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Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

arstechnica.com

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Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#321

Post by [deleted] »

rootusrootus wrote: post #119
shagie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe Tim Walz https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/01/29/tim-walz-say... > MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again. > Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now. > “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.” > The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the…

I would guess that many politicians (of both sides, see also MTG) suddenly start to rethink how bad they want the public job when Trump turns the firehose of death threats their direction.

[deleted]

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#323

Post by bruce511 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #292
bruce511 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough. If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint. You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge rul…

Is that a bad thing though? Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder. But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%. This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1…

Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.

nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.

And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#324

Post by jibal »

stainablesteel wrote: post #311
flumpcakes wrote: post #244

This must be the best example of why China will overtake the US as the world's number 1 super power before 2050. I would link you to a white house press briefing from Biden https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... but it has been taken down by Trumpists. Another irony. It's a shame that the US is being actively sabotaged by Republicans and Trumpists and people will continue on because saying th…

looking at wind as objectively as I can, it doesn't look like a good investment, and the environmental problems caused by putting these in the ocean are tragic to wildlife

Then apparently you have a very limited ability to be objective.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#325

Post by simonsarris »

roenxi wrote: post #254
fsckboy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s. for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves" the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but th…

> for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production" That isn't a crazy interpretation of what actually happened. According to wiki [0] the industry basically collapsed to 50% of its former production after the nationalisation era and the overall trend since then has been downwards.…

A helpful visual (Wiki has a picture of an outdated version of this graph): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#326

Post by tialaramex »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #215
bruce511 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected. Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while. When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sid…

It takes 40 votes to prevent the other party from putting something in a bill that you're willing to do a government shutdown to prevent. That's probably a good thing. Consider what would be happening right now, when the Republicans have >50 but not >60, if that meant they could actually do whatever they want. And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedur…

As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".

None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to.

Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#327

Post by eli_gottlieb »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #124
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory. That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There…

Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom. I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.

And I'm just saying that "less rights overall ... in turn leads to a more productive society" is rubbish idealism that imagines a big thermostat slider by which to trade off one abstraction vs another, ignoring the material histories and institutions that actually generate the outcomes.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#328

Post by rcxdude »

monero-xmr wrote: post #65
bronson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is petroleum, nuclear, or the highway system. What's your point?

Wind is the worst of all, otherwise the UK would have the cheapest energy in the West, instead of the highest

Electricity prices are set by the marginal producer, which in the UK a lot of the time means gas turbines which are expensive to run. Which mainly means that the renewables plants are making money hand over fist, creating a big push to create more. It's only once that percentage grows enough that the price pressure will go downwards in general. (currently the UK is roughly an even split between gas turbines, nuclear/biomass, and renewables). You can already take advantage of the low price of renewables in some cases, though, if you have a flexible tariff and electricity demand (like a water heater, a house battery, or charging an EV), by drawing when the gas turbines are not necessary to meet demand.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#329

Post by ghtbircshotbe »

igorramazanov wrote: post #136

If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured? And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future? This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views. Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptab…

This problem has already been solved. The legislature creates the laws, the executive executes the laws, and the judiciary interprets the laws. But now we're in a situation where the executive does whatever it wants including illegally shutting down congressionally created programs, the legislature lets it happen despite not having the votes to legally change the law, and the judiciary is also letting it happen when they aren't inventing new constitutional amendments. If you're asking how to prevent society from descending into authoritarianism, they've been trying to figure that out since Caesar at least.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#330

Post by vel0city »

watersb wrote: post #56
Retric wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project. Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.

Esoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s. Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua. I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.

I've read a lot of the science funded in the early engineering of the project around the magnets eventually rolled into the LHC, so there's that.

Otherwise it seems like we spent a lot of money on a 17-mile hole in the ground in North Texas.

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