By Steve Levy
A small article appeared in Newsday last month noting that “New York State cancels new wind power bids.”
This was a big deal that required wider coverage. And then, two weeks later, a second wind article appeared (“Wind farms’ impact on average LI electric bills up fivefold”). This article spelled out what many of us had warned about for years: the true cost of wind power is coming in at costs far higher than the initial low-balled estimates.
This is an enormous fall from grace for wind power that was supposed to be the panacea to our energy needs and costs.
Courts reversed President Trump‘s decisions to halt wind projects that were already underway, and rightly so.
But there was no such protection for newer projects.
These projects should have to rise and fall on their own merits, and for too long these wind projects were propped up by misinformation and huge ratepayer and taxpayer subsidies. We long argued that the public was not getting a transparent accounting as to what these offshore wind projects were going to cost.
In fact, the woke virtue signaling politicians in Albany were just signing off on these projects without even knowing how much they would cost.
When then-Governor Andrew Cuomo boasted at a 2019 press conference that these massive new windmills would cost about 73 cents per month per customer, he was clearly drifting in the wind. By 2028, it is estimated the true costs will be $3.54 per month. This is above and beyond fuel, delivery and other increases that will come about. The impact on commercial users will be even greater.
So many of these pols simply wanted to placate the burgeoning wind power cottage industries (which showered pols with substantial donations) and repeat the mantra that wind was clean and cheap and would save the day from fossil fuels.
But as we now know, it’s not cheap, and it’s not reliable. (Imagine if we didn’t have adequate natural gas capacity as we weathered this brutally cold winter.)
Here is what our center wrote two years ago about these potential costs after a Newsday article reported that our officials were signing off on these projects, having no idea of their true costs:
The head of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which oversees offshore wind contracts and bidding, admitted that she did not know what the total cost will be of the project for the construction of wind turbines off Suffolk County. https://paper.newsday.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?edid=ce1e7d25-0da0-4ffb-b636-dd00c629b228&pnum=6
You can’t make this stuff up.
When asked by a Newsday reporter how much the ballyhooed Sunrise wind project will cost, she stated: “The total cost of the project, I defer to Ørsted.” Ørsted is the private company constructing the offshore wind turbines. When the spokesperson for that company was asked the cost, she had the temerity to state: “That’s something that publicly we do not share.”
Are you kidding us?
This isn’t to say that some wind projects could not be an important supplement to an “all of the above” strategy. But our legislators were making dangerously foolish decisions to block natural gas pipelines and to close down upstate nuclear power plants, all while banking on solar and wind to save the day. They wouldn’t, and they couldn’t.
When the true price of these windmills came to the fore, people started to clutch their pearls. These policies are partly responsible for us having see a 50% increase in our energy rates over the last five years in New York. See our center’s white paper on this subject at www.cenetrforcosteffectivegivernment.org.
Now the subsidies are gone, and wiser folks are saying “no more” until we can see this truly is reliable and affordable.
We can have more wind projects, but they must be cost-effective, and cannot, at the present time, replace natural gas, either in cost or reliability.
The fantasy has finally come to an end.
Steve Levy is Executive Director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “On the Right Side Podcast.” Costeffectivegov@gmail.com