In no small part because of the extreme difficulty in building large projects in the US. NEPA is, in the US context, one of the single largest impediments to combating climate change at this point.
Before we go blaming environment regulations, all the literature on this topic that I have read points at the Jones Act as the reason that offshore wind is so difficult:
"The Jones Act, passed by Congress in 1920, says that only U.S.-flagged ships can move cargo from one point in the United States to another. The ships must have been built in the U.S. and be crewed by Americans. The offshore wind industry uses big, specialized ships to assemble the turbines miles out at sea, but there is not a single U.S.-flagged ship right now that can do that work."
Jones act is also terrible and it wouldn't shock me at all if it also makes it much more expensive. But the Jones act has nothing to do with why it takes years and years to even get started.
There was some language changes in the debt ceiling bill.
Manchin had a bill with some support.[0]
The problem is Conservatives want to make sure fossil fuel projects are prioritized in any sort of reform while Liberals want to make sure they're excluded.
Not that I have heard of. And it seems like it's probably a very hard problem to solve (although I admittedly haven't spent too much time thinking about it). There are absolutely certain kinds of development/buildings/whatever that we probably want to restrict building, or at the very least subject to decently in depth review. It's hard to envision a process that blocks those kinds of things while allowing the good things. In part because the line between those things is probably different for just about every single person in the country. I'm sure a lot of people would disgree with my personal view on all the things we should be building.
I've mostly been convinced that, at least for now, the harms that NEPA is preventing are smaller than the goods it's preventing. That probably wasn't true in the past and might not be true in the future though. My hope is that by rabble rousing enough, someone smarter than I can find a good solution that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If putting up wind keeps CO2 out of the ocean, I would think it is net positive. Ocean acidification, less calcium available for making shells, and then the affect of ocean warming on coral and knock on effects of losing those coral ecosystems are pretty terrible for the whole marine ecosystem. A couple pylons for turbines, I doubt that scratches the surface.
Everything thing in the ocean seems to LOVE structure. They build on our detritus as easily as rocks
It's probably very positive, actually. Provided you don't do something stupid like make them out of loose tires, structures in the ocean form an anchor around which ecosystems develop which wouldn't exist otherwise. Not to mention the effects on the ocean of rising temperatures, CO2 and deoxygenated dead zones are awful.
In the Pacific (at least) there’s the concept of a “fish aggregating device” (FAD). Fishing boats build and deploy smallish structures that create a local environment that eventually results in the production of commercially valuable fish. Usually it’s just logs, rope, and such.
Apart from the energy, an offshore wind farm would be a great sanctuary for fish. If you need to visit regularly for maintenance, bringing along a few extra FADs and the occasional marine biologist isn’t going to break the bank.
Similar to how rocket launch sites make great wildlife sanctuaries due to keeping away human settlements, I would think that wind farms make great sanctuaries for marine life by keeping the area clear of normal fishing.
there’s some concern in new england about how they could affect the critically endangered right whales, but there’s little practical evidence of risk… and sometimes the risk is overblown by nimbys and fossil fuel companies who will align with anyone that agrees with them
at this point the ocean temperature is a much greater risk
At least in the North Sea, wind parks have created large area's in which trawlers fishing is prohibited. This is really significant, as I believe the entire Dutch North Sea EEZ is trawled multiple times per year. This is really a massive undertaking, and is even permitted in the Natura2000 area's. Really nothing could stop the fishing lobby from destructing the bottom life on which the industry depends in a giant tragedy of the commons kind of way. Except now for wind farms. Now huge areas are off limits for fishing boats
New Jersey is planning wind farms so that number should continue to rise over time. I grew up in New England but moved out many years ago. I remember wind farms off cape cod being extremely NIMBY and the argument was cape cod is unique and a wind farm should be else where - essentially I assume the argument of anyone living near an area that is going to get a wind farm. These are probably one of the more expensive areas of the state due to being by the water.
Because oceanfront property, especially on the east coast is almost entirely in the hands of wealthy (read: politically influential) people, who throw a shitfit at the thought of offshore wind farms.
They do: pretty much all the proposed farms are far enough out that you can't see them from the shore. It doesn't matter, the people throw a fit anyway.
Even if not they are quickly at the limit of visibility. Here in NL there are a whole bunch of them just North of IJmuiden and you have to really strain to make out the individual machines. When the light catches a blade just so it is a bit easier but they're definitely not so visible that they would have to be placed even further out.
This is funny to me because off the shore of Southern California (some of the most expensive land in the country), the horizon is dotted with oil rigs and cargo ships.
I think the point was that "but my sea view" is apparently only a problem when it comes to wind turbines, but petrochemical rigs that look like an overzealous chemical engineer-turned-modder's map from Unreal Tournament and bunker-fuel-powered floating skyscraper-sized hulks are not such a hot topic when it comes to seafront land values.
And, for the rigs, they are actually substantially closer to shore than turbines would be on the other coast, because, as you say, the ocean gets real deep, real fast there.
I’ve never seen and controversy about it in CA, I think mostly due to the fact that the water is too deep.
People do dislike the rigs, but new ones are banned and the ones off Santa Barbra are I think tapping a source that bubbles up on its own and washes ashore. So perhaps they are helping.
Well either the oil companies are suppressing the rich people complaints in the general discourse, or the relentless "concerns" about land values are oil-funded astroturfing intended to scare rich people with some sway to get on side against the turbines.
Either prospect smells strongly of malfeasance to me.
As you might read from that page, there are only 3 (4 if you add Hywind Tempen) of those in operation from this last decade, plus some demo projects like China's Haiyou Guanlan. The US just auctioned off 5 leases in 2 Californian Wind Energy Areas (Humboldt and Morro Bay), which are both much deeper than the current operational farms (500-1000m vs 100-300m). Aside from that, there are also other challenges like transmission and port bottlenecks [1] [2].
Yeah I've seen the central US wind farms and they're absolutely ginormous. We should do offshore too but we aren't lacking in wind turbines, we're just putting them in different places.
>Europe never had that luxury. Offshore wind is our only option.
This kind of depends on where in Europe. The North of Sweden (i.e the top 2/3 of the country) is very sparsely populated, and well-suited for installing on-shore wind power.
NIMBYs keep on NIMBYing though, and many projects get killed because of their protesting.
See for example the failure of the Cape wind project, which was stuck in NIMBY hell for years because a few rich assholes were worried they would see the tips of the blades over the horizon
There are two big 800 MW projects going in right now, one off Martha’s Vineyard and the other in Connecticut, both of which will begin generating power in the next year or two (the actual construction speed for these projects is amazing!) These projects were supposed to happen before the pandemic, but the Trump administration delayed them by 2-3 years. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-windpower-offshore/u-...
> the actual construction speed for these projects is amazing!
Yes, from start to finish in well under a year in some locations depending on whether or not they can set up a nice pipeline and start producing as soon as one of the turbines is completed. The time consuming parts: permitting, infrastructural changes to the grid, environmental assessments + possible delays, foundation work. Once the foundation is in the ground I've seen operational turbines six weeks later.
For a whole windpark from start to finish the times vary from two to eight years, with off-shore the longer part of that. There is a new option called a floating windfarm, which is self evident from the name, that cuts deployment time to an absolute minimum but has some long term risks and maintenance pros and cons. Still, it is a very interesting development.
"Once the foundation is in the ground" is of course the big thing, as each foundation is unique (even if they all look the same they are specced to exactly the water depth and local spil conditions), and a lot of the installation risks are in the foundation. Rock may be harder than expected, or there might be a boulder hiding in the sandy soil. After the foundations are in, the installation of the tower, nacelle and blades is repetitive work. There should be little variance between sites left then. Weather is probably the most significant differtiating factor left.
The US permitting process is shockingly bad. It is both far too complex and also overseen by understaffed agencies so projects get delayed by years which is very expensive. NIMBYS can either use political pressure or environmental lawsuits to delay projects almost indefinitely at low cost to themselves because they are upset about any number of things.
Second, the Jones act and other regulations prohibit using most of the knowledge and infrastructure that Europe has built up over two decades. We can't use their ships or sailors. We can't use many of their products while being eligible for federal subsidies. So rather than let their industry build up ours we have to start from scratch. No economies of scale, high risk, less competition, etc.
The size of the subsidies available are so large that it'll probably work eventually, and there are some discussions happening about improving permitting. But it's a bit like one department is spending a lot of money to put concrete barriers in the road and then another department is spending a lot on subsidies to install tank treads to be able to drive over the barriers. "But think of all the jobs created in the tank tread installation industry!"
> To meet that demand and hit its climate goals, the report says the US has to add 27 gigawatts of offshore wind and 85 GW of land-based wind and solar each year between 2035 and 2050. That timeline might still seem far away, but it’s a big escalation of the Biden administration’s current goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
Its hard to parse.. I think Biden planned to add less than 4 GW/year on average from 2021 - 2030 to get to 30 GW of offshore added. The 27 GW added per year being required from 2035 means a giant climb from 2031 to 2035.
His incentives are active to various degrees between 2023 and 2032 mostly. So… yes, goals set for 2030 are exactly the timeframe his work addresses. It is what he is doing now.
Not in a quantitative way anyway, but in a qualitative way it is actually trivial because the wind at sea level behaves fairly consistently once you know its speed.
Betz basically says you won't be extracting more than 59.3% of the power in the moving air so the remainder will always be available just behind the turbine. Close to the ground wind isn't laminar so what you'll see is that the 'rolling' air will draw in new air from higher layers just behind the machine, a short way inland you'll have a hard time proving there is a windfarm upwind other than through sound and visuals. There is a lot of air moving around (if you could visualize it try thinking of 1 kg bricks spaced out 1 meter in every direction, and all of them are moving except for when there is absolutely no wind) and the tiny little layer that we siphon off some power from is utterly insignificant compared to the whole.
I live near a ton of windmills in the hills 50 miles east of SF.
In highschool we would go to them, although technically illegal.
You stand on the ground, with the windmill churning away 100 feet above your head. It would obviously still be windy as hell near the ground.
I have a feeling that if you had 10 units of wind, and placed windmills in a linear line for a linear mile as tightly as you could... Just a small distance away you would still have 9.99 units of wind.
The density of wind capture devices relative to the overall mass of wind in the general area is so low I don't think you could make a big difference.
If anything, I'd worry more about solar farms that cause massive heat soak by placing black solar panels near ground level, where instead it would be light color dry dirt and dry greens that are a lot more reflective.
Nothing would change from about a mile behind the line of windmills, but in the immediate wake of the machines you'll have a calming effect, though flow will be more turbulent than laminar. Spiral shaped vortices coming off the back of the rotors would eventually dissipate in the air that gets added from above. Note that windshear is such that any kind of disturbance in an otherwise open field would create a wake that eventually dissipates because wind rolls across the terrain. You can see similar dissipation effects in the wake of an ocean going vessel but it dissipates far faster because air has less mass, and on the ocean there is less flow to have that kind of windshear effect (but then from the water interacting with the bottom, which usually happens much further down).
Read a pretty dishartening article recently, about how offshore turbines reduce water oxygenation, and in turn probably have a negative effect on sea life. I guess there really is no free lunch.
Modern turbines can extract at most about 50% of the energy passing though the disc. The physical limit is the Betz limit, just a shade under 60%. Even if you could arrange them just so (which you can't, because circles don't tessellate and wind directions vary), you'd only be able to get that from the wind at the height of the discs, from a single rank. Mixing from air that went over (or under) the turbine entirely would restore quite a bit of the wind after some distance. The biggest turbine in the world, installed about a month ago off the Fujian coast, has a disc 250m across, centred about 150m from the sea, so it's still only a small fraction of the depth of moving air.
By one estimate there's about 250TW of "extractable" power (after which you can add turbine capacity but the whole ensemble doesn't produce more power, and the global wind speeds after saturation would be 50% lower). Humanity uses roughly 10TW, so even if we used wind for everything, it would only be a small fraction of the energy in the moving air.
That paper also has calculations of the effects of a single wind turbine averaged across a 5km area (tl;dr: sub-0.5% downstream wind speed change)
Rather than plant the gobi with trees (which need lots of water), could China just put in a bunch of wind turbines to prevent erosion? Like, is a wind turbine better than a tree at blocking the wind (well, it also doesn’t have a root system to keep dirt in place).
In eastern WA, we have special trees planted to block wind (mostly to reduce erosion), I wonder if those could be turbines instead? (Although, as long as water isn’t a problem, we should probably still use trees)
I don't think the primary aim of the project is erosion control, but the Gobi desert is already the site of the largest on-or-off-shore wind farm in the world[1], by many multiples, with a planned 20GW nameplate capacity, 10GW online now (next on the list being 2GW at Markbygden in Sweden).
I suppose if there is anywhere in the world where wind power installations can cause a significant reduction in wind speeds, it would be there.
One reason is that on-shore wind in the US is really good. The Great Plains are so windy and big that it's not really clear the added expense of marine turbines gets us much. Texas already has wind capacity factors of 40%, similar to many offshore projects.
The Plains isn’t close to every population center though, so unless some serious new transmission capacity to the coasts opens up, offshore is still a decent component.
Wait a few years until superconducting transmission lines based on LK-99 will be everywhere!
Only half-joking. I suspect that transmission may be a large part of the total cost, and it could be more efficient to build turbines in less windy places but closer to a major transmission station and / or major consumers. Coastal cities have a lot of electric infrastructure in place, and are hungry for more electricity.
The Great Plains has high transport costs due to a lack of navigable waterways, and is also prone to drought. Energy is not usually the dominating factor for population centers, and most power intensive industries also need a lot of water.
Boeing was founded in the Pacific Northwest because aluminum smelting was made cheap through abundant hydro, so this will happen naturally if it makes sense.
Isn't the HVDC loss from the center of the country to either coast going to be under 10%? Balancing that against the maintenance and construction challenges of offshore wind, is it really better to construct offshore projects just to save a few percent?
The main impediment is wealthy people with coastal retirement properties who don't want to gaze out upon a vast expanse of blinking red lights at night.
If you want to follow the details of offshore wind projects, you can consult the the map published by 4C offshore [0] which is used as a reference by everyone in the industry.
Because it’s in the same category as crossing one’s fingers and hoping for fusion. People don’t voluntarily reduce their living standards en masse without a fight.
We’re closer to flat [1]. That said, your broader point stands: the energy intensity of American GDP is falling [2].
My point is relying on that trend continuing is akin to relying on the promise of fusion. Worth pursuing. But unlikely to yield to brute effort the way cleaning up primary production and transport can.
The high and low points are IMO dramatic at the scale of the US. I suspect EV’s are going to continue to reverse this tend in the short term but efficiency is still very meaningful even if it’s never going to solve the problem.
That stat was surprising to me, I had assumed that light bulbs alone would have made a big dent in things (ie 60W vs 10W per bulb). They had a separate page [0] detailing some consumer habits which had some interesting nuggets. The overall point is that heating/cooling dominates residential usage, which is more than enough to swamp out efficiency gains from TVs, refrigerators, etc.
Evidently light bulb installation is significantly lower than I expected. I was unaware you could trivially acquire incandescent bulbs any more.
>In 2009, 58% of all households used at least one energy-efficient bulb indoors. In the 2015 RECS, which was administered from August 2015 to April 2016, 86% of households reported using at least one CFL or LED bulb. Nationwide, 18% of households responding to the latest RECS reported that they had no incandescent bulbs in their homes.
Also noteworthy that household consumption was based on electricity sales. Homes with installed solar/wind/battery would be under-represented in the stats, meaning overall consumption is higher than reported.
> household consumption was based on electricity sales. Homes with installed solar/wind/battery would be under-represented in the stats, meaning overall consumption is higher than reported
Religion can effectively make people go against their desires, especially those for more. This is the one unthinkable option for the average HN user. See Islam.
Moving Las Vegas to the other side of Sierra Nevada. So that it is no longer in the middle of the desert, requiring lots of power to keep people alive and not boiled. Deserts were not meant to live in!
Huge? An overall ten percent reduction in demand would be massive and unprecedented. Meanwhile on the supply side we're adding renewable energy at about the rate of 5% of demand per year.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadhttps://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-nepa-works
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-did-we-wait-so-lo...
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
The time is in tens of months, routinely.
"The Jones Act, passed by Congress in 1920, says that only U.S.-flagged ships can move cargo from one point in the United States to another. The ships must have been built in the U.S. and be crewed by Americans. The offshore wind industry uses big, specialized ships to assemble the turbines miles out at sea, but there is not a single U.S.-flagged ship right now that can do that work."
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/03/t...
Manchin had a bill with some support.[0]
The problem is Conservatives want to make sure fossil fuel projects are prioritized in any sort of reform while Liberals want to make sure they're excluded.
[0]https://www.energy.senate.gov/2023/5/manchin-moves-ball-forw...
I've mostly been convinced that, at least for now, the harms that NEPA is preventing are smaller than the goods it's preventing. That probably wasn't true in the past and might not be true in the future though. My hope is that by rabble rousing enough, someone smarter than I can find a good solution that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That is astonishingly disappointing. Why is that?
China and Europe have both more than 25 GW offshore windpower installed.
We treat the ocean like a big dump place.
Everything thing in the ocean seems to LOVE structure. They build on our detritus as easily as rocks
Apart from the energy, an offshore wind farm would be a great sanctuary for fish. If you need to visit regularly for maintenance, bringing along a few extra FADs and the occasional marine biologist isn’t going to break the bank.
at this point the ocean temperature is a much greater risk
* https://www.ecowatch.com/marine-animals-offshore-wind-farm-h...
* https://energytransition.org/2022/02/in-europes-north-sea-wi...
Better still: do both and put up more wind power.
And, for the rigs, they are actually substantially closer to shore than turbines would be on the other coast, because, as you say, the ocean gets real deep, real fast there.
People do dislike the rigs, but new ones are banned and the ones off Santa Barbra are I think tapping a source that bubbles up on its own and washes ashore. So perhaps they are helping.
it's not that rich people don't mind oil rigs, it's that the power gradient goes oil companies -> rich people -> clean energy companies.
Either prospect smells strongly of malfeasance to me.
[1] https://owcltd.com/the-case-of-california-757m-auction-close...
[2] https://www.times-standard.com/2022/06/04/challenges-face-wi...
Europe never had that luxury. Offshore wind is our only option.
This kind of depends on where in Europe. The North of Sweden (i.e the top 2/3 of the country) is very sparsely populated, and well-suited for installing on-shore wind power.
NIMBYs keep on NIMBYing though, and many projects get killed because of their protesting.
Restricting yourself to offshore wind is a choice, not a necessity.
Yes, from start to finish in well under a year in some locations depending on whether or not they can set up a nice pipeline and start producing as soon as one of the turbines is completed. The time consuming parts: permitting, infrastructural changes to the grid, environmental assessments + possible delays, foundation work. Once the foundation is in the ground I've seen operational turbines six weeks later.
For a whole windpark from start to finish the times vary from two to eight years, with off-shore the longer part of that. There is a new option called a floating windfarm, which is self evident from the name, that cuts deployment time to an absolute minimum but has some long term risks and maintenance pros and cons. Still, it is a very interesting development.
Second, the Jones act and other regulations prohibit using most of the knowledge and infrastructure that Europe has built up over two decades. We can't use their ships or sailors. We can't use many of their products while being eligible for federal subsidies. So rather than let their industry build up ours we have to start from scratch. No economies of scale, high risk, less competition, etc.
The size of the subsidies available are so large that it'll probably work eventually, and there are some discussions happening about improving permitting. But it's a bit like one department is spending a lot of money to put concrete barriers in the road and then another department is spending a lot on subsidies to install tank treads to be able to drive over the barriers. "But think of all the jobs created in the tank tread installation industry!"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_State...
Isn’t this sentence backwards?
Politicians shouldn't promise things they won't be around to deliver on.
Betz basically says you won't be extracting more than 59.3% of the power in the moving air so the remainder will always be available just behind the turbine. Close to the ground wind isn't laminar so what you'll see is that the 'rolling' air will draw in new air from higher layers just behind the machine, a short way inland you'll have a hard time proving there is a windfarm upwind other than through sound and visuals. There is a lot of air moving around (if you could visualize it try thinking of 1 kg bricks spaced out 1 meter in every direction, and all of them are moving except for when there is absolutely no wind) and the tiny little layer that we siphon off some power from is utterly insignificant compared to the whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
In highschool we would go to them, although technically illegal.
You stand on the ground, with the windmill churning away 100 feet above your head. It would obviously still be windy as hell near the ground.
I have a feeling that if you had 10 units of wind, and placed windmills in a linear line for a linear mile as tightly as you could... Just a small distance away you would still have 9.99 units of wind.
The density of wind capture devices relative to the overall mass of wind in the general area is so low I don't think you could make a big difference.
If anything, I'd worry more about solar farms that cause massive heat soak by placing black solar panels near ground level, where instead it would be light color dry dirt and dry greens that are a lot more reflective.
By one estimate there's about 250TW of "extractable" power (after which you can add turbine capacity but the whole ensemble doesn't produce more power, and the global wind speeds after saturation would be 50% lower). Humanity uses roughly 10TW, so even if we used wind for everything, it would only be a small fraction of the energy in the moving air.
That paper also has calculations of the effects of a single wind turbine averaged across a 5km area (tl;dr: sub-0.5% downstream wind speed change)
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/SatW...
In eastern WA, we have special trees planted to block wind (mostly to reduce erosion), I wonder if those could be turbines instead? (Although, as long as water isn’t a problem, we should probably still use trees)
I suppose if there is anywhere in the world where wind power installations can cause a significant reduction in wind speeds, it would be there.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gansu_Wind_Farm
Only half-joking. I suspect that transmission may be a large part of the total cost, and it could be more efficient to build turbines in less windy places but closer to a major transmission station and / or major consumers. Coastal cities have a lot of electric infrastructure in place, and are hungry for more electricity.
There are NIMBYs for offshore, but land transmission lines go through people’s literal backyards and over longer distances.
[0]: https://map.4coffshore.com/offshorewind/
My point is relying on that trend continuing is akin to relying on the promise of fusion. Worth pursuing. But unlikely to yield to brute effort the way cleaning up primary production and transport can.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036
[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/energy...
Evidently light bulb installation is significantly lower than I expected. I was unaware you could trivially acquire incandescent bulbs any more.
>In 2009, 58% of all households used at least one energy-efficient bulb indoors. In the 2015 RECS, which was administered from August 2015 to April 2016, 86% of households reported using at least one CFL or LED bulb. Nationwide, 18% of households responding to the latest RECS reported that they had no incandescent bulbs in their homes.
Also noteworthy that household consumption was based on electricity sales. Homes with installed solar/wind/battery would be under-represented in the stats, meaning overall consumption is higher than reported.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32212
I hadn’t considered this. Thank you.