> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"
So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.
A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
For at least a few years, "common sense" has been hijacked by populist politicians, now it just means whatever simplistic idea that fits their worldview, even when it's not complicated to see that said idea is clearly misguided. The original meaning seems lost to me.
Furthermore, using the phrase “common sense” to describe an idea inherently dismisses any individual that will argue against it. They either are too dumb to have common sense, or too much of an elite to have common sense.
"Common sense" might also mean "do the simple thing" which, given how cheap it is to invest in renewable energy sources like solar farms, and how much room we have to build daytime capacity that way without large scale storage, might mean installing a lot more solar.
Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Then there is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tells us expertise may exist but resources, time, energy, info, attention etc etc may not therefore bounds and limits of expertise alone must be recognized and solutions reached are satisficable rather than optimal. Aiming for optima when other factors havent been sorted just creates new problems.
A significant part of science is plucking the true bits from common sense. A fair chunk of what we call medicine is folk remedies that stood up to rigorous testing.
It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.
Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.
There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.
But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
While I do not know if the following is relevant for the Carolina Long Bay area, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted, it is not without precedent for offshore wind turbine projects to be disallowed due to radar concerns.
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
The energy mix for electricity in Sweden, Norway and Finland is mostly made up of hydro+nuclear+wind, especially wind and hydro complements each other very well since hydro is very much on-demand and can cover for most temporary wind shortfalls.
Driving through my childhood area up north a few weeks back I was also surprised by the amount of solar going up, for comparison this is an area _north of_ Anchorage/Alaska with less than 3 hours of sun around Christmas, but already by late January (usually the coldest period of the year) there is over 6 hours of sun a day (so with high pressure cold peaks with less wind, the 6 hours probably eases the power bill quite a bit).
An interesting fact about those solar installations was that the panels were mounted almost vertically (probably to avoid being snowed over but also useful in the winter since the sun mostly just shines from the south anyhow).
North Americans mostly do not use electricity for heat in the winter. Around 60% use natural gas with forced air furnaces. Something closer to 80% have the option, but 20% don't bother to use it.
Some of the deep south get by with electric heat, but they aren't in places where the cold is a typically a legitimate danger to health and safety.
> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage
Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.
Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent.
The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)
Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.
There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.
That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.
Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].
While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].
Economic growth also comes from getting more for less.
A company can increase their profits by growing and increasing both what they spend and what they earn. But a company can also increase their profits by reducing what they spend without decreasing what they earn. Almost all companies are constantly trying to do this.
Does the env work better in a communist country like North Korea? Or in the Soviet Union? Or are we gonna do no true Scotsman and say Soviet was always capitalist and had no connection to communism?
It's even dumber than that. Someone built a wind farm near Trump's golf course in Scotland and now he hates wind farms: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo. He thinks they're ugly and noisy.
If this is true, this is the person some folks think is fit to lead a nation. One little thing not suiting his whim of the day? Lets hate something that helps with energy production.
It's not a "whim." Trump has a whole aesthetic. The wind farm thing is a dumb manifestation of that aesthetic, but the aesthetic is one of the things people voted for. Trump is the closest person in the U.S. pushing something like the Singapore model of keeping public spaces nice for average people by fixing them up and jailing the small minority of people who create most of the ugliness and disorder. (As opposed to progressives who say they want nice public spaces in theory, but seek to do that by throwing money at the people causing problems instead of throwing them in jail.)
You don't have to like the policy, but it is a policy choice, guided by an overarching aesthetic and ideology. Trump's aesthetic is one of the reasons I think he and outgoing D.C. mayor Bowser low-key got along. She's been big on renovating parks, youth curfews, etc. (instead of "fix the root causes" and whatnot). DC hasn't looked this good in decades.
It's even more hilarious than that because all nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by taxpayers already. People such as Doug just lie strategically. No surprise in that current government of liars.
All forms of power generation are heavily subsidized. Anyone complaining about a particular form being subsidzed is a dishonest liar.
I am personally for building nuclear and compulimenting it with some wind and hydro, but that is not related to what things are subsidized but because nuclear and hydro has worked really well here in Sweden providing reliable power and while wind has a spottier record I think diversification is good.
The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.
These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.
It is important to keep the main issue clear. Failing to invest in renewables is an existential risk to humanity's future.
Permanently shutting all Datacenters (not just AI) saves us about 1 year.
also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.
Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.
Ironically, we are also moving to more capable / faster models that use less power. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is so extreme capable and comparability to a lot of models cheap to run.
We are seeing stuff like AMD buying Taalas, with their Llama 3 8B on a chip, being able to push 17.000 tokens / second.
People need to understand, that even AI companies do not like to build datacenters and the high energy needs. It cost them money and they are also looking at ways to develop better hardware / solutions that gives them more inference for cheaper (what means less power draw / heat generated).
Is there a particular threshold of windmills to construct before we gain better control over earth’s temperature? I’m a little unclear what the victory conditions are in the fight against heat.
It's kind of lucky for everyone that climate is mostly a perfect sliding scale, the more CO2 you avoid putting into the atmosphere the more heat capacity you'd avoid. So every bit helps. Many negative impacts of heat, like changing intense weather, biodiversity loss, and deaths to high heat also correspondingly change linearly with heat. So every bit is a literal victory, there's no major cutoff that we know of until things get really bad (which they might). What's your point?
Over the last year, wind - mostly offshore - has generated more than 35% of electricity here. Gas is down to 27%. It's really, really good. And it looks cool.
No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.
Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.
Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.
But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.
What's insane is that one person will cite something this in one place, but the rest of the people in the thread say "why aren't we building wind and solar????"
This is the exact reason it's happening. Offshore wind is cheaper than gas /kWh and would therefore kill Trump's fossil fuel donor's profits. So kill offshore wind and the grid is forced to go to more expensive fossil fuel sources, which increased the grid price and means extra profits go to those companies. All this raises energy prices.
Utterly Insane. I mean the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction" is proven true by this US administration again, again and again. If you put this as a plot point in a novel, you would get a 1-star rating with readers complaining about lack of realism.
People were for years joking about us approaching Idiocracy but I think this reality is already dumber than that in some regards. Trump & co really turbocharged the idiotification
In Idiocracy, President Camacho recognizes that someone has scientific skills and expertise* he doesn't and puts them in charge to help his people.
* even if it's just "feed plants water, not Gatorade."
From that angle, Idiocracy is notably BETTER than our current situation.
They even look like Captain Planet baddies. Trump with his orange skin, purple sores and ridiculous hair, RFK jr. walking around barefoot looking like a scrotum on steroids, Pete Kegsbreath answering the question "What if a mob boss fucked a frat bro", etc.
What's more mental you talk to any Germans about deprecating their Nuclear power stations they will bang on about their plan for renewables and then you read these sorts of headlines.
What the hell is happening over there? Why can't they get 'energy' despite being a scientifically literate nation. France has a far superior energy policy so it's not like you even have to travel beyond a few miles to see a wildly different price for electricity. At this rate French electricity will be half the price in a few years compared to German electricity. Germany is making mistake after mistake on energy. From Russian dependence to Nuclear scepticism to now accepting money to not build renewables.
Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China).
Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.
Meanwhile China is becoming entirely energy independent and electrifying their economy. I don't understand how the US doesn't see that they won't be top dog forever especially in this multipolar age.
They still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.
You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.
> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.
> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.
The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.
The US is the biggest oil producer in the world. Consumption does exceed production, but obviously this changes the calculus around energy independence.
It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.
Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."
> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.
They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.
No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us.
Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop it, but it requires getting literally everyone else to work together. Which means any disagreement among them results in a loss, and more of the same evil.
Even if the Republican party loses this time, what makes you think they won't find someone even worse than Trump next time? That seems to be the pattern over the last decades.
I don't see myself ever being able to trust the US again. Maybe if they manage 2-3 decades without conservative idiocy, but the Epstein class would never allow that.
Time passes. Trump is literally doing his utmost to disenfranchise voters, called electors to personally harass them, and has spent years "investigating the fraud" to setup groundwork for violating people's voting rights.
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US. It would be akin to all of Europe voting on the same day and trying to falsify an election in each country. The logistics of this means that you need a lot of participants, and someone is going to blow it (and the whole thing unravels).
That is not the same as interfering: Jackboots at the polls, screwing with the mail, ID requirements.
Honestly, despite having a wife from the US (not an US citizen anymore), I agree with you.
It is really weird to me that such a thing as lobbying can be legal. Or the fact that you can donate to an election campaign so that they have more money to influence people.
And it is even more surprising that the vast majority of US people don't even question these things. I have the theory that American exceptionalism hinders their critical thinking when it comes to these kind of subjects. Ie "If we decided to do it like this, it means is the best way possible".
I wish I had not read this. I am not kidding when I say this is ruining my day thinking about. One thing is they ruin our times. But they are in the game of ruining the rest of time for humankind, too.
>RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
Yeah, they say that, but I wonder how much of it is just to make the Trump admin happy.
Like, I don't doubt that they will go and build gas projects, and might even use some of this money to kickstart it, but presumably RWE was already pretty far along the pipeline of preparing this offshore buildout, and there's likely a lot equipment orders, staff, ships, etc that they'd rather not cancel, and would rather redirect into another project if they can.
Maybe that's copium from me though, just sad to see a big wind project go to waste.
Trump holds a grudge against wind turbines, for no other reason than that they "ruined" the view at a golf course / club he owns in Scotland. He tried to get them removed, but lost that case in court.
That's mostly it. Another factor would be Trump getting donations from the oil & gas industry.
Is there any way to view our consistent destruction of green energy products in the last few years as anything other than hostile towards the majority of people purely to have a handful of people profit on cost of gas?
No, it's compensation for backing out of a deal. In contract law, once a deal is signed, you're entitled to the "benefit of the bargain" if you perform your end of the deal. A breakup fee allows one side to get out of the deal, while compensating the other side for sunk cost into the project, opportunity costs from not having pursued other deals, etc.
I don’t understand what pot of money this is coming out of. Has Congress authorized taxpayer money be used for paying energy companies to halt projects?
> The administration signed a similar $129bn (£96bn) agreement with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month in exchange for the termination of the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.
Putting aside the sycophantic wording around the orange leader and the total lack of details of how it's going to achieve what they are promising and what is actually going to happen, it's funny to see the distinction between gov officials and the Duke exec:
Gov: valued at $129 million and reinvest that same amount in additional generating capacity
Duke: will reinvest nearly $129 million in additional generating capacity, which may include
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.
So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.
We have totally not communism sending money to every other country in existence, but spending a single cent towards the betterment of your citizens is super duper evil communism.
I would love to know the thought process of this administration because it feels like a fever dream.
Just “voting” is not sufficient. In fact, voting for the “wrong” people got us here. This guy won because people voted for him. Twice! How about: please always vote for the person who seems the least likely to fuck up the present and the future for all of us
Nah the people voting for the orange fuhrer are beyond reason. It's the third that doesn't vote that needs to decide which road they want us all to take.
That lets Trump off the hook by suggesting it's just run-of-the-mill corruption. It's not. He has a personal vendetta against wind power ever since a bust-up with Scotland about the views from his golf course getting "ruined". Today that cost Americans $4 each.
Or, you know, the future bottom line. I wonder how much these people understand that if you kill everyone or put them under serious resource strain because of environmental collapse, there's no one left to pay anything to you. How hard is that to understand? Don't pull the trigger, because yes, right now you don't have a bullet in your foot, but in a few milliseconds...
"RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana."
"Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan "drill, baby, drill"."
That's insane, even though half of Republican supporters believe in climate change, and almost all Democratic voters do too. I can understand cutting government spending on the transition to green energy when projects are unprofitable, but what is the point of cutting it for profitable ones? If I'm not mistaken, energy firms like RWE are even threatened with lawsuits if they continue building wind turbines. Other coal investments are even more insane.
I fully understand why power generation is subsidised - however honesty I feel if the govt is subsidising it, they should get a cut of the profits too.
I also believe in a free market, and power should be subsidised equally per MW (MWh maybe?) this takes the politics out of a structural necessity. If you want to push a political agenda - great - but do it on political topics.
In most locations, unless you have extremely stable weather, it's ideal to have a nearly even mix of wind and solar capacity, since wind is rather strongly anticorrelated with sunshine.
That number directly correlates with life quality in almost every country on earth. More energy per capita means higher life quality, without a doubt in every high quality place.
What about quality of life per watt and just making having a certain standard of living more energy efficient?
Simple examples: energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides, better insulation helps my apartment building retain heat, more efficient electronics mean that my homelab servers pull like 100 W total and public transport probably removes a bunch of cars from the road and increases air quality and decreases traffic jams (I can get everywhere I need that way, there’s literally train, tram and bus stops like 5-15 minutes away).
> energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides
Efficiency is good, but this isn't true. Decades into LED-ification we still suffer shit-tier PWM strobing, poor dimming, disruption to wildlife and human life, and streetlights turning purple en masse.
(The last two are installation and quality issues, but when driven by lowest-bidder compliance with simplistic "efficiency" mandates that's what you get).
Lower color rendering index than incandescent lights too. High CRI LEDs are available, but they're still worse than incandescents and less efficient than the conventional LEDs.
There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right? Or do you propose it should go up indefinitely?
Air conditioning is quite nice if you find yourself living in a hot environment, for example. But do we really all need smart watches? Or cameras everywhere? Or LLMs, for that matter?
You can do more with less energy, if you use it more efficiently, which sometimes may be more cost effective compared to producing more. Electricity consumption peaked in Germany in 2007 and is down 15% since then while GDP grew by 50%.
Also energy consumption per capita is more than 2x higher in the US compared to Germany, while quality of life should be roughly similar. (In my personal opionion quality of life is better in Germany).
There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion:
Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection.
Direct atmospheric capture of CO2.
The latter is the safer option because it's just restoring the atmosphere to a known good state. Direct atmospheric capture of billions of tons of CO2 per year will take enormous amounts of energy. We're going to need a lot more nuclear power plants if there's any hope of pulling this off.
Alternative is World War Three when large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Atmospheric capture of CO2 seems to me to be one of the things pushed by the fossil fuel industry.
It is clearly not really feasable (at least not now). To me it just seems like the fossil fuel industry is doing the tobacco industry playbook of pushing stuff that doesn't actually work so people don't even try the stuff that does work: using less energy, and using less carbon intensive energy.
We really can move to less carbon intensive energy, there's lots of options all around us. Yes it means a systemic change - which is exactly what the fossil fuel industry doesn't want.
You're not wrong, but it simply isn't politically viable, which has been illustrated quite obviously by now. The "use less" strategy is a complete (and predictable) failure.
It is absolutely the government's job to regulate externalities. Otherwise, personal virtue is just subsidizing third party vice. Energy is fungible. Every joule you save lowers the cost for people who don't care.
Coal rolling is done to spite the holier-than-thou sanctamonious bullshit that people who say "we need to eat lentils and live in a cave" come out with. It's an illogical reaction, but it's human.
We need answers, not revert to a world of catholic sin
Change your car to run off electric, great
Change your city to transport 1000 people by train rahter than 1000 separate cars, great
Power your AC from your off-grid rooftop solar, great
Whine that people need to stop using AC, stop eating meat, stop watching TV, it's just harmful.
In medieval times we used tiny amounts of energy on lighting and everyone sat around in the dark, however the energy used per lumen and indeed the carbon impact per lumen was far higher than it is today
Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?
We are outraged. We know we are nearly the climate abyss. We see the changes all around us. What are we going to do to collectively to change course? To right the ship?
I wrote a book on the issue. I think the next best thing we can do is work together to amplify our voices to the point ignoring us is no longer politically convenient.
As a German I am highly confused by US actions. America is sabotaging its own economic future, demonizing independent renewable natural energy sources (you don’t need to import wind or sun) and Mr. „art of the deal“ is even paying us for it.
To be clear, this isn’t wind power currently under construction. It’s proposed future wind power with leases being planned. Trump has largely failed to stop the nearly complete projects in New England, New York, and Virginia.
Why are they scared shitless of wind power? What's the deal? I don't get it. Like, they seem to be more determined to stop wind power than solar power. Why?
Literally setting fire to the world because the US government is rammed full of corruption and oil cronies. Meanwhile everything is fine for the handful of billionaires who benefit from this shit. Absolutely sickening.
This nonsense again? The firm paid the US government a billion dollars to rent the property that the wind turbines would sit on, then the US withdrew permission for the project. Should the government simply have gypped them and kept the money?
It's just so blatantly and absurdly evil for literally no reason. It's a cartoon villain type of plan, the absurdity of it leaves me at a true loss for words
Offshore wind projects when you have tons and tons of empty land always seemed weird to me. The cost, logistics, reduced life of the installations, disruptions to the ecosystems and potential production issues with winter storms and other extreme weather events.
So in short a company was servicing power demand in a low pollution way. Then American government gave them money so they can instead service the same demand while causing more pollution.
Just... Why? To protect a few hundred jobs in America? They could have just given a small portion of that money to these workers and they would stop complaining about job loss. 1.2 Billion is a big number.
my guess is that this project will be quickly relocated somewhere else in a double loose for the US, but then may very well prove to illegal in any number of violations of US law, triggering further confusion and unplanned costs for US tax payers.
it's a triumphalist celebration of anti logic
The challenge is that you're not dealing with rational people. The big dog in the White House is a imbecile of the highest order, and everyone is doing everything in their power to appease him. It is a unwinnable situation as long as Trump is POTUS.
One of my guiltier pleasures is reading r/Conservative to see which knots they're tying themselves in today defending some of his more insance ideas. In the unlikely event this surfaces up beyond some rage-bait culture war story they've found on Breitbart, I will enjoy reading their thoughts on why this is 4d chess†
†: in fairness to them, they are almost uniformly opposed to Trump's adventurism in Iran and mostly not supportive of the Jan 7th slush-fund, and will call out both when pressed
is it just me or does that seems to be a decision driven fully by a personal dislike of wind energy without having actually run the numbers, or in other words the art of a deal isn't that
like yes there was binding commitment to RWE getting some level of subsidies, hence he had to "pay them of" around the amount of profit they have likely list, and probably more
but... compared to not paying that much more in subsidies _and_ getting more electricity out of it which the US seem to currently be quite tight one this seems to be a terrible bad deal
---
EDIT: Sorry for the rant below, it's just pretty annoying how dishonest non fact based politics has been becoming where I live:
furthermore you can stop future subsidies, so if wind energy is as "fake" as he claims this is something RWE would be stuck with not them, even if it drive them bankrupt it wouldn't be a USA problem (and more a German one)
so the only way this deal makes sense is if you a) hate wind energy and want it cone irrationally b) know it actually works and as such would "stay around" for sure (or if you really really really care about birds, no way this is true for Trump)
(And also practically it already has proven that off shore wind farms can work profitable, so b, isn't really a question. But I guess if you have a president who says all the wind farms in China are fake for show while China produce roughly as much wind energy as all of the EU together then sure you can't except logic).
In general the amount of nonsense you hear when it comes to the topic of renewable energies is pretty crazy both in how people "proof how bad it is" .. based on early technology from well over 20+ years ago, systematically ignoring relevant components of a complete solution, pretending certain already in-use technologies don't exist and don't make sense etc. To ignoring issues with whatever technology they favor and often comparing wrongly calculated "non subsidized" renewable prices with "highly subsidized" non renewable prices. Don't get me wrong it also is done the other way around. But at least where I live, that direction of propaganda isn't really relevantly used while the other direction is spread everywhere non stop (while also pretending that any honest calculation is supposedly "faked" because it doesn't fit their world view).
Now people understand why Merz is so obedient to Trump: USA always pays Germany handsomely. Canadians understood Trump being a problem. German taxpayers also understand this. It is german politicians who consistently act against the people in Germany here; Merz is just doing this very shamelessly and obviously, while also insulting germans as "lazy bums" (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/friedrich-me... - here he claims to never have insulted Germans as that, but prior statements contradict this). There is a reason why more than 70% (!!!!) of germans oppose Merz now. https://ip-quarterly.com/en/troubled-merz-faces-crucial-elec...
Being so obedient to Mr. Trump, who in turn now faces allegation of being more involved than was previously already known with regards to Epstein's sexy islands, is a lose-lose situation Mr. Merz. USA paying german companies to abandon green energy plans, also ties into that. If Merz would have something called a spine he would not be so addicted to the money and instead reject the USA trying to influence Europeans and Germans negatively here. Because that money is ultimately bribery money for RWE. Shame on RWE as well.
Why the flying fuck are we still LARPing with toy projects like this shit?
1.2B gives you a 1-1.5GW nuclear power station that runs at 90% capacity 24/7 365 (minus occasional maintanance and refuling) day or night, wind or no wind.
Nuclear isn't as cheap as you present it. It needs heavy subsidies for insurance and waste disposal.
Most nuclear power proposals are just LARPing as "cheap" as they pretend subsidies don't exist.
In addition you have to shut nuclear power plants down in summers due to lack of sufficient cooling. That means you need to plan alternative replacement power generation.
So what you're saying is instead of spending 1.2B to stop a firm from building wind, the government should leave the firm be so they can keep building wind and invest the 1.2B into building a nuclear power plant which will come online when the German firm has built roughly 1,000x the same capacity in wind turbines.
US has absurdly large domestic energy resources like gas reserves, coal reserves, uranium, and thermal energy infrastructure.
Then, there is the supply chain argument: the specialized turbines, components, vessels and manufacturing chains are manufactured overseas and imported to support Wind. RWE is itself German. It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Fishing and maritime was also cited as a concern.
Onshore Wind is used (see New Mexico). Offshore Wind is a harder sell.
Gas/nuclear/geothermal is a better investment for the US than Offshore Wind.
While these arguments are valid, you’re missing the forrest for the trees. Renewable energy has better long-term ROI because it doesn’t require constant purchase of fuel. Renewable energy plants also produce far, far less CO2 that goes into the atmosphere and endangers our biosphere (yours and mine).
>It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains
The fact that we're still basically entirely reliant on the middle east and other foreign producers for our domestic fuel supply suggests this isn't really that big of a deal. Even in the middle of a war that is generating massive profits for the oil industry, no one is suggesting they should add refinery capacity or convert existing ones to use domestic oil.
This move is about the president's personal vendetta against offshore wind and satisfying his financial backers in the fossil fuel industry.
Do you know if it would be easier to get fully domestic supply and manufacturing chains for solar or for wind, if a way is found to prevent corruption undermining setting up fully domestic production?
> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?
> not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
Out country is ran by bunch of Lionel Hutz clones
All kinds of power generation are typically heavily subdized in some way. I do not think this "common sense" strategy exists.
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"
So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.
A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
For at least a few years, "common sense" has been hijacked by populist politicians, now it just means whatever simplistic idea that fits their worldview, even when it's not complicated to see that said idea is clearly misguided. The original meaning seems lost to me.
Furthermore, using the phrase “common sense” to describe an idea inherently dismisses any individual that will argue against it. They either are too dumb to have common sense, or too much of an elite to have common sense.
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It's basically become a thought terminating cliche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
"Common sense" might also mean "do the simple thing" which, given how cheap it is to invest in renewable energy sources like solar farms, and how much room we have to build daytime capacity that way without large scale storage, might mean installing a lot more solar.
Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
"common sense" is common sense because it is the "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts" (1).
Maybe what you meant to say is that the position isn't, in fact, "common sense", that it is neither sound or prudent?
(1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20sense
Keyword being "simple". The common sense solution often turns out to be unsound based on a more detailed perception of the situation
i.e. "every complicated problem has a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong"
In politics, "common sense" just means that they don't have a real justification. You can just apply it to anything and your base will accept it.
> don't have a real justification.
Oh, but the ju$tifi¢ation is all too real for having that kind of "common sense".
You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Then there is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tells us expertise may exist but resources, time, energy, info, attention etc etc may not therefore bounds and limits of expertise alone must be recognized and solutions reached are satisficable rather than optimal. Aiming for optima when other factors havent been sorted just creates new problems.
> Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Grandma doesn't bake with "common sense", she is using the specialized knowledge of cooking & baking.
Common sense is the sense of commoners. The entirity of science if a fight against common sense.
In Poland the closest phrase to "common sense" is "na chłopski rozum" which means "according to villager's mind/smarts".
A significant part of science is plucking the true bits from common sense. A fair chunk of what we call medicine is folk remedies that stood up to rigorous testing.
Yes, but the testing bit is what makes it a scientifically-proven method and not a folk remedy.
There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’
It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.
Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.
There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.
But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
While I do not know if the following is relevant for the Carolina Long Bay area, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted, it is not without precedent for offshore wind turbine projects to be disallowed due to radar concerns.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
First on a national level they want to concentrate on their renewed push towards building new nuclear power reactors, means wind has to take second fiddle: https://www.government.se/press-releases/2026/06/sweden-take...
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
And in the winter in the North people are just supposed to freeze?
The energy mix for electricity in Sweden, Norway and Finland is mostly made up of hydro+nuclear+wind, especially wind and hydro complements each other very well since hydro is very much on-demand and can cover for most temporary wind shortfalls.
Driving through my childhood area up north a few weeks back I was also surprised by the amount of solar going up, for comparison this is an area _north of_ Anchorage/Alaska with less than 3 hours of sun around Christmas, but already by late January (usually the coldest period of the year) there is over 6 hours of sun a day (so with high pressure cold peaks with less wind, the 6 hours probably eases the power bill quite a bit).
An interesting fact about those solar installations was that the panels were mounted almost vertically (probably to avoid being snowed over but also useful in the winter since the sun mostly just shines from the south anyhow).
Solar would produce enough power in winter. Germany is europe's top solar energy producer and is at a latitude similar to Alaska.
North Americans mostly do not use electricity for heat in the winter. Around 60% use natural gas with forced air furnaces. Something closer to 80% have the option, but 20% don't bother to use it.
Some of the deep south get by with electric heat, but they aren't in places where the cold is a typically a legitimate danger to health and safety.
Supplement w/ geothermal?
Yes, this
That leaves a lot of free energy sources untapped - especially hydro.
If you can set up a hydro/pump dam without wrecking the ecosystem and don't need handouts to function, I'm all for it.
People complaining about renewal electricity production with hydro/pump dams while ignoring mountaintop removal of Appalachian mountains for coal...
As opposed to fossil fuels, which are great for ecosystems, both locally and globally?
> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage
Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.
Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent.
The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)
Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.
There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.
Just like "first principles", "common sense" differs from man to man.
That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.
Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].
While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].
won't happen with capitalism which has an emphasis on economic growth forever...
Economic growth also comes from getting more for less.
A company can increase their profits by growing and increasing both what they spend and what they earn. But a company can also increase their profits by reducing what they spend without decreasing what they earn. Almost all companies are constantly trying to do this.
Does the env work better in a communist country like North Korea? Or in the Soviet Union? Or are we gonna do no true Scotsman and say Soviet was always capitalist and had no connection to communism?
Absolutely irrelevant derailing. No claim was made about communist countries...
Fable can answer all your questions.
And don't forget ethanol, probably the least efficient form of energy ever discovered
What are you talking about, it powers a lot of people I know
Does it do it efficiently though?
It saves energy by making them feel warmer in the winter. If they overdo it and freeze to death, it saves even more energy...
It's even dumber than that. Someone built a wind farm near Trump's golf course in Scotland and now he hates wind farms: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo. He thinks they're ugly and noisy.
If this is true, this is the person some folks think is fit to lead a nation. One little thing not suiting his whim of the day? Lets hate something that helps with energy production.
Welcome the world of transactional opportunism.
It's not a "whim." Trump has a whole aesthetic. The wind farm thing is a dumb manifestation of that aesthetic, but the aesthetic is one of the things people voted for. Trump is the closest person in the U.S. pushing something like the Singapore model of keeping public spaces nice for average people by fixing them up and jailing the small minority of people who create most of the ugliness and disorder. (As opposed to progressives who say they want nice public spaces in theory, but seek to do that by throwing money at the people causing problems instead of throwing them in jail.)
You don't have to like the policy, but it is a policy choice, guided by an overarching aesthetic and ideology. Trump's aesthetic is one of the reasons I think he and outgoing D.C. mayor Bowser low-key got along. She's been big on renovating parks, youth curfews, etc. (instead of "fix the root causes" and whatnot). DC hasn't looked this good in decades.
I think wind farms on sea look really cool, especially if the turbines are huge. It gives some majestic feelings
I'm not a huge fan of their aesthetic in its own right, but it beats the aesthetic of fossil fuel infrastructure any day in my view.
[delayed]
> He thinks they're ugly and noisy
The feeling is mutual
We don't need to "think" if they are noisy. We can measure that. So how noisy are they?
Are you saying that wind farms think you are ugly and noisy?
While they pay a subsidy: > RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum
Inferior Secretary
It's even more hilarious than that because all nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by taxpayers already. People such as Doug just lie strategically. No surprise in that current government of liars.
All forms of power generation are heavily subsidized. Anyone complaining about a particular form being subsidzed is a dishonest liar.
I am personally for building nuclear and compulimenting it with some wind and hydro, but that is not related to what things are subsidized but because nuclear and hydro has worked really well here in Sweden providing reliable power and while wind has a spottier record I think diversification is good.
Parts of the world are literally on fire but the US is redirecting money to halt renewables and towards gas.
The demand for energy is higher than ever due to AI data centers, but I guess the next model is more important than a habitable environment.
> Parts of the world are literally on fire but the US is redirecting money to halt renewables and towards gas.
Parts of the US are literally on fire.
* https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/map/#d:24hrs;@-100...
* https://wfca.com/fire-map
* https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/maps
Nobody will care until the white house burns down (again)
The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.
These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.
It is important to keep the main issue clear. Failing to invest in renewables is an existential risk to humanity's future. Permanently shutting all Datacenters (not just AI) saves us about 1 year.
I believe you may be basing your figure on current Data Center power consumption. But - it's estimately to grow significantly:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-data-centers-...
also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.
Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.
Ironically, we are also moving to more capable / faster models that use less power. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is so extreme capable and comparability to a lot of models cheap to run.
We are seeing stuff like AMD buying Taalas, with their Llama 3 8B on a chip, being able to push 17.000 tokens / second.
https://chatjimmy.ai/
Generated in 0,033s • 14.212 tok/s ...
People need to understand, that even AI companies do not like to build datacenters and the high energy needs. It cost them money and they are also looking at ways to develop better hardware / solutions that gives them more inference for cheaper (what means less power draw / heat generated).
Is there a particular threshold of windmills to construct before we gain better control over earth’s temperature? I’m a little unclear what the victory conditions are in the fight against heat.
The threshold isn't measured in windmills, it's measured in co2.
If we emit more than 0, then we're in trouble.
Needless to say, we're in a lot of trouble.
They're not mills
It's kind of lucky for everyone that climate is mostly a perfect sliding scale, the more CO2 you avoid putting into the atmosphere the more heat capacity you'd avoid. So every bit helps. Many negative impacts of heat, like changing intense weather, biodiversity loss, and deaths to high heat also correspondingly change linearly with heat. So every bit is a literal victory, there's no major cutoff that we know of until things get really bad (which they might). What's your point?
The goal is not to "gain better control" over the earth's temperature, it's to stop actively throwing the temperature out of control.
Worth scrolling through this if you have been midwit-pilled into thinking humans have no levers of control on this question: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Please explain your alternative hypothesis.
Insane.
Over the last year, wind - mostly offshore - has generated more than 35% of electricity here. Gas is down to 27%. It's really, really good. And it looks cool.
Not great for the wildlife during drilling but it's better than the carbon rich alternatives.
Global warming is also killing wildlife. And by many magnitudes more than drilling some holes for offshore wind parks.
It is really great for the wildlife after the drilling is done though, as the windmills tend to make the area safer against fishermen.
Nothing is great for wildlife, including leaving it alone and undisturbed, because nature doesn't care if animals are happy, or even if they exist.
I’m thinking you mean that nature does not possess the ability to care at all.
Nature does have the ability to care unless you postulate that humans aren’t part of nature.
No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.
Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.
Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.
But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.
What's insane is that one person will cite something this in one place, but the rest of the people in the thread say "why aren't we building wind and solar????"
We are building lots. Of everything.
But... you're commenting on an article in which we are stopping the "we are building" part?
This is the exact reason it's happening. Offshore wind is cheaper than gas /kWh and would therefore kill Trump's fossil fuel donor's profits. So kill offshore wind and the grid is forced to go to more expensive fossil fuel sources, which increased the grid price and means extra profits go to those companies. All this raises energy prices.
Utterly Insane. I mean the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction" is proven true by this US administration again, again and again. If you put this as a plot point in a novel, you would get a 1-star rating with readers complaining about lack of realism.
People were for years joking about us approaching Idiocracy but I think this reality is already dumber than that in some regards. Trump & co really turbocharged the idiotification
In Idiocracy, President Camacho recognizes that someone has scientific skills and expertise* he doesn't and puts them in charge to help his people. * even if it's just "feed plants water, not Gatorade."
From that angle, Idiocracy is notably BETTER than our current situation.
It's a cliche now to say we're past that as in Idiocracy they listened to the smartest person to solve their problem.
We're now onto Captain Planet baddies. Ridiculously childish cartoon carictatures of greed and evil are now in charge
They even look like Captain Planet baddies. Trump with his orange skin, purple sores and ridiculous hair, RFK jr. walking around barefoot looking like a scrotum on steroids, Pete Kegsbreath answering the question "What if a mob boss fucked a frat bro", etc.
The LNG plant is being built in Texas which are covered with turbines, and they absolutely do not look cool.
There's a reason so many racing games put them on their maps. They look dope.
Chevron’s Gorgon project LNG plants on Barrow Island also absolutely do not look cool.
> Texas which are covered with turbines
Is "Texas" the plural of "Texa"?
Texae surely
They sure aren't
So they look hot?
> Texas which are covered with turbines, and they absolutely do not look cool.
Compared to coal plants, which are _extremely_ cool-looking. /s
What's more mental you talk to any Germans about deprecating their Nuclear power stations they will bang on about their plan for renewables and then you read these sorts of headlines.
What the hell is happening over there? Why can't they get 'energy' despite being a scientifically literate nation. France has a far superior energy policy so it's not like you even have to travel beyond a few miles to see a wildly different price for electricity. At this rate French electricity will be half the price in a few years compared to German electricity. Germany is making mistake after mistake on energy. From Russian dependence to Nuclear scepticism to now accepting money to not build renewables.
Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China).
Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.
See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
This is about a German company that was going to make a renewable project in the US.
Germany itself has a huge offshore wind industry, which is probably how they have companies that planned to do the same in the US.
There is no french or german electricity price. Its a common market. Price difference is only different taxation
Meanwhile China is becoming entirely energy independent and electrifying their economy. I don't understand how the US doesn't see that they won't be top dog forever especially in this multipolar age.
They still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.
You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.
Plus they are building coal plants as backups for when other sources fail.
This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere).
Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.
But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.
See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.
> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.
China is also ~4x the population of the US and accounts for 30% of the worlds manufacturing and energy production.
The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.
ie. China is the future, US is the past.
Well, China is already "the past". They're past the Lewis turning point. We'll have to look somewhere else for "the future".
If China is declining more slowly than the rest of the world, that's still relative progress.
The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.
Things are changing. Look at starting points and direction, not just things as they currently are.
That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.
> Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal,
So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)
China thinks long-term, the US administration, especially the current one doesn't.
And who is to blame them (or to hold them accountable)? Some won't live long-term... I mean, being 80 and fat, what are the chances...
China thinks, the US administration doesn’t.
The US is the biggest oil producer in the world. Consumption does exceed production, but obviously this changes the calculus around energy independence.
It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.
US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."
And it's called "dutch disease".
We did it with gas. Now look at Norway. We could've been like Norway.
> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.
They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.
The USA is governed by evil people, and the people of the nation are too stupid and expecting someone else to stop them. Plain as day light.
No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us.
Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop it, but it requires getting literally everyone else to work together. Which means any disagreement among them results in a loss, and more of the same evil.
It's not a majority at all. it's a manipulating minority.
And a population that seems content being manipulated.
Fraudulent minority too. Let's not forget Elon Musk was paying folk to vote for.
In the USA's defence, the system that put these gangsters in charge also gives it a shot at changing course in a couple of years.
...unless the gangsters change the rules. Which they have and will.
149 days until Jan 3, when new representatives are seated.
Even if the Republican party loses this time, what makes you think they won't find someone even worse than Trump next time? That seems to be the pattern over the last decades.
I don't see myself ever being able to trust the US again. Maybe if they manage 2-3 decades without conservative idiocy, but the Epstein class would never allow that.
What is your contingency plan for if the groundwork that has been laid to falsify election results works? Wait harder?
The ethical US has rolled over already.
Funny how at this point election fraud is a bipartisan issue, everyone seems to believe it's happening or will happen!
Time passes. Trump is literally doing his utmost to disenfranchise voters, called electors to personally harass them, and has spent years "investigating the fraud" to setup groundwork for violating people's voting rights.
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
> falsify election results
This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US. It would be akin to all of Europe voting on the same day and trying to falsify an election in each country. The logistics of this means that you need a lot of participants, and someone is going to blow it (and the whole thing unravels).
That is not the same as interfering: Jackboots at the polls, screwing with the mail, ID requirements.
These two things are NOT the same.
>> falsify election results
> This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US.
Yet I seem to remember Al Gore winning an election, still Bush became president. Right?
Honestly, despite having a wife from the US (not an US citizen anymore), I agree with you.
It is really weird to me that such a thing as lobbying can be legal. Or the fact that you can donate to an election campaign so that they have more money to influence people.
And it is even more surprising that the vast majority of US people don't even question these things. I have the theory that American exceptionalism hinders their critical thinking when it comes to these kind of subjects. Ie "If we decided to do it like this, it means is the best way possible".
It really is. “This is bad. When will someone stop us?”
Not evil, just dumb.
I wish I had not read this. I am not kidding when I say this is ruining my day thinking about. One thing is they ruin our times. But they are in the game of ruining the rest of time for humankind, too.
Hopefully they take the money and use to to build more wind turbines in Europe I guess.
Absolutely shameful what the USA has become.
>RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
That kinda stinks, I wonder if getting the settlement was contingent on the re-investment.
Yeah, they say that, but I wonder how much of it is just to make the Trump admin happy.
Like, I don't doubt that they will go and build gas projects, and might even use some of this money to kickstart it, but presumably RWE was already pretty far along the pipeline of preparing this offshore buildout, and there's likely a lot equipment orders, staff, ships, etc that they'd rather not cancel, and would rather redirect into another project if they can.
Maybe that's copium from me though, just sad to see a big wind project go to waste.
They'll certainly continue wind projects, just not likely in the US and not with this money.
Right, I just mean I wonder how much of the buildup to this project will be wasted.
They've been in a stop work since April 2025 so that buildup is likely all gone or already reallocated.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/rwe-ha...
I wonder how Americans feel to see that their elected president takes tax money to forcefully destroy the planet and our kid's future :-(
This is beyond my understanding. They are actually paying to stop society from advancing.
Because the money they are spending and the money they will be making comes and ends in different pockets.
Trump holds a grudge against wind turbines, for no other reason than that they "ruined" the view at a golf course / club he owns in Scotland. He tried to get them removed, but lost that case in court.
That's mostly it. Another factor would be Trump getting donations from the oil & gas industry.
When I have drive past the course, I always have the urge to pee. One day I'll get out and take a piss on the green.
To be fair, this seems consistent with what they normally do, and arguably consistent with what their voters want.
As Republican commentator Bill Buckley put it, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop."
The rest of the quote is actually about how it's meant to give people time to think, but it has clearly become an autonomic action.
Is there any way to view our consistent destruction of green energy products in the last few years as anything other than hostile towards the majority of people purely to have a handful of people profit on cost of gas?
Quick! Back to the other thread! I've spotted somewhere DOGE could recoup $1.2B
Can I also threaten to build an offshore wind project if they don't pay me $1.2 billion?
These guys had already signed a deal to build - giving them permission and probably an agreed price - the money was to persuade them to give that up.
So like a subsidy?
No, like a breakup fee in a commercial contract.
So a subsidy to stop building, instead of a subsidy to start building
No, it's compensation for backing out of a deal. In contract law, once a deal is signed, you're entitled to the "benefit of the bargain" if you perform your end of the deal. A breakup fee allows one side to get out of the deal, while compensating the other side for sunk cost into the project, opportunity costs from not having pursued other deals, etc.
...the point being the hypocrisy of exercising that option in the name of removing subsidized power, not the literal financial mechanism.
More like a bribe.
Trump literally just paid money (taxpayer money) for nothing
I don’t understand what pot of money this is coming out of. Has Congress authorized taxpayer money be used for paying energy companies to halt projects?
Trump is exempt from congressional authorisation
Also,
> The administration signed a similar $129bn (£96bn) agreement with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month in exchange for the termination of the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.
I had to check that, It is 129 million
Indeed: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-announces-energy-...
Putting aside the sycophantic wording around the orange leader and the total lack of details of how it's going to achieve what they are promising and what is actually going to happen, it's funny to see the distinction between gov officials and the Duke exec:
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.
So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.
You would think that the US would be all for energy that reduces its reliance on the far east, regardless of the climate change benefit
Except, it's not "the US", just some minority with direct financial ties.
Wow what a great value on those $1.2B for the taxpayers!
We have totally not communism sending money to every other country in existence, but spending a single cent towards the betterment of your citizens is super duper evil communism.
I would love to know the thought process of this administration because it feels like a fever dream.
Thought process is: "me and my buddies get richer, fuck all of you"
Please always vote.
Thank you. :)
Just “voting” is not sufficient. In fact, voting for the “wrong” people got us here. This guy won because people voted for him. Twice! How about: please always vote for the person who seems the least likely to fuck up the present and the future for all of us
Nah the people voting for the orange fuhrer are beyond reason. It's the third that doesn't vote that needs to decide which road they want us all to take.
Energy lobby in the USA is incredible. Maybe the best one? They have direct power too
That lets Trump off the hook by suggesting it's just run-of-the-mill corruption. It's not. He has a personal vendetta against wind power ever since a bust-up with Scotland about the views from his golf course getting "ruined". Today that cost Americans $4 each.
How much wind power can we extract before we disrupt the global wind circulation and thus the climate regulation by winds?
Is no one worried about this?
We found trump's achilles heel. I demand a trillion to shut down my solar
Is the policy now to "harvest whatever we can ASAP" without any regard or consideration for the future or the environment?
Or, you know, the future bottom line. I wonder how much these people understand that if you kill everyone or put them under serious resource strain because of environmental collapse, there's no one left to pay anything to you. How hard is that to understand? Don't pull the trigger, because yes, right now you don't have a bullet in your foot, but in a few milliseconds...
Most of those people are old and don't care about the future. Not their problem.
Once you are a trillionaire or getting there, personal safety can be bought even without receiving future payments.
"RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana."
"Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan "drill, baby, drill"."
That's insane, even though half of Republican supporters believe in climate change, and almost all Democratic voters do too. I can understand cutting government spending on the transition to green energy when projects are unprofitable, but what is the point of cutting it for profitable ones? If I'm not mistaken, energy firms like RWE are even threatened with lawsuits if they continue building wind turbines. Other coal investments are even more insane.
"US strikes..."
Oh God, what now, we've finally bombed Cuba?
"...$1.2B deal to pay..."
Oh thank God!
"...halt offshore wind projects"
God damn it.
I fully understand why power generation is subsidised - however honesty I feel if the govt is subsidising it, they should get a cut of the profits too.
I also believe in a free market, and power should be subsidised equally per MW (MWh maybe?) this takes the politics out of a structural necessity. If you want to push a political agenda - great - but do it on political topics.
This might make sense if power companies would bear the environmental costs, but they don’t. That’s one reason why it is a political topic.
There is no such thing as a free market, the way you refer to it.
A free market that avoids externalities like climate change?
Take that $1.2bn. Invest it. When this moronic administration is gone, use it to build more renewable energy infrastructure.
Can the US please keep their bad decisions within their borders...
Why does Doug Burgum need to underscore the fact that the RWE investment is 'voluntary'?
We need more energy. We should be doing this, gas, nuclear, solar. Not either or.
̶W̶e̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶(̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶)̶.̶ (Edit: apparently I can't read today)
In most locations, unless you have extremely stable weather, it's ideal to have a nearly even mix of wind and solar capacity, since wind is rather strongly anticorrelated with sunshine.
> We should be doing this
It'd be very reasonable to assume "this" means wind here.
I somehow missed the "this", that makes way more sense, thank you for pointing it out.
We also need to use less total energy, regardless of source. That number doesn't have to always go up.
That number directly correlates with life quality in almost every country on earth. More energy per capita means higher life quality, without a doubt in every high quality place.
What about quality of life per watt and just making having a certain standard of living more energy efficient?
Simple examples: energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides, better insulation helps my apartment building retain heat, more efficient electronics mean that my homelab servers pull like 100 W total and public transport probably removes a bunch of cars from the road and increases air quality and decreases traffic jams (I can get everywhere I need that way, there’s literally train, tram and bus stops like 5-15 minutes away).
> energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides
Efficiency is good, but this isn't true. Decades into LED-ification we still suffer shit-tier PWM strobing, poor dimming, disruption to wildlife and human life, and streetlights turning purple en masse.
(The last two are installation and quality issues, but when driven by lowest-bidder compliance with simplistic "efficiency" mandates that's what you get).
Lower color rendering index than incandescent lights too. High CRI LEDs are available, but they're still worse than incandescents and less efficient than the conventional LEDs.
There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right? Or do you propose it should go up indefinitely?
Air conditioning is quite nice if you find yourself living in a hot environment, for example. But do we really all need smart watches? Or cameras everywhere? Or LLMs, for that matter?
Do smart watches and cameras and llms increase quality of life?
You can do more with less energy, if you use it more efficiently, which sometimes may be more cost effective compared to producing more. Electricity consumption peaked in Germany in 2007 and is down 15% since then while GDP grew by 50%.
Also energy consumption per capita is more than 2x higher in the US compared to Germany, while quality of life should be roughly similar. (In my personal opionion quality of life is better in Germany).
OK some people should use less energy
You say that like it’s an infinitely scalable proposition? It really isn’t.
Electrification roughly halves total energy use in an economy.
Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.
There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion:
Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection.
Direct atmospheric capture of CO2.
The latter is the safer option because it's just restoring the atmosphere to a known good state. Direct atmospheric capture of billions of tons of CO2 per year will take enormous amounts of energy. We're going to need a lot more nuclear power plants if there's any hope of pulling this off.
Alternative is World War Three when large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Atmospheric capture of CO2 seems to me to be one of the things pushed by the fossil fuel industry.
It is clearly not really feasable (at least not now). To me it just seems like the fossil fuel industry is doing the tobacco industry playbook of pushing stuff that doesn't actually work so people don't even try the stuff that does work: using less energy, and using less carbon intensive energy.
We really can move to less carbon intensive energy, there's lots of options all around us. Yes it means a systemic change - which is exactly what the fossil fuel industry doesn't want.
You're not wrong, but it simply isn't politically viable, which has been illustrated quite obviously by now. The "use less" strategy is a complete (and predictable) failure.
Oh it shouldn't be a political issue at all. We don't need the government forcing us to reduce energy use, we need people to do it for themselves.
It is absolutely the government's job to regulate externalities. Otherwise, personal virtue is just subsidizing third party vice. Energy is fungible. Every joule you save lowers the cost for people who don't care.
I wish. Look up "coal rolling".
Coal rolling is done to spite the holier-than-thou sanctamonious bullshit that people who say "we need to eat lentils and live in a cave" come out with. It's an illogical reaction, but it's human.
We need answers, not revert to a world of catholic sin
Change your car to run off electric, great
Change your city to transport 1000 people by train rahter than 1000 separate cars, great
Power your AC from your off-grid rooftop solar, great
Whine that people need to stop using AC, stop eating meat, stop watching TV, it's just harmful.
In medieval times we used tiny amounts of energy on lighting and everyone sat around in the dark, however the energy used per lumen and indeed the carbon impact per lumen was far higher than it is today
Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?
Pack your stuff and go to a country that uses less energy and leave the rest of us alone with the degrowth.
Your "growth at all costs" mindset is going to kill everyone, including yourself, so it's not as simple as just moving elsewhere.
We are outraged. We know we are nearly the climate abyss. We see the changes all around us. What are we going to do to collectively to change course? To right the ship?
I wrote a book on the issue. I think the next best thing we can do is work together to amplify our voices to the point ignoring us is no longer politically convenient.
https://sustainedminimalist.com/book
Big Oil getting what they paid for.
As a German I am highly confused by US actions. America is sabotaging its own economic future, demonizing independent renewable natural energy sources (you don’t need to import wind or sun) and Mr. „art of the deal“ is even paying us for it.
This is Dr. Evil level stuff
(looks at Secretary of the Treasury...)
"SCOOOTTTTT !!!!!!"
Clown administration, there is nothing else to say. It’s completely captured by grifters at that point
take a look at what Spain is doing. diversifying the energy system is needed
To be clear, this isn’t wind power currently under construction. It’s proposed future wind power with leases being planned. Trump has largely failed to stop the nearly complete projects in New England, New York, and Virginia.
Still short sighted and stupid, of course.
Can't have wind power. Can't have bike lanes. Can't have trains. Can't have healthcare. Love this country!
Why are they scared shitless of wind power? What's the deal? I don't get it. Like, they seem to be more determined to stop wind power than solar power. Why?
See this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208635
The US continues to cede the energy revolution to China.
Literally setting fire to the world because the US government is rammed full of corruption and oil cronies. Meanwhile everything is fine for the handful of billionaires who benefit from this shit. Absolutely sickening.
This nonsense again? The firm paid the US government a billion dollars to rent the property that the wind turbines would sit on, then the US withdrew permission for the project. Should the government simply have gypped them and kept the money?
Was there a good reason not to build there?
It seems at a glance like we should have just built the turbines, not paid off or stiffed them.
Since we seem to desperately need more energy, currently expanding with every other short term high polluting source we can.
You might want to reconsider using "gypped" in that way.
It's just so blatantly and absurdly evil for literally no reason. It's a cartoon villain type of plan, the absurdity of it leaves me at a true loss for words
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Offshore wind projects when you have tons and tons of empty land always seemed weird to me. The cost, logistics, reduced life of the installations, disruptions to the ecosystems and potential production issues with winter storms and other extreme weather events.
So in short a company was servicing power demand in a low pollution way. Then American government gave them money so they can instead service the same demand while causing more pollution.
Just... Why? To protect a few hundred jobs in America? They could have just given a small portion of that money to these workers and they would stop complaining about job loss. 1.2 Billion is a big number.
Because Trump hates wind power for "ruining the view". That's it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uyLiON_f5c0
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl...
November can't come soon enough, this administration is beyond disgusting
They are literally a non-stop crime-spree against humanity
But if the Dems don't get 52 in the Senate absolutely nothing will change and might get even worse, likely much worse
Every single day it's getting stupider and stupider with the NewUSA
Leave to the idiot cheato to be #1!
Nobody else ever spent this much money to NOT have cheap power 8-/
Barf
this is the stupidest thing ever. literally this administration cancels the contract and compensates german company... omg
my guess is that this project will be quickly relocated somewhere else in a double loose for the US, but then may very well prove to illegal in any number of violations of US law, triggering further confusion and unplanned costs for US tax payers. it's a triumphalist celebration of anti logic
The challenge is that you're not dealing with rational people. The big dog in the White House is a imbecile of the highest order, and everyone is doing everything in their power to appease him. It is a unwinnable situation as long as Trump is POTUS.
The madness continues. No one else is to blame other than the american zeros who made this hell to continue this long.
One of my guiltier pleasures is reading r/Conservative to see which knots they're tying themselves in today defending some of his more insance ideas. In the unlikely event this surfaces up beyond some rage-bait culture war story they've found on Breitbart, I will enjoy reading their thoughts on why this is 4d chess†
†: in fairness to them, they are almost uniformly opposed to Trump's adventurism in Iran and mostly not supportive of the Jan 7th slush-fund, and will call out both when pressed
is it just me or does that seems to be a decision driven fully by a personal dislike of wind energy without having actually run the numbers, or in other words the art of a deal isn't that
like yes there was binding commitment to RWE getting some level of subsidies, hence he had to "pay them of" around the amount of profit they have likely list, and probably more
but... compared to not paying that much more in subsidies _and_ getting more electricity out of it which the US seem to currently be quite tight one this seems to be a terrible bad deal
---
EDIT: Sorry for the rant below, it's just pretty annoying how dishonest non fact based politics has been becoming where I live:
furthermore you can stop future subsidies, so if wind energy is as "fake" as he claims this is something RWE would be stuck with not them, even if it drive them bankrupt it wouldn't be a USA problem (and more a German one)
so the only way this deal makes sense is if you a) hate wind energy and want it cone irrationally b) know it actually works and as such would "stay around" for sure (or if you really really really care about birds, no way this is true for Trump)
(And also practically it already has proven that off shore wind farms can work profitable, so b, isn't really a question. But I guess if you have a president who says all the wind farms in China are fake for show while China produce roughly as much wind energy as all of the EU together then sure you can't except logic).
In general the amount of nonsense you hear when it comes to the topic of renewable energies is pretty crazy both in how people "proof how bad it is" .. based on early technology from well over 20+ years ago, systematically ignoring relevant components of a complete solution, pretending certain already in-use technologies don't exist and don't make sense etc. To ignoring issues with whatever technology they favor and often comparing wrongly calculated "non subsidized" renewable prices with "highly subsidized" non renewable prices. Don't get me wrong it also is done the other way around. But at least where I live, that direction of propaganda isn't really relevantly used while the other direction is spread everywhere non stop (while also pretending that any honest calculation is supposedly "faked" because it doesn't fit their world view).
The art of the deal is historically mostly losing, flailing and bankruptcies
Now people understand why Merz is so obedient to Trump: USA always pays Germany handsomely. Canadians understood Trump being a problem. German taxpayers also understand this. It is german politicians who consistently act against the people in Germany here; Merz is just doing this very shamelessly and obviously, while also insulting germans as "lazy bums" (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/friedrich-me... - here he claims to never have insulted Germans as that, but prior statements contradict this). There is a reason why more than 70% (!!!!) of germans oppose Merz now. https://ip-quarterly.com/en/troubled-merz-faces-crucial-elec...
Being so obedient to Mr. Trump, who in turn now faces allegation of being more involved than was previously already known with regards to Epstein's sexy islands, is a lose-lose situation Mr. Merz. USA paying german companies to abandon green energy plans, also ties into that. If Merz would have something called a spine he would not be so addicted to the money and instead reject the USA trying to influence Europeans and Germans negatively here. Because that money is ultimately bribery money for RWE. Shame on RWE as well.
And here I'm saying again NAFO peps live in a bubble
What does NAFO have to do with anything here?
Why the flying fuck are we still LARPing with toy projects like this shit?
1.2B gives you a 1-1.5GW nuclear power station that runs at 90% capacity 24/7 365 (minus occasional maintanance and refuling) day or night, wind or no wind.
Nuclear isn't as cheap as you present it. It needs heavy subsidies for insurance and waste disposal.
Most nuclear power proposals are just LARPing as "cheap" as they pretend subsidies don't exist.
In addition you have to shut nuclear power plants down in summers due to lack of sufficient cooling. That means you need to plan alternative replacement power generation.
So what you're saying is instead of spending 1.2B to stop a firm from building wind, the government should leave the firm be so they can keep building wind and invest the 1.2B into building a nuclear power plant which will come online when the German firm has built roughly 1,000x the same capacity in wind turbines.
US has absurdly large domestic energy resources like gas reserves, coal reserves, uranium, and thermal energy infrastructure.
Then, there is the supply chain argument: the specialized turbines, components, vessels and manufacturing chains are manufactured overseas and imported to support Wind. RWE is itself German. It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Fishing and maritime was also cited as a concern.
Onshore Wind is used (see New Mexico). Offshore Wind is a harder sell.
Gas/nuclear/geothermal is a better investment for the US than Offshore Wind.
While these arguments are valid, you’re missing the forrest for the trees. Renewable energy has better long-term ROI because it doesn’t require constant purchase of fuel. Renewable energy plants also produce far, far less CO2 that goes into the atmosphere and endangers our biosphere (yours and mine).
>It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains
The fact that we're still basically entirely reliant on the middle east and other foreign producers for our domestic fuel supply suggests this isn't really that big of a deal. Even in the middle of a war that is generating massive profits for the oil industry, no one is suggesting they should add refinery capacity or convert existing ones to use domestic oil.
This move is about the president's personal vendetta against offshore wind and satisfying his financial backers in the fossil fuel industry.
Do you know if it would be easier to get fully domestic supply and manufacturing chains for solar or for wind, if a way is found to prevent corruption undermining setting up fully domestic production?
> It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Huh? That’s quite a whopper to drop as if it’s an obvious truth.
It’s good to diversify supply chains. Eggs-in-one-basket is bad for many reasons, even if it’s your own domestic basket.
Trade interdependence is good for competition, reduces risks from disasters, and creates disincentives for war.
And the market apparently thinks offshore wind is a good investement for the US, to the point where the government has to pay companies not to do it.
See
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/securing-us-supply-chain...
2. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/84710.pdf
3. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107769
4. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/wind/articles/report-outlines-su...