Five companies will pay..feds $750 million for the opportunity to build huge floating wind turbines

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: CNN Politics

CNN — The Biden administration’s first-ever offshore wind energy lease sale for federal waters off the West Coast generated more than $750 million, as energy companies competed for five areas that could eventually be home to massive floating wind turbines. Five companies, including Equinor and Invenergy, bid on five lease areas totaling more than 370,000 acres off the coast of Northern and Central California. The two-day lease sale concluded on Wednesday.

When developed, the leased areas near Morro Bay and Humboldt County have the potential to generate enough green energy for up to 1.6 million homes over the next decade, administration officials said last year. The deep-water regions off the West Coast – and other coastal areas, including the Gulf of Maine – will require turbines to be installed on floating platforms and tethered to the sea floor. The platforms will also allow turbines to be installed farther from the coast.

In all, floating wind turbines off US coastlines could unlock up to 2.8 terawatts of clean energy in the future – more than double the country’s current electricity demand, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm estimated in September. This week’s auction was ultimately not as lucrative as February’s offshore wind lease sale off the coast of the New York Bight, which drew a record $4.37 billion from six companies. The New York lease sale “was just a perfect storm of all the right factors coming together to create a very, very expensive auction,” said John Begala, vice president for state and federal policy at nonprofit the Business Network for Offshore Wind. “I don’t see that happening again anytime soon.”

The lower bids in this week’s lease sale were due in part to the unique challenges of developing wind energy off the West Coast, Begala said. Because of the much deeper waters in Pacific, technology for floating offshore wind platforms is still being developed and tested. But even with the challenges, Begala said there is massive potential with floating offshore wind – and an opportunity for the US to compete with Europe, which is also starting to develop floating offshore technologies.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/07/politics/west-coast-wind-energy-auction-climate/index.html

---

Full headline: Five companies will pay the feds $750 million for the opportunity to build huge floating wind turbines off the West Coast

[Shellback Squid]

1. too distant to cause cancer?

[NNadir]

2. Until reporters can learn the difference between a Watt and a Joule, it's going to get worse and...

...worse.

This kind of stuff isn't helping.

I hate to see the beautiful California coast industrialized for no good reason.

[The Roux Comes First]

5. I Can't Say I Have Any Idea How Far Offshore These Generators Will Be

And the article appears to provide no elucidation on that whatsoever.

[NNadir]

6. It really doesn't matter. They'll be landfill in 20 years, more or less, or fragments of...

..."stuff," floating in the ocean, garbage washing up on beaches around the world, along with all the plastic crap.

The wind industry hasn't addressed climate change, isn't addressing climate change, and won't address climate change.

I wish we'd come to our senses.

[womanofthehills]

11. The latest wind farms being built in NM

Will generate more energy than nuclear reactors and are cheaper to build with way way fewer regulations.

[former9thward]

20. Wind does not blow 24 hours a day.

In NM or anywhere else.

[BumRushDaShow]

21. "Wind does not blow 24 hours a day. In NM or anywhere else."

https://scijinks.gov/trade-winds/

[former9thward]

22. Please do not sell yourself as a sailing captain.

You would put yourself, your passengers in jeopardy when you are stalled in the middle of the ocean. Wind does not blow 24 hours of the day 7 days a week anywhere. Other than you googling an article which did not disprove that, show me a place where it does, Especially a place in the context of wind farms.

[BumRushDaShow]

25. "Winds" don't have anything to do with "sailing"

They are caused by pressure differentials, temperature differentials, and by the rotation of the earth. There are high and low pressure vortexes that are more or less fixed (or will park and wobble) at certain locations within the earth's atmosphere (e.g., the Polar Vortex which is a strong Low pressure system that sits and spins around the North Pole) and will interact with opposite pressure systems to generate a pressure clash that causes "wind" currents. Similar happens when the air temperatures change and you get mixing causing updrafts/downdrafts, where the stronger the differential, the stronger that warm air/cold air mixing potentially generating "convection" (gust fronts and in some cases tornadoes).

So if a piece of the PV or a strong upper level Low interacts with a Greenland Block (High pressure) system in the northern hemisphere, you get continuous, 24/7 strong winds along their interactive zones (depicted with isobars shown tightly clustered) as long as this configuration remains in place (which becomes its own "weather pattern" that can go on for weeks). E.g. (a current Euro ensemble depiction of a Greenland high ("Greenland Block" ) that is in place at the moment) -



I have a degree in chemistry (which included taking 3 semesters of physics along with 2 semesters of physical chemistry) and have been a weather hobbyist for over 50 years, and this is something that is common knowledge within those scientific fields. These phenomena are something that those looking at using wind power will take into account when considering use and locations of such devices as a turbine.

Maybe you need to do more "googling" because time after time after time, these are the types of nonsense responses you throw out there.

[former9thward]

32. With your "knowledge" you could not answer my question.

I knew it...

[BumRushDaShow]

33. With my knowledge

it's obvious that you lack it.

[former9thward]

34. Still can't answer the question with that "knowledge".

[BumRushDaShow]

35. You had no "question"

You had this nonsensical declaration -

Wind does not blow 24 hours a day. In NM or anywhere else.

which illustrates that you have no idea what happens in the atmosphere (either locally or globally) with pressure differentials. And after attempting to explain it and observing how the scientific reasoning was dismissed, it leads to that old saying about "arguing with fools", which is exactly what is now happening.

[former9thward]

36. My question from the post:

(Which of course you saw, you are just trying to evade it)

show me a place where it does, Especially a place in the context of wind farms.

You can't or won't answer that question.

[BumRushDaShow]

37. The OP is about "offshore platforms"

which in your haste to make an idiotic pronouncement, you completely ignored. And the descriptions of (and even a frame from one of the weather model ensembles) showing the wind patterns happening currently (where these winds move over water AND land), was subsequently dismissed, again due to a refusal to learn about global air circulation.



You didn't even bother to read other posts in this thread that link to the DOE website to describe what the plans are - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=3004748

Stop typing and watch the webinar and do some research of how global climate works.

[Bengus81]

26. It does where they have wind farms in Kansas

You don't need a 20 mph wind at ground level to turn blades that are 150 feet above the ground.

[BumRushDaShow]

15. Here are links to this project

Per this - https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/12/california-offshore-wind/ the platforms will be about 20 miles offshore.

FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Expand U.S. Offshore Wind Energy

Floating Offshore Wind Shot



Webinar -

[Magoo48]

28. Please elaborate on "not helping".

[Tikki]

29. Beautiful California Coast...eh?

From the San Diego Union-Tribune

Storage site for San Onofre nuclear waste gets a 13-year extension...

BY ROB NIKOLEWSKI
OCT. 13, 2022 6:45 PM PT

The California Coastal Commission on Thursday approved a 13-year extension to a permit for one of a pair of storage facilities that holds more than 50 canisters containing nuclear waste at the now-shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

The extension passed on a 9-0 vote but commissioners said they weren’t enthused with the prospect of spent nuclear fuel remaining at the plant for the foreseeable future because the U.S. government has not been able to find a permanent repository to store the waste from commercial nuclear facilities like the one in San Onofre.

“I have a lot of concerns (but) we’re in a challenging situation without any options from the federal government,” said commissioner Effie Turnbull-Sanders....


Tikki

[NNadir]

30. It has a footprint of 9 acres, and routinely produces more power...

...reliably than 1500 square miles of trashed industrialized wilderness laced with wind turbines and access roads for diesel trucks produced for the entire period of this summer's extreme heat event produced during this life threatening emergency in California.

Since it doesn't operate at the whim of the weather, it doesn't rely on the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels that in fact are the cause of these types of extreme events.

During this summer's extreme heat this summer, when there was little or no wind, California relied on dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste to address the problem it and other fossil fuel dependent grids caused, climate change.

The failure of the wind fantasy at a cost of trillions of dollars of expenditure to address climate change is a fact, not an opinion. It's also a disgrace.

The California coast is generally beautiful but I would argue that the Diablo Canyon plant has nothing like the impact that a completely industrialized coast laced with wind turbines and the polymers and other junk they shed will have. This short lived unreliable wind junk will also require an expensive and wasteful redundancy, dangerous fossil fuel based.

To me Diablo Canyon is a very beautiful structure because it saves human lives at the lowest possible environmental impact and is an effective low impact device for addressing climate change.

HVe a nice day.

[Tikki]

31. San Onofre plant is permanently closed..nothing going on there except:

Millions and millions of tax payers dollars to contractors to tear down the structures for
over 10 years now and fret about what to do with the buried waste. 3.55m lbs of waste.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2022-10-13/songs-coastal-commission-meeting

Sorry..should have posted a link to the rest of my above article from the San Diego Union-Tribune.


Tikki

[NNadir]

42. The SONGS plant saved human lives that would have otherwise been lost to air pollution and...

...climate change.

What taxpayers are paying for the 18,000 deaths that will take place today from air pollution on this planet?

What is the taxpayer cost of climate change?

Beyond the trivializing bean counting that antinukes do with the bourgeois selective attention, what is the human cost of each?

Songs was a valuable asset to humanity, and it is a tragedy that it is no longer in operation. On the bright side, the used nuclear fuel there is extremely valuable for a number or reasons that I will not bother to describe in this context.

My standard joke about reporters though is that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better, so I'm unimpressed with articles in the San Diego Union. (I lived in San Diego for many years.)

For the record, I obtain most of my information from the primary scientific literature, commentary on which populates my journal here. The overwhelming majority of these posts are involved with issues in energy and the environment.

I'm not here repeating slogans or dogma or cherry picking.

Every dollar spent on nuclear energy is an investment in humanity. I note, with some disgust, that in this century we have, instead, spent trillions of dollars on solar and wind with the result that people died all over the world from extreme heat in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2022, major rivers dried up all over the world, vast ecosystems underwent collapse, crops failed, and major glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply melted, with the result that 1/3 of Pakistan, a nation with more than 200 million human beings went under water.

I really, really, really, really don't care about whining about the cost of SONGS. The world would have been even worse without it. Again, it saved human lives, and it helped, with hundreds of other reactors, to prevent a full year's worth of carbon dumping, roughly 30 billion tons by 2013. Nine years later, the quantity is much higher. We'd be looking at 425 or 426 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide without having had nuclear power.

A scientific publication on the matter, open sourced, much discussed by people who did pass college level science courses, often with excellent grades: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Either we will go nuclear against climate change or we will leave a burned planet for all future generations. It's really that simple, and all the selective attention in the world will not change it. I am convinced of that, and no chanting, and no cheering for the destruction of wilderness for the failed land and mass intensive wind and solar efforts will cause me to change my mind. I started as an anti-nuke and then I made an effort to examine my assumptions and changed my mind on my own, without reference to popular opinion. I note, with some sadness and trepidation, that popular opinion has driven vast tragedy and in the matter of energy and the climate, continues to do so.

[SheltieLover]

3. Kicking for visibility

[Historic NY]

4. Probably a better deal in the long run over oil leases that until Biden upped the cost and

Royalties they were at 1920 prices. Wind doesn't pollute

[NNadir]

7. That's hardly true.

Wind energy isn't particularly clean.

Here is the serious energy thinker Vaclav Smil on the subject:

Vaclav Smil: What I See When I See A Wind Turbine.



Here's a graphic from a recent paper in Environmental Science and Technology:

Closing the Infrastructure Gap for Decarbonization: The Case for an Integrated Mineral Supply Agreement Saleem H. Ali, Sophia Kalantzakos, Roderick Eggert, Roland Gauss, Constantine Karayannopoulos, Julie Klinger, Xiaoyu Pu, Kristin Vekasi, and Robert K. Perrons Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (22), 15280-15289

Here's figure 3 from the paper:



The caption:

Figure 3. Materials needed for different forms of power generation. Figure based on data from U.S. Department of Energy Quadrennial Energy Review 2015.

The figure pretty much speaks for itself.

The wind industry is not sustainable, precisely because it is wholly dependent on the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

[underpants]

9. I'm learning so much here. Thanks. Nt

[womanofthehills]

13. I have a wind farm not far from me in NM and the wind transmission lines

cross my property. I would be freaking out if it was a nuclear reactor. I would be taking my daily iodine.

It’s bad enough being north of White Sands - where all kinds of anti missle testing,etc is being done.

It’s too expensive and there are lots of regulations to build nuclear reactors. Companies want to make money so the are going with wind and solar - way cheaper than a nuclear reactor.

[NNadir]

14. Thanks for your kind words, but...

...I don't have a problem with the Jury System here. I've been dinged more than once, but in most cases I may have deserved it.

It certainly beats the hell out of other website procedures. I was banned at Daily Kos for making a true statement, which was, to paraphrase, that "if this paper by the Climate Scientist Jim Hansen...

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

...then opposing nuclear energy is murder."

The banning did not come from a jury or even a group like DU's MIRT. It came from the autocratic "ruler" of Kos, good ole' Marcos himself.

By contrast, Democratic Underground is well, "Democratic."

I get a little pissed off when dinged, but I can certainly live with it.

On the grand scale, we are not immune, on our side, from holding a certain amount of dogma. We'd like to think we are, but we aren't. The idea on our end of the spectrum that so called "renewable energy" is "green," is hard to surrender, I guess. I've been through that process myself. It hurt more than a little. Nevertheless, if the goal is a sustainable world, something we owe future generations, we must disabuse ourselves of some of our notions, as hard as that is to do. As a scientist, I'm trained to look at the data; numbers don't lie. We are failing, and failing badly, to address climate change, and wanting to do something is not the same as doing it. The numbers tell us what we should have known, since the idea of depending on the weather for all of our energy was abandoned in the 19th and early 20th century (except among the desperately impoverished) for a reason, that reliance on the weather for our energy, particularly when we've destabilized it, is reactionary, not progressive.

[mopinko]

8. i love this.

harvesting the energy of the oceans was a dream my da had in the 60’s. built a model for a wave turbine that he thought should sit on the edge of the continental shelf.
it’s taken a lot to engineer machines that can withstand the forces they are harnessing. but i think the time has come.

[oldsoftie]

12. Id much prefer a wave generator than a wind turbine.

[truthisfreedom]

16. I'd very much like to see how these are wired

Into the grid. That seems like a nightmare of electrical infrastructure.

[BumRushDaShow]

17. I posted some links from DOE upthread

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=3004748

(includes a webinar on youtube)

[IA8IT]

18. Dead whales? More deadly than Maine lobster pots? Any impact surveys?

No free lunch ever

[BumRushDaShow]

19. There is some info posted upthread

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=3004748

Also the slide deck from the webinar in that post is here (PDF) - https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/floating-offshore-wind-energy-earthshot-and-deployment-goal-webinar-slides.pdf

Part of the process includes environmental impact surveys -

[IronLionZion]

23. Probably won't cause any wildfires out in the ocean

The west coast is really feeling the burn from climate change

[LudwigPastorius]

24. Was hoping they were going to park these things just off of Mar-a-Lago.

...if only to give Trump a Captain Queeg-type breakdown.

[jaxexpat]

27. Why is there so little discussion in harnessing the bobbing up and down of the tides?

About twice a day, every day, for as long as the Earth has the moon on gravitational tether. Hardly any moving parts. No radiation at all.

As far as I've thought about it it's like the weights of a clock. Except the weights are measured in tons and they get a zero-energy cost reset about 4 times each day. Instead of marking the duration of energy dissipation, like a clock, the energy spins generators through a system of gear reducers/increasers. The thing just ratchets away all the time forever and so slowly that nary a bird fear being swiped by a fan blade.

[BumRushDaShow]

38. There have been some looking at harnessing

actual known persistent ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream, where capture is all underwater (sortof a grand scale version of hydro-electric turbines but not needing to dam a river to control the flow) -

[jaxexpat]

39. I'm familiar with that technique.

I recall seeing a program where it was used in the East River to power a supermarket. Those turbines require harnessing flowing water. If I recall correctly the problem was the corrosive environment for such a sensitive structure.

Have you heard of a method such as I outlined previously?

I'm speaking of the energy required to lift and gently set down a supertanker or an aircraft carrier about 5-7 feet twice each day. It happens all over the world without fail.

[BumRushDaShow]

40. Nat Geo (that I sub to)

has an article about tidal energy generation and the different methods - https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/tidal-energy

South Korea has a tidal energy plant (based on river tides) and just found this -

Mersey tidal power: Agreement signed with South Korean giant

Published

2 days ago



Liverpool City Region has signed an agreement with the company behind the world's largest tidal power plant in a bid to power up to one million homes. Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram wants to harness tidal power on the River Mersey in Liverpool by building a barrage.

He said the agreement to share lessons with South Korea's state water company, which runs the Sihwa Lake tidal range power scheme, was a "massive step". However, he admitted he needed the government's help to build the scheme.

"This is an achievable and realistic scheme but nobody's taken it seriously," he told BBC Radio Merseyside. "It's as close now as it's ever been. There are technical challenges and environmental concerns we need to address, but all of those things can be overcome.

"All we need now is a government to say 'yes'. "I think this is the most exciting thing we've ever seen on the River Mersey in our lifetime - maybe ever."

(snip)

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-63878410

This is their English-language website - https://www.kwater.or.kr/eng/tech/sub01/sub02/patentPage.do?s_mid=1207

What is interesting was that when we got the remnants of Hurricane Ida here in Philly, I discovered our smaller Schuylkill River (which feeds into the bigger Delaware River, that itself flows into the Delaware Bay and then out to the Atlantic ocean) actually had a portion that was tidal. So when I was monitoring the water gauge levels along that river during the storm, when I checked out one of the gauges located right downtown, I saw the periodic ups and downs being recorded for it, and thought that was pretty cool. I knew the Delaware River was tidal because I used to work near it, and not far from the main thoroughfare running along it where a section is about 5ft below sea level, and that portion of road experiences minor flooding during full moon (and sometimes new moon) tidal events!

[jaxexpat]

41. These are immersive harnessing of running water with turbines.

Thanks for your time but I'm thinking along entirely different lines. I haven't been able to find any study on the subject.

The little creek behind my house is tidal during "high tide" events, but normally it flows to the St Johns river.

[Elessar Zappa]

43. We need to be investing in more nuclear plants.

That’s our only chance to slow down climate change. Wind and solar won’t cut it.