131–140 of 585 posts
We don’t need offshore wind or onshore. Wish the US focused more on Solar. Seems to be the smartest path forward. China understands and is gunning for Nuclear and Solar. Geothermal and wind are nice but too location dependent.
The big solar plant they made in between Cali and Las Vegas one, it wasn't online more than a few years? It shut down...
This is a road to serfdom (and/or a road to 1789 France) situation with what's happening to energy prices in the past couple years[1]. The price of new solar+battery and wind should be pushing fossil fuel energy prices off a cliff right now, unless you live in a petrostate. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
The UK has tons of wind power but prices there are exceptionally high. Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy
Its not clear cut.
Part of the reason why electricity is so expensive in the UK is that its tied to natural gas prices. some of it is CFD, but most of it is because a lot of our power comes from natural gas.
We pay for gas on the open market because we aren't self sufficient for gas any more.
Yes solar is cheaper to deploy, but its not as useful on its own. Wind is far far better in the winter.
What we should be doing is getting nuclear plants built. Small ones ideally, but a few bigguns will do. Then we won't be so reliant on natural gas. We also need to get those extra transmission cables built.
(note we could have built 10 nuclear power plants, well EDF at 2002 power prices, but the present government balked because nuclear is bad yo.)
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones. Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additiona…
Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
energy development is complex, but it cannot be your idea, which boils down to, "whatever is cheapest," especially for government policy. it would be cheapest to not use energy at all, which is the exact opposite of the mercenary POV you are talking about, without having to use the word environment at all.
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy. But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
Close, but one minor correction.
Multiple studies have found that it would be cheapest to DEstruct coal plants.
Literally demolishing them and replacing them with battery + solar is more cost effective than continuing to operate them in 99% of cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy. But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
Why do you think your particular mercenary point of view does not prevail? Because people are stupid? I like nuclear. The funny thing about nuclear power and the mercenaries promoting their startups about it is, you will still have to convince democrats about it. Because occasionally they are in power, and nuclear, as is often criticized, takes a long time to build and a short time to turn off haha.
I've been wondering all year about what happens when an executive-branch office issues orders that it is not legally qualified to issue; by and large everybody has just... followed them. This may be another example (I don't know quite enough of the legal specifics in this case, though there are certainly others that are more slam-dunk-y in this respect). What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in quest…
As the article also touches upon, this already happened in the particular case of Revolution Wind: There, work, was forced to stop in August, then in September a federal judge blocked enforcement of the block, and work continued:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/judge-orsted-revolution-wind...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/offshore-wind-develo...
And “what happens” seems to be that rather than appeal, the rule-of-law deniers apparently choose to not care? Work has stopped again:
https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2025/12/revolution-wind-and...
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones. Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additiona…
Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a deca…
The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
Occam's Razor: offshore wind requires a lot of rare earths for their magnets and whatnot. US military-industrial complex needs the little remaining global supply not under China's export controls.
compared to the general motor market in the USA? I think thats out by a few orders of magnitude.
Radar shadow is vaguely plausible, if your radar is shit and needs replacing.
it also requires your hydrophone network to not be working that well either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy. But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Close, but one minor correction. Multiple studies have found that it would be cheapest to DEstruct coal plants. Literally demolishing them and replacing them with battery + solar is more cost effective than continuing to operate them in 99% of cases.