Free Republic

President Joe Biden's administration announced Tuesday their approval of another large offshore wind project off of the coast of Martha's Vineyard, despite ongoing legal battles to block similar projects. The Interior Department approved the New England Wind Project, a planned commercial off-shore project roughly 20 nautical miles south of Martha's Vineyard and 24 nautical miles southwest of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The planned wind farm would include up to 129 wind turbines off of the coast of the island, the location of some of the wealthiest homes in the United States. 'The New England Wind project will help lower consumer costs, combat...

A group of fishing associations is sounding the alarm about new plans from the Biden administration to industrialize the Gulf of Maine by leasing two million acres of area for wind farm construction, a move that fishermen say will be detrimental to their business and marine life.One large portion of the WEA is frequented by the endangered North Atlantic right whale, the groups said. Leasing the area to wind farming "is flatly inconsistent with a policy of endangered species protection."

Conservationists in Germany are incensed as 120,000 trees in an ancient forest have started to be felled in order to make way for a wind farm. The forest in Sababurg, Reinhardswald, which is in the central German state of Hesse, is said to be an inspiration for the Brothers Grimm mythical tales, but now it’s being destroyed to facilitate the country’s latest green energy project. The site of the tree-toppling is next to the famous Sleeping Beauty Castle, which takes its name due to its fairytale architecture and its proximity to the mystical forest. However, now the castle will be...

In November, Orsted nixed two major wind farm projects planned off the coast of New Jersey, citing the same problems that the company cited for the Skipjack Wind project.. Danish wind developer Orsted has canceled another contract on a planned offshore wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean. The company said the 966-megawatt Skipjack Wind project, planned to be constructed off the coasts of Delaware and Maryland, would no longer be commercially viable at the contract prices due to inflation, high interest rates and supply chain issues. “Today’s announcement affirms our commitment to developing value creating projects and represents an opportunity...

A wind turbine at a northern Colorado wind farm folded in half and caught fire Thursday morning, startling neighbors who heard banging noises prior to the collapse. The incident was reported at 8 a.m. No injuries were reported. Oil and grease from the generator caught fire after the tower's collapse. ... Personnel from the Peetz and Crook all-volunteer fire departments responded. Employees from Invenergy - a Chicago-based company which first owned the wind turbine field and now operates it for the current owner, ClearWay Energy - were already at the site when firefighters arrived, according to Peetz Fire Protction District...

This past August, as things were beginning to really heat up as far as inflationary and warranty pressures on wind farm developers like Ørsted and turbine manufacturers like Siemens Gamesa, most of the attention was focused on the whale killing sonar surveying off the New Jersey coast. Learning about profits disappearing because of extraordinary problems with deliveries, cables, blades – whatever their issues were – or the nitty gritty of duking it out over already signed contractual agreements for rates increases can cause your eyes to glaze over. But a leviathan washing up on a popular beach…and another and another...

The Biden administration on Wednesday approved the Orsted A/S’s Ocean Wind 1 project, setting the stage for installation of a massive wind farm in the waters off New Jersey while ignoring the protests of locals who will be forced to share their environment with as many as 98 turbines. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland boasted the authorization was “another milestone in our efforts to create good-paying union jobs while combating climate change and powering our nation.” Bloomberg reports the approval represents the third commercial-scale project of its kind in federal waters to win U.S. government backing — all under President Joe...

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy was expected to sign a bill Thursday giving a tax break to Danish offshore wind developer Orsted for the first of two energy projects it plans to place in the waters off the Jersey Shore. Before the ink is dry on that bill, he will face pressure from another offshore wind company looking for similar assistance. The governor’s office said he would sign the bill, allowing Orsted to keep federal tax credits that it otherwise would have been required to pass along to New Jersey utility ratepayers. Lawmakers who narrowly approved the bill last week...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The first-ever U.S. auction of leases to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms in the deep waters off the West Coast attracted $757 million in winning bids Wednesday from mostly European companies, in a project watched by other regions and countries just getting their own plans for floating offshore wind started. The auction featured five lease areas — two in northern California and three in central California — about 25 miles off the coast that have the potential to generate 4.5 gigawatts of energy, enough for 1.5 million homes. Combined, the lease areas cover 583 square miles...

A wind energy company named Avangrid has been in the process of developing a massive offshore wind farm called the Commonwealth Wind project, working with the support of the state of Massachusetts for several years. When completed, it was to be a 1,200-megawatt energy source. A second offshore project from Mayflower Wind was to produce an additional 400 megawatts. But now, the companies behind both of these projects have asked the state to put the plans on hold. The reason given was that the projects are “no longer viable” under the current conditions and they will be unable to move...

Nothing could better symbolize the deflating bubble of green madness that gripped Germany than the following from Lawrence Richard of Fox Business:A German energy company is dismantling a wind farm to allow for an adjacent coal mine to expand its operations, officials said.The German coal mine Garzweiler, operated by energy company RWE, admits the situation appears to be "paradoxical" — sacrificing one energy source for another — but defended the decision as necessary to strengthen supplies amid the ongoing energy crisis, Oilprice.com reported. "We realize this comes across as paradoxical," RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen said in a statement. "But that...

I should probably give our readers a moment to double-check and ensure that you didn’t inadvertently wander into an article from the Babylon Bee or The Onion. But the title of the article stands as is and it’s legitimate. German energy company RWE operates several different types of power generation operations in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. At one location, they have a large lignite coal mine and a wind turbine farm located side by side. (A rather startling juxtaposition given the divisive nature of the ongoing green energy debate.) But some changes are coming, and not the sort that...

11-story tall blades flew the full length of a football field and plowed a 4-feet deep furrow in a wheat field. The heavy-duty bolts that kept the blade attached to the tower scattered like shrapnel. A new report has revealed the unreliability of a major Oregon wind farm, discovered after a blade from a windmill detached and flew across the field. According to The Oregonian, in January, a delivery driver found some broken, industrial-size bolts on the ground near one of Portland General Electric’s towering wind turbines but did not know who to tell and used it as a paperweight.

TransAlta Renewables Inc. has to replace foundations of 50 wind turbines at Kent Hills wind farm.. An investigation into what caused the collapse of a wind turbine at New Brunswick's largest wind farm has revealed serious structural issues that affect not only the turbine that fell, but dozens of others in the area as well. According to TransAlta Renewables Inc., the Alberta-based company that owns and operates the Kent Hills wind farm, the cracks formed because of "deficiencies in the original design of the foundations." This caused a 100-metre-tall turbine to collapse in the fall of 2021. Now the company...

Dubbed the “Blue Hills Wind Project,” GH America Energy, a company owned by Shanghai billionaire Sun Guangxin, plans to purchase nearly 130,000 acres of land immediately across from Laughlin Air Force Base.Guangxin is a former officer in the Chinese army and is the richest person in China’s embattled Xinjiang province. GH America Energy is a subsidiary of Guanghui Energy Company, based out of Shanghai, where Sun Guangxin owns a controlling 44% stake, according to Market Screener. Late last year, Del Rio Mayor, Bruno Lozano, wrote to federal officials close to the matter, “We believe that this project and all future...

WASHINGTON—A proposed wind farm project in West Texas has become a potential national security issue due to its Chinese owner who has ties to the communist regime in Beijing and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), experts say. A Chinese-owned company called GH America Investment Group since 2015 bought 130,000 acres of land—an area the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma—in Val Verde County, Texas. The man behind the investment firm is Sun Guangxin, a businessman from Xinjiang, China, who is described as a “carpetbagger” by Chinese media with strong ties to the communist regime, The Epoch Times previously has reported. Sun, a...

Boris Johnson has declared that wind power is the future of Britain's energy .. But an investigation has revealed turbine owners are being paid over the odds .. Civil servants set subsidy rate so high it's been branded ‘licence to print money’.. A botched green scheme is paying wind turbine owners seven times the value of the electricity they generate – and it is set to cost UK consumers an estimated £1.4billion. The Daily Mail can reveal the eyewatering fiasco in the week Boris Johnson declared that wind power was the future for the nation’s energy generation. The scheme was...

New Jersey has chosen a Danish company to build a wind energy project off the coast of Atlantic City that could power half a million homes. The state Board of Public Utilities on Friday chose Ørsted to build a project that would generate 1,100 megawatts of electricity. The company says the work could be completed by 2024. The BPU said the project will cause an estimated monthly bill increase of $1.46 for residential customers, $13.05 for commercial customers and just over $110 for industrial customers. […] Murphy, a Democrat, wants New Jersey to produce all its energy from clean sources...

It consisted of eleven turbines, each with a capacity of 0.45 MW, giving a total export capacity for the wind farm of 5 MW. The hub height of each turbine was 37.5 m and blade height 17 m, small by today’s standards. Because of its date of construction, it would have been all but totally reliant on conventional energy for its manufacture and installation. The original stated project cost was £7.16 million in 1991, which is equivalent to approximately £10 million today.[2] During its lifetime, it delivered 243 GWh to the Danish electricity grid. This means that the actual amount...

For the first time in the history of the burgeoning U.S. wind industry, a wind farm got hit by a hurricane—and it was back producing power within days. Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of more than 130 miles an hour a week ago Friday about 20 miles from the Papalote Creek Wind Farm near Corpus Christi, Texas. One section of the onshore wind farm was producing electricity on Thursday and the other was expected to be back online on Friday, according to its owner, German power company E.ON SE .“Papalote actually survived really well,” said...