If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
> how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
I'm not sure I follow the questions. The success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
you set up a durable judicial system, and give them their own army.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments.
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
If the concern is the control module of the wind turbine— that’s not a nationalization and confiscation program. It might look similar in the near-term to participants, but that’s simply because they are functioning as instruments of the control module supplier, extending the inference, which isn’t a legitimate owner of the wind farms or US electrical grid anyway, and is quite unlike the fossil fuel companies in Venezuela of the 1970s.
> ...the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation
Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group
Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship.
As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough.
What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.
posted this at ars forum: (it should be clear I think it was a stupid move by the WH, but I am trying to think what might have "informed" it)
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast.
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense, it's exactly what we do with offshore O&G. The rub is that securing offshore wind installations is an order of magnitude more resource-intensive than securing a deepwater rig, bc you're talking about a perimeter than spans 100's of square miles, not a single platform with a limited # of risers
If you wanted to defend an O&G field, wouldn't you need to consider a similar extent? per wellhead, yes. but the go to a concentrator for onshore feed don't they? or some kind of attached floating rig, which itself is a SPF.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
> Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
Even if there were legitimate concerns surrounding defense of the wind farms, it makes more sense to instead de-risk with redundancy elsewhere, which is increasingly cheap and quick to do thanks to the combo of solar+batteries. That’s what we should be doing anyway if AI data center energy requirements are to continue to increase.
I think that wind farms dotted along the entire US coast would be a bad target for crippling US power compared to a few coal/gas/nuclear mega power plants.
> Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
The Judges appear to have responded to something specific. If it was made-up, they would have thrown the case out harder and sanctioned whoever submitted false evidence. So I assume somebody with an ability to legally bind intel into the right form was persuaded to say something.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
I mean, we need all the electricity we can get to run all of these datacenters, right? So I think this might be one of those things that the Republicans quietly allow to continue so that the corporate interests can maximize electricity production
The reality, of course, being that wind farm construction is big on labour, specialist transport machinery, crane operating, jacking, bolts, working to weather extreme thresholds, etc.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
Offshore windmills legitimately do interfere with some of these military radars monitoring the coastline that are probably top secret, or so I'm told by people that would know. However, I doubt that's the only reason of course.
I am all for green energy, but these windfarms were designed years ago. Since then, solar has progressed in leaps whereas wind has not. Im not so sure that fighting the olds over wind farms is the fight worth winning. Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
You don't appear to be "all for green energy" if you want to prohibit some forms of green energy. In fact that appears to be the stance of someone who opposes green energy
That definitely won't be what they're using that free hand for, unfortunately. I wish it weren't true, but the Republican party is sticking to its blanket opposition to anything that isn't fossil-fuel related. Add it to the growing list of stuff to be annoyed / angry about.
solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy, wind farms can run constantly with low weather impact
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
It doesn't mean a free hand to develop solar. The Trump administration hates solar, too, and is doing as much as it can to hinder solar development.
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
What olds? The shutdown here was ostensibly for national security reasons.
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.
I would guess that many politicians (of both sides, see also MTG) suddenly start to rethink how bad they want the public job when Trump turns the firehose of death threats their direction.
There'll be a ton of people running, any of which I think would be highly competitive against Vance: Walz, Pritzker, Newsom, Chris Murphy, Harris, Josh Shapiro, etc.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
3 years of Trump getting progressively weaker as more and more Republicans in purple districts decide they are more likely to be reelected by going against Trump than by supporting him. Not to mention the midterms will at least make it impossible to get any legislation passed that they want (which, thankfully, they have been mercifully incompetent at so far).
Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means.
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
The midterms this year can already seriously throw wrenches into the Project 2025 plans. Trump's failure to address the economy situation, the constant and ongoing wars, ICE seriously disrupting agriculture and construction sites, ICE executing white people in front of cameras [1] and now the latest Epstein crap... Democrats are flipping what used to be solid-red seats these days.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
> how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
I'm not advocating their system, but here's one pro for China obviously.
I mean, you could also frame this as an issue the electorate could actually prioritize instead of just hoping the courts work it out
I'm not sure I follow the questions. The success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
you set up a durable judicial system, and give them their own army.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
> incompetency
"corruption"
spite of one man child
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[flagged]
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have you met the california high speed rail or not yet?
> A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
Worse than the Superconducting Supercollider?
Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
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Or that space telescope?
Well, judicial checks and balances should protect them until regime change, which is coming.
I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
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It's going to be dicey whether you can keep all the suppliers engaged with start / stops over 3 years.
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There's no regime change coming when those in power run the elections, have already cheated in the past, and know that they are now untouchable.
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GOP cronyism and deep corruption.
In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments.
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
If the concern is the control module of the wind turbine— that’s not a nationalization and confiscation program. It might look similar in the near-term to participants, but that’s simply because they are functioning as instruments of the control module supplier, extending the inference, which isn’t a legitimate owner of the wind farms or US electrical grid anyway, and is quite unlike the fossil fuel companies in Venezuela of the 1970s.
> ...the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabed_warfare
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
If the latter were true, the permits would have never been granted. The permits took years of back and forth, public and government commentary.
The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.
People mix up freedom and dicatorship here:
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship. As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough. What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.
posted this at ars forum: (it should be clear I think it was a stupid move by the WH, but I am trying to think what might have "informed" it)
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
The pretext for the suspension was radar noise.[1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-offshore-wind-...
Thank you!
US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast.
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense, it's exactly what we do with offshore O&G. The rub is that securing offshore wind installations is an order of magnitude more resource-intensive than securing a deepwater rig, bc you're talking about a perimeter than spans 100's of square miles, not a single platform with a limited # of risers
From an attack PoV that's hundreds of square miles to destroy or disable many structures Vs taking out a single target.
ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target.
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If you wanted to defend an O&G field, wouldn't you need to consider a similar extent? per wellhead, yes. but the go to a concentrator for onshore feed don't they? or some kind of attached floating rig, which itself is a SPF.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
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> Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
Even if there were legitimate concerns surrounding defense of the wind farms, it makes more sense to instead de-risk with redundancy elsewhere, which is increasingly cheap and quick to do thanks to the combo of solar+batteries. That’s what we should be doing anyway if AI data center energy requirements are to continue to increase.
I think that wind farms dotted along the entire US coast would be a bad target for crippling US power compared to a few coal/gas/nuclear mega power plants.
I appreciate the sentiment behind steelmanning but Trump has had over a decade of publicaly, vocally hating windmills because some were built too close to his golf course. See https://www.npr.org/2013/07/01/196352470/thar-he-blows-trump...
Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
> Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
The Judges appear to have responded to something specific. If it was made-up, they would have thrown the case out harder and sanctioned whoever submitted false evidence. So I assume somebody with an ability to legally bind intel into the right form was persuaded to say something.
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This is very much a root cause.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWmZwObZc
( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS )
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Weird how these security risks only show up to tank projects in blue states
I mean, we need all the electricity we can get to run all of these datacenters, right? So I think this might be one of those things that the Republicans quietly allow to continue so that the corporate interests can maximize electricity production
Trump banning offshore wind projects is why oil and gas workers vote for him.
The only way they can keep their jobs working on vastly inferior, dangerous technology is to ban new, safer, better technology.
The reality, of course, being that wind farm construction is big on labour, specialist transport machinery, crane operating, jacking, bolts, working to weather extreme thresholds, etc.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
[dead]
Judge: "Why were these projects put on hold?"
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
Offshore windmills legitimately do interfere with some of these military radars monitoring the coastline that are probably top secret, or so I'm told by people that would know. However, I doubt that's the only reason of course.
I am all for green energy, but these windfarms were designed years ago. Since then, solar has progressed in leaps whereas wind has not. Im not so sure that fighting the olds over wind farms is the fight worth winning. Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
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Whether or not these wind farms are economically viable sounds like something for the companies building them to work out.
They are 100% not viable without tax dollars
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You don't appear to be "all for green energy" if you want to prohibit some forms of green energy. In fact that appears to be the stance of someone who opposes green energy
That definitely won't be what they're using that free hand for, unfortunately. I wish it weren't true, but the Republican party is sticking to its blanket opposition to anything that isn't fossil-fuel related. Add it to the growing list of stuff to be annoyed / angry about.
solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy, wind farms can run constantly with low weather impact
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
Solar + battery is good enough & cheap enough (and recyclable enough). But agreed that multiple renewable energy sources aren’t a bad thing!
Solar + battery is just so good at staying stable and productive for decades with no moving parts, minimal maintenance, and unbeatable scalability
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> solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy
Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.
Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.
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It doesn't mean a free hand to develop solar. The Trump administration hates solar, too, and is doing as much as it can to hinder solar development.
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
What olds? The shutdown here was ostensibly for national security reasons.
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.
3 more years. I don't know who the Dems can elect to go against JD Vance, maybe Tim Walz, but they need somebody.
> maybe Tim Walz
https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/01/29/tim-walz-say...
> MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again.
> Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now.
> “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.”
> The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the work” while finding other ways to serve the country.
I would guess that many politicians (of both sides, see also MTG) suddenly start to rethink how bad they want the public job when Trump turns the firehose of death threats their direction.
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There'll be a ton of people running, any of which I think would be highly competitive against Vance: Walz, Pritzker, Newsom, Chris Murphy, Harris, Josh Shapiro, etc.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
Newsom, maybe Mark Kelly
3 years of Trump getting progressively weaker as more and more Republicans in purple districts decide they are more likely to be reelected by going against Trump than by supporting him. Not to mention the midterms will at least make it impossible to get any legislation passed that they want (which, thankfully, they have been mercifully incompetent at so far).
A wet towel could go against JD Vance, but what if Vance shutters polling stations in blue districts? Because "terrorism".
Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means.
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
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If the Democrats nominate Tim Walz they deserve to lose the next ten thousand elections. My god.
Pritzker.
3 more years til the next dog and pony show but different colors.
The midterms this year can already seriously throw wrenches into the Project 2025 plans. Trump's failure to address the economy situation, the constant and ongoing wars, ICE seriously disrupting agriculture and construction sites, ICE executing white people in front of cameras [1] and now the latest Epstein crap... Democrats are flipping what used to be solid-red seats these days.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi... - it is notable that widespread outrage only followed after the execution of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/georgia-fult...