Saturday's Energy Absurdity: Governors Beg Biden for More Subsidies to Bail Big Wind Out

As if it isn’t repugnant enough to see the Big Wind companies lining up at the federal trough to beg for more subsidies at every difficult inflection point their projects face, now Democrat governors in six Eastern US states are lining up to feed along with them.

Bloomberg reported Friday about the latest disgusting spectacle in a story appropriately headlined, “States Beg Biden to Bolster Offshore Wind While Projects Flounder.” Writer Jennifer Dlouhy, who has done good work in the energy reporting space for a long time, detailed a letter sent to Biden by the governors, imploring the feds to fork over even more debt-funded dollars than the piggish industry already receives from Washington, as the costs for their completely unnecessary, destructive offshore wind projects soar.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Six US governors have implored President Joe Biden to boost support for the fledgling offshore wind industry amid growing concerns that surging costs imperil multi-billion dollar projects planned for coastal Atlantic waters and the nation’s climate goals. 

The governors, including those from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, made their plea in a letter to Biden obtained by Bloomberg News. It follows recent lobbying by Orsted A/S to claim bonus tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, with the Danish company warning that without additional support to offset rising costs and supply chain hurdles, it could “walk away” from some of its US offshore wind projects.

“Absent intervention, these near-term projects are increasingly at risk of failing,” the governors said in the letter dated Wednesday. “Without federal action, offshore wind deployment in the US is at serious risk of stalling because states’ ratepayers may be unable to absorb these significant new costs alone.”

States are already under pressure to renegotiate power purchase agreements that were inked before a runup in costs for everything from financing for offshore wind farms to the towers, turbines and foundations needed to support them. Shell Plc, Avangrid Inc., and other companies are paying tens of millions of dollars to exit contracts, while Equinor ASA and BP Plc asked New York to approve a 54% price increase for power from two of their projects.

But the governors warn “offshore wind faces cost increases in orders of magnitude that threaten states’ ability to make purchasing decisions.” Failed projects would threaten not just state deployment goals but also further challenge Biden’s bid to get 30 gigawatts of offshore wind production capacity installed by the end of the decade.

[End]

Understand the Governors’ real concern here: That the cancellation of these projects would deny them the ability to virtue signal about being able to meet the completely arbitrary “deployment goals” of having X GW of offshore wind feeding sporadic electricity into their grids by X date.

Nevermind the well-documented threat these projects present to an array of endangered marine mammals, or the reality that they will destroy a big segment of the northeast’s commercial fishing industry - these governors have a box to check off before they run for re-election again, and they’re panicked they won’t be able to brag about all the “clean” energy they’ve secured at extreme high rates for their constituents.

Note also that their solution of begging for more federal money does nothing to lower the real costs of these completely unneeded projects; all it actually would do is force citizens in the 44 other US states to subsidize their own idiotic, arbitrary goals.

We are living through a time of literal global insanity about energy, and this is just one more bit of proof of that reality.

That is all.