With every little breeze, the offshore wind industry begs for a bailout, according to energy experts who say the Biden administration might be more than happy to throw taxpayers’ money to the winds.
Multiple offshore wind projects are not only failing to achieve the results they promised but are costing companies huge chunks of cash.
General Electric, for instance, said it expected to lose $1 billion this year and again next year because of its offshore wind project losses, according to Bloomberg.
Siemens Energy is looking at a loss of $4.8 billion, according to Fortune, while Orsted A/S is facing a loss of $2.3 billion over its projects, Bloomberg reported.
Gee, who could have seen this coming?
Answer: anyone who’s ever driven past a wind farm.
Wind companies losing billions, prompting fears a federal bailout could be coming https://t.co/RnNkJVUeu0 via @JustTheNews
— Don Fotsch | fotsch.eth (@fotsch1) October 30, 2023
All of which means a line will be forming for taxpayer cash, several experts said.
“No one should doubt the willingness of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to try to spend billions more debt-funded dollars to bail out their pet offshore wind industry,” David Blackmon, an energy consultant with 40 years of experience, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Offshore wind, though completely unnecessary and environmentally destructive, has been a centerpiece of the Green New Deal propaganda, and its supporters will resort to any measures available to keep it on life support,” he said.
In a piece Blackmon published Friday on Substack, he warned that wind projects are likely to get what they want.
“Everyone should prepare themselves to see an effort in Washington, DC to allocate billions more dollars to bail out Big Offshore Wind developers soon,” he wrote. “It turns out the billions already offered by various state governments in the Northeast and in the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act just aren’t enough largesse to sustain these hogs feeding at the government trough.
“So, they have recently been pressuring friendly politicians to dump another bag of debt-funded printed dollars into the bin.”
Some experts said the debacle is the result of the government’s effort to make the industry into what it is not.
“This is what happens when the government tinkers in markets that it has no expertise in,” Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future, told the DCNF.
“It does not matter that it costs an enormous amount of money, jeopardizes the grid’s reliability or inflicts pain and higher costs on the American people: it is about the agenda and reaching political targets,” Turner said.
If wind if so profitable why does Siemens Energy need an emergency bailout to save it from bankruptcy on wind turbine issues. GE Offshore wind posted $1 billion loss in 2023 and expects to lose same amount in 2024. Perhaps wind energy isn’t the goldmine you were suggesting? https://t.co/XxUhC2ImKy
— Robertplewis21 (@robertplewis21) October 26, 2023
Governors of six East Coast states are at the front of the line, The Associated Press reported last month.
The governors of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — all Democrats — wrote to Biden expressing concerns that projects might never be built unless federal money comes along.
“Absent intervention, these near-term projects are increasingly at risk of failing,” the governors wrote. “Without federal action, offshore wind deployment in the U.S. is at serious risk of stalling because states’ ratepayers may be unable to absorb these significant new costs alone.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
