Is offshore wind the electrical equivalent of California’s high-speed rail project?

One of Trump’s many crimes, according to Democrats, is pouring cold water (so to speak) on their dream of offshore windmills. A Facebook friend in Maskachusetts recently highlighted “Why Undermining Offshore Wind Is a Threat to U.S. National Security”:

Oddly, that directive conflicts with one signed on January 20th, 2025, triggering the withdrawal of offshore wind lease areas and retroactive review of already-approved projects. This initial memorandum threatens not only a once-rapidly developing U.S. power source, but also undermines America’s energy independence and, by extension, our national security.

She pointed out “the industry that took over 20 years to build up in the US is being destroyed in months” (offshore wind is such a great idea commercially that almost nothing was done during the 12 years of Democrat rule within the past 20 years?).

From my conversations with people who invest in renewable energy projects around the world, the main limitation for wind in the US is the lack of modern DC transmission lines. Each state gets to regulate power transmission and the typical regulator is hostile to cheap out-of-state power, unlike in China where they ship power up to 1,900 miles with a single line that can power 50 million houses. The New York Times pointed this out in 2024:

In the United States, the best places for wind tend to be in the blustery Midwest and Great Plains. But many areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid’s capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade.

The righteous Trump-haters at New Yorker offered a similar explanation in 2024:

The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028. One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines

Based on a 2011 New York Times article, “Lack of Transmission Lines Is Restricting Wind Power”, the U.S. has made no progress on this front for 15 years.

When I pointed out that offshore wind couldn’t make economic sense without dollars extracted directly from taxpayers during construction and indirectly from peasants during operation, the Maskachusetts Democrat responded with “MA locked in a 20-yr contract with Vineyard Wind for 9 cents/ kWh” as though that were a favorable rate for wholesale electricity. I quickly found that right now, in the middle of peak summer demand, the wholesale rate in New England is about 4 cents per kWh ($40 per megawatt-hour):

Solar, of course, is now down to about 1.3 cents per kWh in sunny places and never more than about 2.2 cents in the U.S. (NREL). See also a real-world 2024 project in Saudi Arabia at 1.3 cents per kWh. As of 2024, the NREL nerds said that onshore wind was just barely competitive with current wholesale electricity rates (4.2 cents/kWh) and offshore was 3-4.5X the cost:

How come Europeans can do offshore wind, then? The Europeans are able to do everything with water at a much lower cost than Americans can. They don’t have the Jones Act that requires everything to be done with U.S.-built, American-crewed ships and, therefore, don’t have to pay 5X the world market price for an oceangoing vessel. A law firm that specializes in these “mine out the taxpayer” projects says “A typical offshore wind farm may require as many as 25 types of vessels–to lay cable, transfer crew, address surveying, lift components, monitor the environment, install, maintain and service turbines–many of which will require construction of new Jones Act-compliant vessels”.

A male (sort of) Massachusetts Democrat responded to the above data with “You are such a fool.”

The magical thinking that what is currently inefficient will some day become efficient reminds me of the enthusiasts for California’s high-speed rail project, but we also see it among those who promote nuclear power plants. As far as I know, no nuclear plant built in the past 50 years has made a profit. The most recent plant (in Georgia) was 7 years late and $17 billion over budget (the final cost should be about $35 billion). Yet the nuclear power enthusiast will posit a hypothetical world in which Americans are capable of building a nuclear power plant on time and within budget. In that fantasy world, the cost of nuclear power becomes competitive with solar+storage, wind, or natural gas.