Trump vowed to halt new offshore wind farms. Will that cost America billions, or save billions?

Photo above - ALL ENGINES HALT. Asteroid field ahead. Mr. Chekov . . . can you plot a course for the Enterprise around this thing?

First off, I have no personal animosity toward wind turbines. But then again, I don’t live near one. The current obsession is to put them offshore. Where snowflakes like me won’t be distressed by minced and diced birds plummeting to the ground. The only people who complain about offshore wind power are the ones who own shipping companies. Sites like the “Hornsea Wind Farm” cover 1,800 square miles. Might be tough for the 1,300 foot long “Ever Given” (the cargo ship that blocked the Suez Canal for a week) to make it through - or around - an 1,800 square mile wind farm during heavy weather, eh?

Per the link below, Trump wants to stop offshore farms. But for the wrong reasons. He claims they kill whales. There ARE an unusually large number of dead whales washing up on shore, but nobody knows why, and wind farms aren’t the most likely culprit. See link below.

The wind turbine manufacturers – a lot of them are European and Chinese – are screaming bloody murder. They built a bunch factories based on the US government’s promises that we would buy and subsidize their giant pinwheels forever. Now those subsidies are in jeopardy.

Per the link, the total installed+under construction US wind turbine capacity is sufficient to meet the needs of 26 MILLION homes. Yeah, my mind was blown too. You’d think this would be enough, given all the nuclear, hydro, natural gas, solar, geothermal and other stuff we already have. Apparently not.

America’s demand for electricity is insatiable. Rather, I should say that the demand by AI companies, Bitcoin miners, and cloud operators is insatiable. If the US built 26 million new homes anytime recently, I must have missed it. Most of that juice is going to our tech oligarchs. To help juice up their profits. Google - which legally changed its name to Alphabet - earned $175 billion in profits in 2023.

Remember, Trump is only ranting about wind farms because they are government subsidized. Paid for with our tax dollars, or through trillions getting added to the US national debt. Depending on which politicians and bureaucrats you ask, you get different answers as to how wind farms are paid for.

Personally, I DON’T want trillions added to the national debt to install Dutch-made wind turbines in off the US coast, so that Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg can order a new 600 foot yacht whenever the impulse strikes them. Besides, one of those yachts is eventually going to wander off course on it’s way to Monaco's Formula One Grand Prix race, and knock over a of offshore turbines. And then we’ll have to pay up AGAIN, to replace the broken ones. Why not make big tech bear the costs of their own electricity, since they’re the ones gobbling it up at exponential rates? Don't stick on you and me, please.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Trump has vowed to kill offshore wind in the US. Will he succeed?

Hornsea Wind Farm - Wikipedia

MistyCee

It seems slightly more important than athletes kneeling for the national anthem to me.

I seriously doubt Trump's aversion to windmills is any more serious than his aversion to electric vehicles, which I suspect will go away now that he's getting paid by Musk.

beckyromero · 36-40, F

How many birds have been killed flying into the windows of Trump Tower?

Hydroelectric power was heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Lake Mead, for example, is 112 miles long and covers almost 250 square miles.

Oil and coal were also heavily subsidized. How about the railroad industry, which delivered much of that coal, not to mention the Crédit Mobilier scandal.

There's no easy answer. But at some point, we are going to run out of oil. Unless we start cloning dinosaurs.

trollslayer · 46-50, M

They build wind farms offshore because there is almost always wind. Any NIMBY rationale is minor.