In honor of Hurricane Francine, now making her slow and steady way up the Mississippi River and deluging everything in her path, I thought I'd revisit some of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's most recent frustrations on the federal government's march to destroying our offshore waters. 

While the Biden administration's big plans for windfarms up and down each coast have met with mixed success - some spectacular lease sales, some cancellations for lack of interest, and some approved project flops of epic proportions - it's not for lack of the government trying to make life easy for wind developers to bite, to begin with. 

Lease attractiveness has no doubt been helped by the bureau's blessing of most of the sites as being ideal for wind development with minimal environmental impacts. Always helps when you can grease your own skids.

Take the big push to dump turbines in the Gulf of Maine.

After a thorough review, the BOEM - not a disinterested third party - said, "Looks good to us!"

BOEM review finds offshore wind leasing activities won’t harm environment in Gulf of Maine

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its final environmental assessment of the wind energy area in the Gulf of Maine Friday. 

In its review, the agency found that leasing activities such as surveys and installing meteorological buoys in the Gulf of Maine will not have significant impacts on the environment.

The agency did not look at the impacts of installing offshore turbines, however, which would be assessed in a separate environmental review if a leaseholder submits a project proposal, according to BOEM. 

“We are committed to ensuring that future offshore wind development proceeds in a manner that reduces potential impacts on other ocean activities and the surrounding ecosystem,” said BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein.

As you might expect, locals beg to differ and pretty vociferously.

BOEM is planning on lease areas for up to eight commercial offshore wind farms.

What they're building in conjunction with the state of Maine in the meantime is a "research" facility that presents its own set of questions.

...The State of Maine just got a very strange offshore wind lease from the Feds. They call it a research lease as opposed to a commercial development lease. It has some mysterious features that are worth pondering.

There may even be a many billion-dollar trick here. We consider that at the end, after briefly explaining the mysteries.

To begin with, the lease is for a 144 MW “research array” of turbines, as it is called. Well, 144 MW is huge for research. The South Fork Wind site (fixed, not floating) that is already running is a 12-turbine, 132 MW commercial facility, so this array will be bigger than commercial.

It could cost $3 billion-plus the cost of the factory to make the dozen or so floaters. Different websites suggest different turbine sizes from 10 to 12 MW. Of course, if this is really research, they might use a variety of sizes, but the total is still huge.

There's also this very important point: 

...The commercial leases for the Gulf are due to be sold in the next few months (The Biden-Harris folks want to get as much leased before the election as possible, lest Trump win.) the research array has to go through the same permitting processes as the commercial sites.

 Ah, the Gulf of Mexico, where Green grifters have had nowhere near the offshore success they have experienced on either coast. While it baffles bureaucrats, it doesn't really confuse the rest of us.

This was one of the earlier unsuccessful proposed lease areas yesterday afternoon, underneath all the green, yellow, and orange of Francine's swirl as she approached the Louisiana coast. Notice the wind gusts recorded from an offshore oil rig - 112 mph.

140p - Two stations at the coast now reporting sustained TS winds - Eugene Island (40 mph gusting to 53 mph) and Caillou Lake with (53 mph). Also note the elevated platform in the gulf w/ winds of 86 mph gusting to 112 mph.

Strong winds will spread inland through the afternoon. pic.twitter.com/R4Hz38YtHV

— NWS New Orleans (@NWSNewOrleans) September 11, 2024

When a Gulf storm is forecast, rig workers in the projected path batten down the hatches and, if the storm meets a certain threshold - if the rig has people on it - they are all evacuated after shutting the workings down to prevent oil spills. They are great solid structures built well above all but the most violent of raging sea levels and can withstand dang near anything.

The important moving parts are all internal and protected by much of the superstructure of the rig itself. 

Not so with wind towers.

In January, I wrote a post that included pictures of wind turbines on Prince Edward Island, Canada, that had blown apart at 56 mph. Francine, a relatively benign blow for the Gulf, had gusts twice that speed.

150 mph Typhoon Yagi recently blew through an older-generation wind farm in China, leveling a good portion of it while also knocking out several of the newer "typhoon resistant" designed towers on its way through another area.

Several giant wind turbines were toppled by Typhoon Yagi in Mulan Bay, near Wenchang City, Hainan Province, China. The powerful typhoon caused significant damage to the wind farm, underscoring the destructive force of natural disasters even on large infrastructure projects.… pic.twitter.com/W3XLlgR2DI

— 𝕏 (@AlertChannel) September 8, 2024

Those wind speeds, say 130 mph +, are not uncommon in the Gulf of Mexico. For example, in back-to-back years - 2020 and 2021 - the state of Louisiana was smacked by Cat 4's Laura and then Ida, both with over 150 mph winds.

That reality, which kind of sucks if you live along the coast (but it is what it is - at least you can plan for storms unlike random tornadoes) is no doubt why the government is having such a tough time foisting off these leases out in the turquoise waters of the Gulf.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management cancelled its planned Gulf of Mexico offshore wind lease sale, saying it saw scant commercial interest in four leases of 410,060 acres off Louisiana and Texas.

BOEM’s first lease sale in the Gulf in August 2023 had one successful bid from German energy firm RWE Offshore US Gulf LLC. RWE was the only company among 25 commenters responding to the agency’s latest lease sale notice in March 2024.

“As a result, BOEM is cancelling this sale due to a lack of competitive interest. BOEM may decide to move forward with a lease sale at a future time, based on industry interest,” the agency said July 26.

Meanwhile, BOEM said it has also received an unsolicited lease request from renewable energy developer Hecate Energy Gulf Wind LLC, Chicago, Ill., for areas off southeast Texas. In 2021 BOEM mapped out the area as two potential Wind Energy Areas totaling 142,352 acres.

The BOEM can map all they want, but they can't fool Mother Nature.

The area for the leases off Texas was just blown over by Hurricane Beryl on her way up out of the Caribbean. Now, that storm wasn't as impressive in the Gulf - I think she got back up to 110 mph or so before landfall as an 80 mph Cat 1 after passing over the Yucatan.

However, what if she'd shot the gap between Cuba and Mexico? Beryl had already won renown as the earliest Atlantic hurricane to reach Cat 5 on record - just a few days prior, she'd been screaming along at 165 mph in the Caribbean.

Data from a NOAA-P3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft tonight has been quite 
helpful in assessing Beryl's structure and intensity. Within the 
past hour, the aircraft measured a peak 700-mb flight-level wind of 
157 kt in the northeastern quadrant. A typical 90 percent reduction 
translates to a maximum sustained wind of 140 kt, which makes Beryl 
a potentially catastrophic Category 5 hurricane. This is the 
earliest Category 5 hurricane observed in the Atlantic basin on 
record, and only the second Category 5 hurricane to occur in July 
after Hurricane Emily in 2005.

There are any number of examples and every one of them is a reason nobody bites on these leases.

A National Academy of the Sciences article from 2012 points out the obvious problem with the turbines we are installing or planning to install on the US coasts that weather Atlantic hurricanes in any iteration. These aren't the massive new-generation Chinese typhoon turbines, which, frankly, are 1) Chinese and 2) still pretty much unproven. These are European designs, built for European conditions, however huge they grow.

...The article’s conclusions follow:

“The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that if the United States is to generate 20% of its electricity from wind, over 50 GW will be required from shallow offshore turbines. Hurricanes are a potential risk to these turbines. Turbine tower buckling has been observed in typhoons, but no offshore wind turbines have yet been built in the United States.”

“We present a probabilistic model to estimate the number of turbines that would be destroyed by hurricanes in an offshore wind farm. We apply this model to estimate the risk to offshore wind farms in four representative locations in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal waters of the United States. In the most vulnerable areas now being actively considered by developers, nearly half the turbines in a farm are likely to be destroyed in a 20-y period.”

“Typically, wind turbines are designed based on engineering design codes for northern Europe and the North Sea, where nearly all the offshore and coastal wind turbines have been built. These codes specify maximum sustained wind speeds with a 50-y return period of 42.5–51.4 m/s (83–100 knots), lower than high intensity hurricanes.”

“Offshore wind turbines … will be at risk from Atlantic hurricanes…. Wind turbines are vulnerable to hurricanes because the maximum wind speeds in those storms can exceed the design limits of wind turbines. Failure modes can include loss of blades and buckling of the supporting tower.”

They estimate nearly half the turbines are likely to be destroyed in a 20-year period. Who pays that insurance? Who pays for that clean-up?

You all saw what one blade blowing apart did to hundreds of miles of New England shoreline, and they aren't done picking up the pieces YET. These windfield leases are projected to hold hundreds of turbines.

POOF

As the fisherman in the video and the wind skeptic both pointed out, there's a huge rush by the Green grifters and climate cultists invested in this administration's renewable scheming to get as much shoved down people's throats as possible before November 5th, just in case.

Where we have a slight advantage here in the Gulf is that, besides not being plagued with Democratic governors sucking up blindly to Biden-HARRIS and their insane agenda, we have a higher power ally in the battle against the forces of darkness. 

Mother Nature is on our side.

We've learned the hard way you don't mess with her.