Offshore Wind Turbine Agenda Continues To Fail

In 1979 a single 2-megawatt wind turbine was installed in Boone, North Carolina. By 1981 neighbors had complained about noise now defined as infra-sound and the gearbox drive train failed. The project failed.

In 2010 and 2012 Falmouth, Massachusetts installed several similar size 1.5-megawatt land-based wind turbines. The turbines caused noise problems to residential homeowners and had gearbox drive train problems, The turbines were removed in 2022.

Massachusetts had a land-based wind turbine agenda of 2000 megawatts of land-based wind by the year 2020 an absolute failure.

In 2016 Block Island, Rhode Island an ocean wind farm demonstration project in 2021 required months of maintenance most of the summer and was the beginning of whale deaths that have followed wind turbine construction on the East Coast since 2016. The Block Island five wind turbines were purchased for 500 million in 2018 or 100 million for each.

The Block Island onshore submarine cable has had a history of outages costing electric rate-payers 30 million dollars. The ocean floor can shift every six months or whenever a large storm takes place. The shifts increase the risk of corrosion and damage with no chance of being insured.

Whale deaths have raised questions over how badly the ocean environment will be affected and how much of a loss to the fishing industry and jobs.

New England states after the lessons learned at Block Island now want to place hundreds of megawatt wind turbines in the ocean that produce intermittent power requiring fossil fuel backup plants, acres of battery backup plants, and acres of high voltage direct current to alternating current caustic loud electric substations.

In addition, the proposed ocean wind turbine cable routes in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Falmouth, Massachusetts require miles of sets of buried 800-megawatt cables through residential streets to get to electric grid locations. The residential routes are being used to save offshore wind companies money for submarine cables to the large cities that require the power.

The output of the old Pilgrim nuclear plant was 780 megawatts. No residential homeowner wants 800 megawatts buried outside their home which will make their property unsaleable.

Commercial megawatt wind is failing and has been failing for well over 40 years and today offshore wind is failing again.

Note # 72 Whale Deaths Opinion Source: The Bergen Record November 8, 2023