Wind Industry Donations Behind Biden, CAP, And Media Matters Misinformation
John Podesta, Founder of Center for American Progress, is giving away hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies
Offshore wind energy is the key to lowering electricity prices, say President Joe Biden and a range of groups, including the Sierra Club, the Center for American Progress, and Media Matters. “Folks, it’s also now cheaper to generate electricity from wind and solar than it is from coal and oil,” said Biden last November. “Literally cheaper. Not a joke.”
But if that were the case, then Biden would not have demanded Congress pass the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which will send $781 billion to $1 trillion in taxpayer subsidies to wind and other renewable energy companies.
In response to this criticism, many experts say wind energy is good economics, good for jobs, and crucial for combatting climate change. “Offshore wind can lower energy prices and beat out oil and gas,” argued a major report by the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, last fall.
The wind industry points to the 800 high-paying construction jobs that will be created to build projects like Ørsted’s 84-turbine Sunrise project off the coast of New York.
But the US government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that US offshore wind projects “would by themselves probably have a limited impact on global emissions and climate change” and that benefits would be “negligible.”
As for those 800 construction jobs, they will last for just two years, after which the project will employ just 60 people over the next 25 years.
And now, New York’s regulator says that all this wind and solar energy not only won’t lower electricity prices, it will raise them by a whopping 64%. Supplier delays at Sunrise, Ocean Wind 1, and Revolution Wind projects on the East Coast, and other factors will cost Ørsted $2.3 billion overall, which, as Reuters notes, is “over half the book value of Ørsted’s US operations.”
"Application of Empire/Beacon's request would result in a 54% increase on average across its portfolio of projects," says the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
All of this is on top of the fact that wind turbines grew 40% more expensive over the last two years, in part because manufacturers have increased turbine height and blade length.
Making the turbines larger has also made them more unsightly, as new visualizations of the East Coast wind projects show:
Into this perfect storm comes new evidence that the wind industry is behind elevated whale deaths, simply from mapping the ocean floor and increasing boat traffic in previously untrafficked areas. Deaths could spike further if and when construction begins.
Both CAP and Media Matters deny that the wind industry is killing whales. “The real reason behind the recent spike in whale deaths may simply be that there are more whales,” claimed CAP.
But that’s false. In truth, the population of North Atlantic right whales has plummeted. Today there are only 340 of the whales left, down from over 400 just a few years ago. Their average life expectancy has declined from a century to 45 years.
Biden, the Democrats, and progressive think tanks all say they care about working people, climate change, and the natural environment more than Republicans and conservatives. Why, then, are they pursuing offshore wind that would raise electricity prices, hurt working people, and kill whales, perhaps to the point of extinction?
The Subsidies-For-Donations Grift
