Offshore wind energy under Trump

OPINION:

Liberals are worried: Will President-elect Donald Trump succeed in killing the offshore wind energy industry?

“I believe this is a tipping point for the offshore wind industry in America,” said Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, according to The Associated Press. “They have been given a glide path by Democrat-run administrations at the federal and state level for many years. For this industry, [the election] results will bring headwinds far greater than they have faced previously.”

But the truth is that offshore wind has problems of its own.

As The New York Times reports, “The largest challenges facing wind, especially the offshore segment, is not what Mr. Trump may do, [Wood Mackenzie consultant Soren] Lassen said, but costs, which have jumped in the United States and Europe, making wind projects more difficult to build and possibly raising electricity prices for consumers.”

Costs keep going up, and embarrassing public failures, such as the turbine blade failure at the Vineyard Wind site off Massachusetts, aren’t helping.

There are good reasons — along with the cost savings — for ending the expensive and disappointing offshore wind debacle.

Offshore wind causes immense environmental damage. Even environmentalists acknowledge this.

“Construction crews — housed in floating hotels — use giant equipment to piledrive anchors into the seabed,” Hakai Magazine reports. “Others lay heavy-duty submarine cables and build offshore electrical substations. Once the turbines are running, maintenance crews sail out to keep the blades humming along with the ocean’s forceful winds. All of this creates opportunities for ship strikes, collisions with the turbines, and an onslaught of underwater noise.”

The Biden administration has circumvented the environmental impact by reviving the Obama administration’s “Smart From the Start” program. This allows it to skip impact studies and grant permits to foreign-owned energy companies to move forward despite the harm to our safety, our domestic industries and our environment.

North Atlantic right whales are in particular danger. Much offshore wind development is planned for the waters off New York, New England and the mid-Atlantic states. But those waters are also in the migratory route of endangered North Atlantic right whales. Fewer than 400 of them remain.

A letter from May exposes the damage offshore wind is doing to these majestic creatures. The letter’s author, Sean Hayes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, acknowledged the danger to whales. He wrote that “oceanographic impacts from installed and operating turbines cannot be mitigated for the 30-year lifespan of the project unless they are decommissioned.”

Offshore wind turbines degrade our national security. Big, spinning turbines interfere with early warning radar systems. As Rep. Chris Smith, New Jersey Republican, points out, the federal government’s “own analysis for the Atlantic Shores South project acknowledges that the offshore wind turbines would specifically interfere with federal and military radar systems, even mentioning Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst by name.”

America’s fishing industry would be devastated. In August, a flotilla of fishing vessels gathered around the site of the Vineyard Wind project off Long Island, New York, to protest offshore wind and its effects on the ecosystem — and their livelihoods. The protest came just a few weeks after a Vineyard Wind turbine failed, dropping tons of debris and chemicals into the ocean.

The families that have fished these waters for generations warn that a way of life may end.

“What’s going to be left for my grandchildren?” said Tom Williams, a lifelong fisherman whose two sons now captain the family’s two boats. “It’s a way of life, and this is the biggest threat we’ve faced.”

The offshore wind industry has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Mr. Trump will get some grief from the environmental lobby over his pledge to put a halt to offshore wind development. But he has good reasons to end this boondoggle.

• Robert Henneke is executive director and general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.