Finland’s prime minister identifies the future policy challenges ahead, magnified in the US by regional political conflicts. A potential surge in renewable capability can happen in California with offshore wind implementation that should not take as long as the twenty years it took for East Coast offshore windfarms. Structural change still seems to lag with the usual pandering to capitalist energy assumptions about carbon markets and compliance with conservation. Fortunately we’re past the stupidity of the previous guy mocking wind power. Energy and environmental justice as discussed by Norway can be instructive as matters of inequality should be addressed as well as critiques of capital regulation. The simplest understanding of the difference between substitution and complementary energy policies need to be explored first. Ultimately it remains a planning problem.
These new technologies and processes may start out with a large price tag. But as we’ve seen with solar panels and fuel cells, a technology’s costs tend to plummet as soon as its usage starts to scale up. Moreover, markets for other new climate-friendly technologies are developing quickly, though these vary in depth and scope, depending on the level of government support (through measures such as blending regulations for fuels and carbon pricing).
For example, promising new hydrogen-based technologies will require a massive increase in fossil-fuel-free electricity production in order to achieve scale. But this need can be met by expanding the use of wind and solar power, which are already the least costly options for power generation in many parts of the world.
New technologies will enable a major shift toward sustainably fueled transportation in many developed and developing countries. They will not only allow us to reduce global CO2 emissions, but will also position many industries to become carbon-negative in the future.
But technology will not solve the climate crisis for us. We also need to create the right policy environment. A key component of the green transition will be higher carbon pricing, which requires coordination and support at the international level. Agreeing on sustainable criteria for carbon-market mechanisms would be an important step forward. And governments should do more to support structural changes through regulatory frameworks and financial incentives.
www.project-syndicate.org/...
Energy security, climate mitigation, market conditions and efficiency are challenged by broad public contestations concerning environmental and nature values, local participation and transparency, and the distribution of burdens and goods. Attempts to stabilize wind power goals and systems of governance through the NF and maps have fueled contestations and radically destabilized the policy path. Our analysis shows that wind power policies have primarily been influenced by energy authorities, developers and interest organizations, furthering arguments on climate concerns, energy security and economic opportunity. The wind power regime has been surprisingly un-challenged from the perspectives of hydropower and oil energy policy regimes, where both public ownership and local and national taxation are required [48,50]. In a profitable energy market with no political targets or boundaries for wind energy development, the only limitations are set by the licencing regime. Emerging voices of local governments, environmental organizations and concerned citizens have claimed new political engagement related to valuations of (local) environmental, distributional and procedural justice and the recognition of alternative future energy imaginaries. These concerns indicate a need to reconsider the green-tech and market-centred line of policy that has, until now, dominated national wind power policy rationales. Further, claims of procedural justice depict that aspects of energy democracy have been under addressed in existing Norwegian wind power policies. The up-surge in conflict and public debate challenges national politicians to take a more active role in wind power policy making and repoliticize [5,25] energy policies to also consider the key tenets of energy justice [9,16,19]. This entails the reconsideration of wind power as an energy policy and critically judging what, for whom and how wind power should contribute to local, national, and global energy transitions. Wind power policies are thus moving beyond discussions of pure technical maturity and regulative measures, climate mitigation and market predictability towards what we consider discussions of energy justice [9,17,19]. As such, the emergence of the assemblage of wind power policy will be a question of how the involved actors have and are exercising their power to territorialize a stable and hegemonic knowledge regime in the debate [11,23] concerning four main topics of justice.
1. Aspects of the justice of the recognition [9] of purposes, goals, needs and alternatives for wind power at the local, national and international scales. This requires more transparent and explicit recognition of how policies affect actors, themes and scale [20] and what issues are ignored or disrespected in the political goals and system of governance [9,19,26].
2. Aspects of cosmopolitan justice concerning how local and global values and the rights of humans and the environment are balanced against climate change mitigation and economic growth [16]. This entails the broadening of the wind power policy agenda to consider aspects beyond the sociotechnical energy system [13] and consider effects on sociocultural identities [4] and nature consequences.
3. Questions about distributional justice scrutinizing who gains and who loses and reconsidering the institutional and structural premises of wind power production [14,17]. These issues pertain to questions of owner-ship, taxation and compensation, which are emerging as counterforces in Norwegian public debate.
4. Considerations of how wind power development can be planned in line with principles for procedural and processual justice and democratic participation [9,14]. This entails claims of transparency, legitimate knowledge and spaces for participation [17]. Aspects of distributional and procedural justice in Norway have been discussed as municipal experiences of fairness [21] and formal and informal practices in the licencing process [54], as well as related to scale and socioeconomic conditions [20]. We argue that there is a need for the further exploration of the interrelations among the key tenets of energy justice [9,14,19] in Norwegian wind power policies, not least from a historic perspective of Norwegian energy policies.
https://t.co/GcLNms88cd?amp=1
installations per capita versus total capacity is a very different measure
Until now, the plan to power American cities by erecting thousands of giant wind turbines in the oceans off the United States has mostly been an East Coast vision. Developers are busy studying the outer continental shelf and awaiting — or recently celebrating — federal permits to put wind farms from Maine to North Carolina.
The West Coast has lagged behind as the Biden administration pursues its ambitious goal of producing 30 gigawatts of electricity from offshore wind by 2030. The main reason has been geography. The deeper coastal waters of the Pacific make these costly construction projects even more difficult. And the U.S. military’s frequent use of the Pacific for training and maneuvers has been a complicating factor.
But the Biden administration and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced on Tuesday that they plan to push ahead with West Coast offshore wind by designating two areas off the California coast for future wind energy development. If wind farms in these areas ultimately get approved in coming years they would be the first of their kind on the West Coast.
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Unlike the East Coast turbines that will be affixed to the seafloor, the deeper Pacific waters would require floating turbines, a less-developed technology. The first floating wind farm, off the coast of Scotland, began producing electricity in 2017.
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There are two pilot offshore wind farms operating in the United States — one in Rhode Island, one in Virginia — that combined have seven turbines and produce 42 megawatts of electricity, a tiny fraction of Biden’s 2030 goal.
This month, the Biden administration approved the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the country off Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. The Vineyard Wind project is scheduled to be built in 2023 and 2024 and is expected to have up to 84 turbines, enough to power 400,000 homes, according to company officials.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
On March 8, 2021, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) released the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, a project that the industry has long treated as a harbinger of the industry’s fortunes. Then, on March 29, the White House announced a bold target to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by 2030—a thousand-fold increase relative to 2020 levels and roughly equal to the total installed capacity worldwide in 2020 (around 34.4 GW). To support this goal, the administration proposes to set permitting deadlines, provide funds for ports, offer new loans for developers, and invest in additional areas that could facilitate deployment like research and development, data-sharing, and studies on the impacts of offshore wind. Such a focus makes sense: a landmark study by Princeton University suggested that a net-zero greenhouse gas U.S. economy could require between 200 and 400 GW of offshore wind by 2050. The White House is finally aligning federal policy to start to meet this challenge.
Most of the world’s installed wind generation capacity is located onshore. Relative to onshore wind, offshore capacity is trivial at 34,367 megawatts (MW), compared to almost 700,000 MW of onshore wind. Offshore wind is also geographically concentrated: 73 percent of total capacity is in Northern and Western Europe and 26 percent is in China (the balance is other parts of Asia). The United States has two operating projects with a combined capacity of 42 MW—a rounding error in the global total.
www.csis.org/...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California and the U.S. government announced an agreement Tuesday to open up areas off the state’s central and northern coasts to the first commercial wind energy farms on the Pacific Coast.
The pact that would float hundreds of turbines off the coast of Morro Bay and Humboldt Bay was touted as a breakthrough to eventually power 1.6 million homes and help the state and federal government reach ambitious climate change goals through clean energy production.
“California, as we all know, has a world class offshore wind resource, and it can play a major role in helping to accelerate California’s and the nation’s transition to clean energy,” National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said.
The plan includes floating 380 windmills across a nearly 400-square-mile (1,035-square-kilometer) expanse of sea 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of Morro Bay. The site could be finalized next month and could be put up for lease next year.
The announcement is part of President Joe Biden’s plan to create 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.
The new projects — if approved and built — would provide a major expansion of offshore wind power in the U.S. Currently, there are just two working offshore wind farms — off Block Island in Rhode Island and off Virginia — but more than two dozen others are in development.
The projects will require several stages of approval — from an early review by the Coastal Commission to federal and state environmental reviews after a lease sale, said Sandy Louey of the California Energy Commission.
www.huffpost.com/...
In conjunction with battery technologies, hybrid small scale wind and solar installations can augment large scale renewable energy production.
According to many renewable energy experts, a small "hybrid" electric system that combines home wind electric and home solar electric (photovoltaic or PV) technologies offers several advantages over either single system. In much of the United States, wind speeds are low in the summer when the sun shines brightest and longest.