A broken wind turbine blade has paralyzed the beaches of Massachusetts. What would hurricanes do?
Paul Driessen
Photos of oil-stained seals and birds from the Santa Barbara disaster in California in 1969 helped launch the environmental movement and the oil freeze movement. Some 90,000 barrels of oil polluted the sea, and yet when I dived beneath the same oil platform two decades later, it was once again home to a magnificent ecosystem of millions of anemones, mussels, starfish, crabs and fish.
The Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster in 2010 killed 11 workers and spilled 3-4 million barrels of oil and enormous amounts of natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico. But within a surprisingly short time after the runaway well was capped, waves, oil-dispersing chemicals, dust-covered oil droplets slowly sinking to the sea floor, and other natural forces had cleared the water of oil.
Those other forces were hydrocarbon-degrading microbes, which are always present in oceans worldwide – but multiply rapidly when they sense oil in their environment. After the hydrocarbon food sources are exhausted, the microbes die back to their normal numbers and new organisms break down the byproducts created by the original foragers until those nutrients are gone too. Then their populations also drop rapidly in a now-clean ocean.
The disasters prompted the industry to adopt better technologies and procedures to prevent blowouts.
Although irrelevant, anti-oil campaigners stress that we must ban oil and gas and replace fossil fuels with clean, green wind, solar and battery energy, otherwise wildlife, beaches and tourism will be continually threatened by oil spills.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that these supposed alternatives won't work – especially as AI, electric vehicles, data centers, government-mandated electric heating and cooking, and charging of grid-based backup batteries double or triple the need for electricity generation. Intermittent electricity cannot power modern nations. Wind and solar cannot produce thousands of vital products that require petrochemical feedstocks. These energy sources are neither clean, green, renewable, nor sustainable. They endanger wildlife.
A recent accident off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, highlights another reason why permits cannot be granted for hundreds or thousands of giant wind turbines in America's coastal waters.
Shards, chunks and finally the remains of a turbine blade fell into the sea. One blade… from a 62-turbine project that is only three-quarters complete… broke under its own weight, not a storm.
And yet, beaches had to be closed in the middle of peak tourist season while workers collected pieces of fiberglass, resin, foam and plastic blades and boats avoided large pieces floating in the water. Worse, Vineyard Wind did not inform Nantucket authorities of the problems until two days after the blade began to disintegrate.
Each blade is 350 feet long and weighs 140,000 pounds. That's more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 airplane. Vineyard Wind consists of 186 blades: a total of 65,000 feet (12 miles) long and a total weight of 26,000,000 pounds!
Biden and Harris' offshore wind plan calls for 30,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2030. That's 2,500 gigantic 12 MW offshore turbines. That won't even be enough to meet New York State's current summer peak electricity demand before all of these additional demands are met. To meet the future offshore wind energy needs of all the states on the Atlantic coast would easily require 5,000 of these turbines: 15,000 rotor blades weighing a total of 2 billion pounds and with a total length of 5,250,000 feet (995 miles)!
What's even more worrying is that the entire Atlantic coast is hit by hurricanes. And they happen almost every year. The only question is how many hurricanes there will be, how strong they will be, and where each one will hit.
NOAA's records of landfalling hurricanes – those that actually hit American beaches and cities – show that a total of 105 Category 1-5 hurricanes hit the Atlantic coast from Florida to Maine between 1851 and 2023. If you add those that stayed at sea, where the turbines will be located, that number could double.
Of that total, 23 were Category 3-5 (wind speeds of 110-155 mph or more). Most hit Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. But 39 made landfall between North Carolina and Delaware—and 19 hit the northeastern states, including nine Category 2-3 monsters (wind speeds of 96-129 mph).
But remember that these turbines are weakened by constant corrosive spray and, often, hurricane-like storms. When the inevitable major hurricane comes barreling up the coast, devastation is inevitable.
Kamala Harris is bullish on offshore wind. For the past three and a half years, she has led an administration determined to transition the U.S. to wind, solar and battery power, speed up permitting processes for onshore and offshore “clean energy” projects, and even eliminate the requirement that offshore wind developers post bonding and pay for the removal of damaged, broken and outdated offshore wind towers.
She supports a ban on plastic straws, but has never asked how many plastic straws it would take to replace 15,000 offshore wind turbine blades. (To use maritime parlance, an unfathomable number.) Moreover, plastic straws do not contain dangerously sharp fiberglass shards and cannot sink fishing boats that collide with huge but barely visible rotor blades.
Ms. Harris, Tim Walz and other wind fanatics ignore concerns that hurricanes could destroy forests and offshore wind turbines as anti-wind scaremongering. History tells a different story.
The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 devastated Florida with winds over 200 mph and Georgia with Category 1 winds. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 struck New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts with winds of 115-120 mph. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 struck the coast from North Carolina to New Jersey and Massachusetts with Category 2 winds.
Edna hit the Northeast in 1954 with Category 2 winds, Donna did so again in 1960, and Gloria devastated the region in 1985 with gusts of 96-115 mph, even reaching New Hampshire and Maine! Isabel struck North Carolina and Virginia in 2003. The “smaller” Category 1 hurricane of 2012, better known as Superstorm Sandy, was also devastating.
This roundup includes just a few that hit the North and Mid-Atlantic states, and some that hit Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—all prime areas for forests of offshore turbines, either attached to the sea floor or on giant floating platforms off Maine and other states. They would all sink.
Replacing hundreds or thousands of torn, damaged and shattered turbines and blades would take years, perhaps decades. At the same time, the East Coast, which the Harris-Biden-Waltz-Democrats are trying to bring electricity to, would be without power. The lack of heating, air conditioning and electricity for homes, hospitals and everything else would leave millions homeless and cost thousands more lives.
Hopefully politicians and bureaucrats could push ahead with the construction of new gas turbine and modular nuclear power plants. This would mean only a few years of hardship and blackouts, rather than many years or perhaps decades.
Otherwise, floating pieces of broken turbine blades would endanger boats for months or years until they were recovered, pulled ashore and deposited in landfills. Cleanup of billions of sharp fiberglass shards – each 8 to 15 feet long and nearly invisible – would likely take decades, during which time they would impale and endanger beachgoers, swimmers, fish, whales, dolphins and other marine life.
Although I am not a microbiologist, I am not aware of any microbes that eat away at fiberglass, resin or foam plastics.
Since there are neither guarantees nor an obligation on the part of the large wind power companies to cover the costs of cleaning and dismantling the turbines, the taxpayers and ratepayers who had run out of electricity were left to foot the bill.
Before we plunge even further into this “renewable energy transition,” can we first do a realistic, sensible analysis? Can we at least think about it before we cast our vote in the autumn?
Paul Driessen is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights.
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