America’s Bet on Wind Power Is Running Into a Big Problem. Higher costs and serious delays are plaguing offshore wind projects.

Barron's ^ | July 21, 2023 | Avi Salzman

[karpov]

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Financially, the [wind power] industry is teetering, with a parade of companies planning to renegotiate or pull out of contracts, jeopardizing plans for projects that were expected to provide electricity for millions of homes. Inflation is erasing profits, causing some of the largest energy firms in the world to back away. “Returns on offshore wind are becoming more and more challenged,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan told Barron’s last month, just days after a Shell joint venture said it would pull out of a power contract in Massachusetts. Shell won’t build renewable projects that can’t earn initial returns of 6% to 8%, he said.

At least eight multinational companies in three states have quietly started to back out of wind contracts, or ask to renegotiate deals in ways that will pass more costs to consumers. Beyond Shell (ticker: SHEL), they include BP (BP), Denmark’s Orsted (DNNGY), Norway’s Equinor (EQNR), Spain’s Iberdrola (IBDRY), Portugal’s Energias de Portugal (EDPFY), and France’s Engie (ENGIY) and state-owned Electricite de France. The projects those companies are building will collectively cost tens of billions of dollars to construct and connect to the grid. The cost problems they’re facing make offshore wind a dicey investment proposition today, with the potential for substantial write-downs ahead.

America’s pledge to decarbonize is at risk, too. President Joe Biden announced a goal in 2021 to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power installed by 2030, enough to power roughly 10 million homes, up from essentially zero today. “We’re going to make sure that the ocean is open for the clean energy of our future,” Biden said last year.

Credit Suisse analyst Mark Freshney says there’s little chance that the country will reach Biden’s goal.

“We won’t get there,” he says. “We might get to 15.”

[kaktuskid]

The times when you use electricity them most...mid-summer and mid-winter...are the times with the least amount of wind.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Siemens Energy Gemesa (Europe wind division) declared lost several tens of billions in value on June 23. Siemens Energy other divisions need to make up that loss, and dropped 1/3 their stock price in 24 hours.

[brookwood]

More than .0001% of your readers have heard of them unless this post gets 1 million views.
The biggest problem with wind power is that is actually does not reduce carbon dioxide (plant food) emissions, because

1) the most efficient fossil fuel energy comes from combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), which have a gas turbine (like a jet engine) which creates power, but also uses the excess heat from the jet exhaust to boil water, which drives another steam turbine. CCGT power plants are 60% efficient.

2) Intermittent power from wind turbines requires 24/7/365 backup in case the wind dies, which can happen at any time.

3) this backup cannot be from CCGT because it takes many hours for the excess heat to boil the water for the steam turbine. So it has to be from single cycle gas turbines or coal or oil, which are only 40% efficient.

So intermittent power sources (which only work about 35% of the time anyway, so can only provide a maximum of 35% of our electricity - see Germany) force utilities to BURN MORE GAS AND OIL and COAL TO CREATE THE SAME AMOUNT OF ELECTRICITY.
Combine this with the fact that 15 percent of the energy produced by the wind turbine is offset by the energy to create the steel and cement to build it, and to mine the iron ore which makes the steel, and to transport all this gear into the ocean, and build the platforms for it, and the extra transmission lines, and it is likely that an offshore wind grid with non-CCGT backup emits almost the same amount of CO2 as a CCGT grid.

We could build 10 or 20 new nuclear power plants and reduce CO2 by more than all the wind turbines ever made in human history have done.