As Joe Biden continues to save the planet by destroying the fossil fuel industry, alternative energy sources continue to lag in picking up the slack. This has led to brownouts and blackouts out West, while similar problems with the energy grid loom elsewhere for years to come as both wind and solar power are not replacing fossil fuels fast enough.
Chances are that Joe Biden will be out of office when the real energy shortages hit. By then, no matter what the status of climate change might be, he will claim to have saved the planet and any energy shortages are just one of those things that we have to live with.
For all the promise of these alternative energy sources, they are failing to live up to their hype either in availability or price. The Financial Times reports, "Larger solar projects that supply power to the grid were the worst hit, with installations declining by 31 percent as a result of probes into tariff-dodging by Chinese manufacturers and US customs seizures of modules linked to forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)."
Wind power is doing even worse. Ørsted, a Denmark-based offshore wind firm with a big presence in the United States, has canceled two major wind projects off the coast of New Jersey.
“Macroeconomic factors have changed dramatically over a short period of time, with high inflation, rising interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks impacting our long-term capital investments,” David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO of Americas at Ørsted, said. “As a result, we have no choice but to cease development of Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2. We are extremely disappointed to have to take this decision, particularly because New Jersey is poised to be a U.S. and global hub for offshore wind energy.”
Late last summer, the Biden administration offered offshore wind leases in the Gulf of Mexico for sale, with few takers. Now, other East Coast wind projects in Rhode Island and New York may also face the ax.
Ørsted and Equinor officials say they are weighing options ranging from starting construction at their initially agreed-upon rates to walking away.
A New York official said that neither developer has terminated their contracts yet. Last week, the state requested information about launching an expedited bidding process as early as late November to backfill potentially canceled deals.
Firms such as Equinor and Ørsted would have to pull out of existing deals to participate in any new bidding process, the state official said.
“Those developers have a pretty fundamental decision to make: Do we abandon ship here?” said Eamon Nolan, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins who has helped finance wind projects.
While the problems are similar — high interest rates leading to higher costs to finance the project and snafus in the supply chain — there is also the fundamental problem of cost to consumers. Building these wind farms offshore is a daunting construction task, and along with rising costs to the contractor go rising costs to the consumer.
New York’s new proposals will boost ratepayers’ bills by about 2.7%, or more than $35 a year, for the lifespan of the projects, according to state projections. The expected sum is four times more than what officials estimated when the first round of contracts was struck in 2019.
Some analysts and advocates warn that bigger bills could hurt low-income people who have faced higher energy costs from gasoline to heating fuel in recent years, dinging public support for offshore projects.
Related: Bidenomics Has People More Stressed Out Than Obamanomics Ever Did
There's no chance that we will ever go back to an economy fueled mostly by fossil fuels. Biden made sure of that. Industry has invested trillions of dollars into new technologies, so ready or not, here we go. The breathtaking incompetence with which this switch to renewables was handled is all on Biden and the green fools who believed their own propaganda about how easy it would be to rid the U.S. of fossil fuels and replace the energy grid with wind and solar.
