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US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

bbc.com

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Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#711

Post by pornel »

rsynnott wrote: post #481
pornel wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're silent. I don't know where Trump got the idea from. Perhaps he thinks they work like fans?

They're certainly not silent, but unless you're actually standing right under one they're rarely particularly noisy. Modern ones should be about 35 decibels at 300 meters distance. You're never going to hear an offshore one, really.

I have some wind turbines near my town. I can walk right up to the pole, and I can't hear any noise from the turbine.

Light car traffic is ~50dB.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#712

Post by eastbound »

master-lincoln wrote: post #110
eastbound wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we…

won't happen with capitalism which has an emphasis on economic growth forever...

That’s an error. Most capitalists are against government intervention.

It’s EU socialists who want to raise poor people to the level of consumerism of rich ones. Not capitalists. Capitalists would be happy to let them be poor.

In the EU, it’s trying to help-and-attract poor people by millions which strains the Earth. In the US it’s a special breed of capitalism where the state colludes with rich people to subsidize the big corporations at the detriment of nature and citizen.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#713

Post by pjc50 »

pavlov wrote: post #567
1dontknow_ wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like these comparison with Roman Empire but it seems too simplsitic and Ive learned that usually means "its not so right actually". Meaning for example, what about empires that actually survived or adapted? What did they do that we know exactly didnt the Roman Empire do that saved them? How does zeitgeist impact this in the sense that what ruined Roman Empire might save a nation today? Not trying to be negative, Im…

"what about empires that actually survived or adapted" — which ones exactly? Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.

"Empire" is really just a large hereditary monarchy with the ability to subordinate nearby ethnic groups into a unified political/military command. They can be remarkably stable. China managed two to three thousand years, depending on whether you want to count Zhou (pre-Qin unification) or not. I suspect in another millenium the Chinese empire historians will gloss over the discontinuous period of the 20th century ("nuclear glass layer era") and claim four thousand years.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#714

Post by Danox »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #485
whack wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest. It sure looks stupid when you look at America or the Roman Empire as a whole. But when you look at the specific individuals doing these "stupid" things, and the individuals enabling them, it is perfectly aligned with their own best interests.

Yes, but as a nation, we are stupid to go along with it.

It’s going to be very hard to turn around over 60 years of behavior, particularly the part of interfering and spending money like a drunken sailor on special interests oil and military, the complex is coming to an end and the piggy bank is running out of money. Without useful internal infrastructure building within the country and I don’t mean data-centers, a restructure, a rethink, the decline will just accelerate.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#717

Post by glaslong »

db48x wrote: post #633
glaslong wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there a good reason not to build there? It seems at a glance like we should have just built the turbines, not paid off or stiffed them. Since we seem to desperately need more energy, currently expanding with every other short term high polluting source we can.

That’s a separate issue, and irrelevant to the issue of cancelling the lease early.

I'm confused then. Cancelling the lease early is unrelated to the decision to build the turbines or not?

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#718

Post by pjc50 »

Danox wrote: post #693
zmmmmm wrote: post #310

I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire and it was fascinating how eerily similar it was to the current state of the US. Overwhelmed by corruption and wars they make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales, ever more frequently. And the population grows ever more cynical, eventually opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapse…

Yes, Britain pretty much went the same way after World War I, and went into acceleration downward after World War II. The final cap may have been Brexit.

The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want parallels to the present.

Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#719

Post by parineum »

OroPla wrote: post #610
winter_blue wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time that a democratic country like the U.S. is doing all these shenanigans like blocking clean zero carbon energy, while a communist authoritarian country is massively moving towards clean energy. Based on what our media and our education system teaches us, one would have assumed that common sense and sound logic would prevail in a democracy, but rather what we see is…

The thing we have called "democracy" for the past three hundred or so years is basically just shadow government by whoever has the deepest pockets to influence public opinion with propaganda and pay politicians to do what they want. The politicians get blamed and cycled out while everything continues as before.

If that were true Hillary Clinton would have been president.

Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

#720

Post by est31 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #235
saagarjha wrote: post #4

> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies". I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?

> not one dependent on "costly subsidies". While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.

Mostly this is just about giving back the money RWE paid for the leases from the US government to build those turbines. Plus various fees. They could have went for suing for total profits too.

> RWE U.S. Offshore secured these leases from the U.S. government with a long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity in American waters and invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects. These leases provided legal rights to develop offshore projects and represented years of planning, investment, and partnership with federal agencies.

> After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The settlement resolves RWE U.S. Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds.

https://www.rwe.com/en/investor-relations/financial-calendar...

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