-
Good news (again/for now): Judge reverses Trump order halting Revolution Wind
Judge Lamberth said the government had failed to explain why the new information warranted a halt to construction, calling it an “unreasonable and seemingly unjustified” change in position.
-
We Need Wind Power, Especially in Winter
The day after a severe winter storm hit the midwestern and northeastern US, leaving tens of thousands of people without power, is as good a day as any to underline the belligerent stupidity of Trump’s assault on the wind power industry. Aging grids, energy-hogging data centers sprouting up like dandelions, power costs continually climbing, and here’s this fool doing everything he can to undermine a key source of clean energy.
As Canary Media reports in an article last month titled Feel the cold? Offshore wind alleviates grid woes in winter, study says, the power generated by the wind turbines that Trump dislikes are especially useful this time of year:Along the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, offshore wind can play a critical role in keeping the lights on year-round, especially through the winter, according to a study published this month… offshore wind is well suited to “meeting the moment,” in part because gas plants are reliable in the summer but can buckle under winter weather, according to the study. Ocean winds in the Northeast are at their strongest and steadiest in winter months, making turbines there a way to boost the reliability of power grids connected to underperforming gas plants.
The article goes on to say:
The periods in which offshore wind performs best also align with the time of increasing grid strain: winter mornings and evenings, when people tend to crank up the heat.
So generating power from the wind in the northeast is a good fit, on both a seasonal and a daily basis. And these are the projects that are being capriciously cancelled by the fossil fuel superfans that Big Oil helped get elected to run this country. Projects like Revolution Wind, the big wind farm project off the coast of Rhode Island, which Trump tried to kill even though it was 80% complete. Thankfully construction has resumed (for now), after a federal judge found that the stoppage was indeed as arbitrary as it seemed.
Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Canary Media that if Revolution Wind were killed, the impact would be most acutely felt in winter months. That’s when the region’s limited supply of fossil gas is stretched even thinner, since the fuel is used for both building heating and power generation.
Losing Revolution Wind’s electricity entirely would have cost New England consumers about $500 million a year, according to Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins University.
Look, wind isn’t quite as lovely and scalable as solar. These are huge projects, with all the attendant costs, timelines, and complications. But as with solar, once they’re online the fuel is free, forever. Exxon Mobil can’t make any money from that – in fact, it cuts right into their business – so they don’t like it. Just like all of Trump’s rich cronies, they don’t care if the American people get shafted for half a billion dollars. For Big Oil, that kind of money is just the going rate to buy politicians in the Trump era.
-
Great story – with great pictures – from @Science.org, who named the surge in renewable power their 2025 Breakthrough of the Year:
China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.
-
This is what’s known in the business as, “bullshit”: Trump officials halt offshore wind-farm projects over ‘national security risks’. It’s a disgusting & arbitrary overreach that will only drive up energy prices (and deadly emissions, of course)
-
Good news: US judge strikes down Trump order blocking wind energy projects
A federal judge on Monday struck down Donald Trump’s order blocking wind energy projects, saying the effort to halt leasing of windfarms on federal lands and waters was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated US law
It's high time to go solar