19th Century Factory Tuwn

I sort of lose track of these “flood the zone” things, but after Labor Day’s cancellation of Government Worker’s collective bargaining rights, Tuesday’s Three Alarm Fire was the  revocation of  offshore wind leases along the Atlantic. Most remarkably the Revolution Wind project, which was 80% complete – with 100% of the turbine bases in place and 70% of the turbines mounted and ready to spin.

Halting the Revolution Wind project arrests some 2000-3000 jobs, dead-ends a few $Billion Dollars invested by Oersted, the project developer, and flummoxes nine years of various Agency evaluations, approvals, and permits from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), Department of the Interior, NOAA Fisheries (NMFS), Department of Defense (DOD), and probably scads of State agencies who also have a hand in approving the landing of offshore energy into the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island  – where it was slated to power some 500,000 homes.

I’m not sure how orders come from above in this administration, but the roll-out of this “Emergency” was a bit sloppy. Aside from the nine-year regulatory ramp-up being disrupted on Tuesday, some of the reasons given for why it was hastily cancelled don’t even honor the word “specious.”

Probably the most amusing for me was from Doug Bergum – now the Secretary of the Department of the Interior claiming that he was concerned about the turbine’s interference with radar, compromising the DOD’s ability to monitor underwater attack drones. A bit of a reach, as radar – while compromised by dozens to hundreds of spinning turbine blades across the horizon, has absolutely nothing to do with underwater reconnaissance.

This is what happens when you hire propagandists and politicians – who are great at inflaming controversy, to do jobs that require achieving stable solutions.

This is also setting up another disaster: Just as the use of “Artificial Intelligence” is expanding exponentially, scuttling clean energy projects, or any energy projects for that matter, can only result in the US driving full speed into an energy shortage.

Server Farms are being proposed (and developed) that consume stunning amounts of energy. Each text query consumes between 0.25 Watt/hours to 0.34 Watt/hours. Image generation takes six times that, and short videos can eat up 100Watt/hours. Meta is planning a data center in Louisiana that will consume three times the entire energy use of the city of New Orleans.

This is really not the best time to pull long-planned power generation projects offline. It is bound to kick the US back into the “Dark Ages.”

But maybe this is the real point?