 2050, is set to power 500,000 homes through green energy provided by wind turbines. It has faced steep criticism from Nassau County officials, who claim that the project threatens marine life and the local fishing industry.

Hochul promised to fight the stop-work order the same day it was put into place, noting that the bipartisan plan had “already put shovels in the ground.”

“I knew this critical project needed to move forward and have spent weeks pushing the federal government to rescind the stop work order to allow the workers to return and ensure this important source of renewable power could come to fruition,” Hochul said.

“I want to thank President Trump for his willingness to work with me to save the 1,500 good-paying union jobs that were on the line and helping get this essential project back on track. New York’s economic future is going to be powered by abundant, clean energy that helps our homes and businesses thrive. I fought to save clean energy jobs in New York — and we got it done.”

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Germany Wind Power Firms Face Millions In Losses As Wind Speed Drops To 50-Year Low

In many ways, Germany’s wind power revolution has been a success, with wind power serving as the country’s largest source of electricity. However, the current wind lull over the last three months has led to an extreme dip in energy production, which is costing firms millions in losses.

The wind speed average has dropped below less than 5.5 meters per second in the first quarter of 2025, according to German Meteorological Service (DWD). The last time the country saw such low speeds was in 1972 and 1973, and before that, in 1963.

Wind energy producers have been hit hard. For example, PNE, a wind farm operator in Coxhaven, showed revenue dropped to €27.9 million from €31.4 million the previous year, but perhaps more importantly, it went from an operating profit of €1.1 million in the first quarter to a loss of €7.1 million, according to Welt.

The company indicated that there was 31 percent less electricity generated nationwide in the first quarter of the year than in the same period last year, according to data from the German Energy and Water Industry Association (BDEW).

However, it should be noted that April 2024 and 2022 saw much higher wind speeds than previous years, so comparing 2024 to 2025 makes this drop look even more extreme. Experts say there is no evidence of climate change being at work, noting that previous decades have had similar lulls in wind speed.

Germany experienced so-called “dark lulls” over the winter, featuring little sunlight and low wind speed, which led to extremely high prices. Germany imported energy from neighboring countries and turned to conventional power plants in response.

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