I am a strong believer of offshore wind as a way to mitigate climate change.
a pity finances get in the way of achieving collective good.
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"Biden aims to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind farms installed in the US by the end of the decade, up from basically nothing today. In Europe, nations including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands vowed earlier this year to reach a combined 120 gigawatts of wind power by 2030, more than quadruple the current capacity.
“But with governments still intent on seeing their green goals deliver cost reductions for consumers, it’s not clear how they can achieve that kind of expansion.”
DB2
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That’s looking at it the wrong way. The “finances” are one of the measures of how good it is (it’s probably one of the best measures). If the “finances” tell you that $150B buys you 30GW of clean wind energy, and that $150B buys you 60GW of clean solar energy, and you have $150B, which is the better choice at the current time?
And, obviously it’s much more complicated than that, but the principle holds. If you have $1T to upgrade energy systems over 10 years, what is the closest to optimum you can get to have the correct mix of clean or cleaner technologies overall. It probably includes some of each type, even including some of the cleaner fossil fuel types (maybe some dispatachable gas fired generators included, etc).
It’s when people get fixated on one type of energy production (the “savior”) that the trouble begins and costs end up spiraling, and complexity (technical and political) increases. That’s what happened to nuclear over the last 5 decades. Instead of standardizing, cost-reducing, and increasing ease of use, they made everything much more complex, making it far more expensive and time-consuming to use, almost to the point where it isn’t even worth doing anymore.
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All wind turbine companies are reporting losses from long lead time contracts w inadequate inflation provisions. They seemed to get hit from all directions: materials, labor and transportation.
New contracts address that but now contract cost is unknown and may not be economical.
Who should carry the inflation risk? Govt? Rate payers? So many projects on hold until inflation moderates. Wind is one of the big losers to inflation.