‘Industry of the Future’: Cooper Administration Pushes “Potential” of NC Offshore Wind Industry

RALEIGH – Just a week or so removed from the nation’s focus on a massive Texas electrical grid disaster amid an extraordinary bout of cold and snow — a disaster enabled largely by the Lone Star State’s foolish over-reliance on unreliable “green energy” sources like wind power, exacerbated by a coinciding under-investment in reliable fossil fuels and grid capacity (and a snow storm) — the administration of Governor Roy Cooper is touting a report that screams, “I want a piece of that!”

A report from the N.C. Department of Commerce on March 3 pushes argues that North Carolina should hitch it’s wagon to the politically palatable wind industry because it “OFFERS POTENTIAL FOR NEW JOBS AND BILLIONS OF INVESTMENT IN NORTH CAROLINA.”

From the report synopsis [emphasis added]:

“The publication of the report from BVG Associates [*a pro-green energy cronyism consultancy] marks the latest step in Governor Cooper’s far-reaching commitment to build a clean energy economy to fight climate change and grow clean-energy jobs in North Carolina.

BVG Associates (BVGA), a consulting company with extensive wind energy experience, forecasts the U.S. east coast will see a total offshore installed capacity exceeding 40 gigawatts (GW) by 2035.  Reaching this level of capacity will require a manufacturing ecosystem to supply component parts for at least two dozen utility-scale wind farms.

To reach the capacity targets for wind projects already publicly announced by states and site developers, BVGA expects the industry will invest $140 billion by 2035 to establish and build out its supply chain, install equipment, and operate the wind facilities.  BVGA forecasts North Carolina manufacturers can address and supply equipment for the entire east coast market, not just for projects directly off the state’s coast.

“Wind energy means new jobs for North Carolinians,” said Machelle Sanders, North Carolina’s Commerce Secretary. “Just like biotechnology was for us many years ago, today clean energy represents an industry of the future and North Carolina always embraces the future.” […]”

That last sentence has to make you chuckle: the WINDMILL is the ‘industry of the future’ in 2021 akin to  BIOTECHNOLOGY in the 1980s?

 

Secretary Sanders is a very accomplished person, with a background in the biotechnology industry, and every reason to know that windmills are not an industry of the future in any comparable way to splicing genes and mapping genomes.

Granted, she used the more ambiguous term “clean energy,” and so the ‘cutting edge industry of the future’ language is but consistent with the climate change, green energy windmills the Left has been tilting at for quite some time now.

But while this report stresses supply chains, jobs, and investment opportunities for a misleadingly attractive economic veneer, it is, at its core, a call to go all-in on wind the same way other states have. States like Texas.

They do so arguing that the wind energy potential is plentiful and enticing:

“[…] North Carolina already features one approved Wind Energy Area (WEA) under lease for development.  The Kitty Hawk WEA, located 24 nautical miles from Corolla, is projected to be able to support 2,500 megawatts of electricity generation, which would be enough to power approximately 700,000 homes.

The publication of today’s report sends an important signal to OSW developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that North Carolina is committed to the industry, both as a location for wind energy projects as well as an ideal manufacturing location for projects along the entire eastern seaboard. […]”

That sounds great doesn’t it? 700,000 homes! 2,500 megawatts of capacity!

How much capacity typically translates into actual energy supply on any given day is curiously absent from this report.

Luckily, the advent in Texas a few weeks ago put some of these tidbits out into the public sphere. For example, the fact that ‘clean energy’ never really operates anywhere close to those ‘potential generation’ figures, perpetually operate at the low end of said capacity, and in emergencies they fail to be reliable at all. The absolute worst offender? Wind.

Yes; let’s hitch our wagon to that and call it the future.

You can read the full glossy report making the case for this boondoggle here.

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