Comment by cucumber3732842
3 hours ago
Is that a bad thing though?
Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.
But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.
This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?
And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.
So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.
Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.
nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.
And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.