Tag: windmills
Windmills

Biden Wisely Favors Fossil Fuels For Today, But Not Tomorrow

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has thrown world energy markets into turmoil. Prices are high; Europe is still dependent on natural gas from Russia; and Joe Biden is urging other countries to boost petroleum output. For his efforts, the president is under attack from both Republicans and Democrats, who are each erring in their own peculiar way.

Biden has banned imports of Russian oil and gas because such purchases would help fund Putin's war. But he is not content to see world oil supplies shrink. On Thursday, he said he would release one million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six months.

The administration has also lobbied the unsavory governments of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to boost output. The same president who wants to phase out the burning of fossil fuels now wants to ensure that plenty of fossil fuels are available for burning.

His GOP critics accuse him of hypocrisy. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La), said, "Biden must end his war on American energy production so the United States and our allies can have access to affordable, secure energy." Republicans still live by Sarah Palin's credo: Drill, baby, drill.

But progressives are equally unhappy, urging Biden to take steps to "end the fossil fuel era and petrochemical tyranny" by ramping up renewable energy production. "Putting more oil on the market is not the solution to our problem but the perpetuation of our problem," said Mark Brownstein, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Both sides make the same mistake, which is failing to understand the difference between short-term necessities and long-term imperatives. In an emergency, your focus is on the immediate need, not the long-term one. But it's important that while attending to the present, you don't forfeit the future.

Biden is capable of meeting both obligations. He understands that letting prices soar is a bad thing for the anti-Putin effort (and the world economy). At the moment, his priority is depriving Russia of the means to fund its aggression.

Biden's Strategic Petroleum Reserve announcement helped, pushing prices down below $100 per barrel. Getting other oil exporters to increase production would further depress prices and make it harder for Putin to sell his most important commodity.

If resisting aggression against Ukraine means making nice with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, so what? Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt teamed up with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to defeat Nazi Germany, and it's a good thing they did. "If Hitler invaded hell," Churchill said, "I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

Conservatives think Russia's power over global fuel supplies proves the need to produce more oil here at home. They say that by canceling the Keystone pipeline and putting a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands, Biden has inflated gasoline prices and doomed Americans to be fleeced by Putin.

But those policies have little if anything to do with the current price of gasoline. Killing Keystone didn't reduce oil supplies, because it hadn't been built. New federal oil and gas leases would take years to generate production. Biden's policies may mean higher fossil fuel prices down the road, but not now, and not soon.

The current supply crunch, we are told, proves the need to increase exploration and drilling. But the supply of oil on the world market — and the price here at home — will always be at the mercy of unpredictable events in foreign lands. Under the oil-friendly presidency of George W. Bush, the price more than quadrupled, topping out at $128 per barrel — the equivalent of over $168 in today's money.

Sunshine and wind keep coming regardless of wars and revolutions on distant shores. Supplies of renewable energy are far more reliable than those of fossil fuels. Real "energy independence" is not producing more oil and gas at home; it's freeing ourselves from the need for either. Putin has far more to fear from solar panels and wind turbines than from the Permian Basin, and so do Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

More important, though, is that clean energy addresses the emergency of climate change — which is less immediate than Putin's invasion but ultimately even more dangerous. Doubling down on fossil fuels is the wrong strategy for a warming world.

The war in Ukraine is a matter of urgent consequence, but it won't last forever. The best energy policy is one that meets the needs of today without torching tomorrow.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Asked About Ukraine, Trump Answers With Weird Rant Against ‘Windmills’

Asked About Ukraine, Trump Answers With Weird Rant Against ‘Windmills’

There’s only one thankful aspect to Russia’s horrific and illegal invasion of Ukraine: Failed one-term President Donald Trump isn’t leading the U.S. as it happens.The orange monster recently sat down with the bros from the Ultimate Fighting Championship podcast Full Send, and although it’s anyone’s guess what they expected, what they got was an off-the-rails answer to the war in Ukraine.

Trump initially began with the usual, talking about how great his leadership was, that “Putin would not have done it [invaded Ukraine],” and if he’d been in office there’d be “no war.”

Side note: Somehow the twice-impeached dolt seems to have completely forgotten about his illegal phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pressuring him to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe into then-candidate Joe Biden’s son.

After being asked about how the Ukraine conflict would look in the future, whether or not it would drag on for some reason, Trump launched into a bizarre rant about—wait for it—windmills?

“I said this a long time ago, if this happens we are playing right into their hands—green energy,” he said, adding: “The windmills, they don’t work. They’re too expensive, they kill all the birds, they ruin your landscapes.

“And yet the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years … the windmills are the most expensive energy you can have and they don’t work.”

Trump went on to say: “By the way, they last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody takes them down. They just go onto the next prairie or land and destroy that.”

Trump has long proffered weird and false claims about wind energy. In 2019, he claimed windmills “killed all the birds.” He added that windmills cause cancer.

Meanwhile, former failed Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen went to the Ukrainian border, asking for thoughts and “prayers” for Ukrainian refugee families and donations to the relief organization @SamariansPurse, a “non-denominational evangelical Christian organization” that provides worldwide aid.

Trump’s full interview here, if you can stomach it:

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Winds Of Change: Floating Power Turbines Envisioned Off Oregon Coast

Winds Of Change: Floating Power Turbines Envisioned Off Oregon Coast

By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES—A Seattle energy company received initial regulatory approval Wednesday to build five massive wind turbines floating 16 miles off the Oregon coast.

The pilot project off Coos Bay would be the first offshore wind facility on the West Coast. It also would be the biggest demonstration of technology that places floating turbines on platforms in deep water, according to federal officials and executives at Principle Power, the developer.

The turbines would be as tall as a 60-story building, vastly larger than typical turbines on land-based wind farms, and able to tap strong ocean winds that blow consistently in southern Oregon, said Kevin Banister, Principle’s vice president for business and government affairs.

Each 6-megawatt turbine would be supported on three floating platforms moored by cables anchored to the sea floor, about 1,400 feet below the surface. The electricity would be transmitted to shore via underwater cable.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, part of the Interior Department, gave approval for the company to submit a formal plan for building the 30-megawatt project. Principle Power would lease 15 square miles of ocean away from shipping lanes and barely visible from the coast.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber announced the project Wednesday in Oregon, invoking the Obama administration’s vision for clean energy and reducing carbon pollution.

Banister said the venture would cost about $200 million and was expected to be operational by 2017. It has received $4 million in Energy Department funding as an advanced demonstration project. Principle hopes to reach a power purchase agreement with Oregon utilities.

Approval for the lease application followed a process to ensure there was no competitive interest from other parties in the 15 square miles of ocean that Principle would have access to. The company still must go through a complex federal regulatory approval process under the National Environmental Protection Act, said Doug Boren, the bureau’s renewable energy manager for the West Coast.

“It is a relatively new technology that the Department of Energy is interested in funding,” he said.

The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that the West Coast has 800 gigawatts of wind energy potential, equal to more than three-fourths of the nation’s entire power generation capacity. Banister said the company’s research has determined that southern Oregon and Northern California have some of the strongest and most consistent winds, along with parts of Southern California.

“Offshore wind in the right locations is a very promising technology,” said Bill Corcoran, the Sierra Club’s western director for its Beyond Coal campaign.

Banister said the company’s studies indicate that the turbines will produce about 40 percent of their maximum potential generating capacity, significantly above the 20 percent to low 30 percent that is typical on land-based California wind farms. The best wind farms planned for Wyoming are expected to product at 45 percent capacity.

Boren and other wind experts say the economic feasibility of generating power offshore still needs to be determined. Only three wind turbines operate on floating platforms, including one in Portugal that Principle built for research.

The Portugal turbine has given the company confidence that it can engineer floating platforms that will remain stable in major storms, Banister said.

“It has gone through 50 foot waves and performed through those conditions,” he said.

AFP Photo/Morten Stricker